Queen Hatshepsut confirmed?

A note for those with an interest in ancient history: the remains of a mummy have been confirmed by diagnosis of a tooth fragment to have been Queen Hatshepsut, a woman ruler of Egypt at almost 2000 BC.

SOA Workshop Presentation

Keynote slide deck for SOA workshop preceding Systems Integration conference can be found here

Systems Integration Keynote Slides

Slide deck is here.

Greetings from Prague

I am typing from the Czech Republic, where I just attended the SOA workshop preceding the Systems Integration 2007 conference. I'm told this is the largest conference of its sort in the region. I presented at the workshop (slides to be posted by the conference) on the technology trends that are driving SOA as a viable application/integration strategy. I also sat on a panel with folks from HP (formerly Systinet), Progress, Sun, and the University of Technology, Sydney. Hot topics: SCA and governance. Expect to hear a lot more in these areas over the next year.

The interesting takeaway for me was the similarity of the views of the presenters and panelists. I believe this reflects a common experience with customer requirements. This is a particularly good thing, since it means that the SOA hype phase may be over, and now we're getting down to the real value proposition: easier, cheaper application integration, flexible business processes, and better alignment with business objectives.

Tomorrow I have a chance to keynote the main conference. I am planning to dwell on these three topics. In addition, Jon Maron and I are doing a three hour presentation for the Oracle field and customers on the next iteration of the SOA platform. Should be a fun, but very long day!

Addendum (a few notes on Prague): beautiful city with architecture going back to the middle ages. Mostly I have been in hotels or meetings, but the city is extremely pleasing to the eyes and a pleasure to walk around. We managed to do just that a bit and see the prague castle, the old town's powder gate tower and the famous astronomical clock. Ironically, the czechs are renowned for the high percentage of atheist citizens: the houses of worship are really amazing. This morning, we had a chance to explore the Jewish quarter, also fascinating (the Spanish synagogue is not to be missed). St. Vitus's Cathedral rivals Notre Dame as a massive, buttressed church: it also houses the tomb of "Good King Wenceslas".

JBI 2.0, does anyone agree?

JBI has always interested me for two reasons: 1) I was surprised to see a model pushed for describing how application servers should be built, rather than used. This was tried with JSR 111 and it failed pretty spectacularly: and this was after J2EE was already defined and agreed on as the standard model for integration servers. 2) It was originally proposed as some of the oddest combinations of technologies: WSDL 2.0 and very old school approach to solving the same problem solved by every dependency injection framework.

OK, now some years have passed: JBI hasn't taken off and now a few vendors are back at the table trying to decide what to do next. Since it's unclear what direction folks will try to take this, I thought I'd poney up a few suggestions on what could make the spec relevant and useful. Basically, get rid of a lot of cruft.

First thing to tackle: the "J2EE for integration servers" looks like it will clearly be SCA. So check SCA support as the standard model for service development. (This seems to be in line with where things are going, or so I thought: Out of the blue, my old friend Mark Little suggests that maybe they will support JBI without SCA. What? Invent a closed, Java specific model for composite services? Enter the matrix indeed!)

Once you build one of these things, it's pretty clear that most of JBI 1.0 can go away. Using SCA and OSGI, you really don't need to do much other than have an interface that passes normalized messages to service engines or binding components. In fact, OSGI provides most of the packaging and injection heavy lifting for building plugins to an SCA/JBI runtime model.

Once you boil down to a few interfaces, then the group could focus on simplifying those interfaces further. Add some management hooks and this is something that could really take off. I suspect this is really what the folks in the Eclipse SRP are really after. All of this suggests that the group could do something genuinely useful: explicitly focusing the JSR as the OSGI based plugin model for Java-SCA platforms.

In sum, narrow the scope, align with industry direction and build some real value additions.

More on Java and SCA

Thoughtful comments from Sanjay Patel at SAP as a follow-on to the SCA/Java discussion.

The Other Dave on SCA

The other Dave Chappell is suggesting that the Java community is fracturing on whether Java is a useful programming model for SCA. Let me give my perspective on this, since I've commented on this extensively in the SCA working group and in other forums.

There is no doubt that adding support for imperative programming models is important for SOA composites. This is where the Java/SCA model makes sense.

But does it matter? My argument all along has been that we should not teach a new model around Java. Everyone is already converging on a common model: the whole Java world is moving toward pojo programming stripped free of the framework cruft. In the first SCA f2f I sat with Rod Johnson and watched him implement some of the annotations in the original SCA JCI spec in a few minutes. SCA frameworks will bootstrap Java code. Write it for Spring and it will be useable in SCA. Or vice versa.

Put it another way: we can bootstrap basic BPEL processes into an SCA environment without changing the BPEL definition because you just use the language. We expect to see the same thing for Java platforms moving forward. If anything, this is the ultimate form of industry convergence.

Dave Chappell joins Oracle SOA team

Great news: Dave Chappell (ex-Sonic) has signed on with Oracle's integration and SOA team. He was already out speaking on our SOA strategy at JavaOne last week on the main SCA panel.

Update: bookmark Dave's blog here: http://blogs.oracle.com/davidchappell

Systems Integration 2007 (Prague, Czech Republic)

I will be delivering two keynote talks this year at the Systems Integration conference in Prague. This is a big event for central Europe and I'm excited to get a chance to talk with lots of people that are implementing SOA solutions. I'm also pretty excited about seeing Prague, if only between meetings.

Jim Gray Tribute Redirect

Some thoughts on Jim Gray. It's fair to say there's little I've done in the last ten years that wasn't laid out by Jim Gray.

ICSOC 2007 Call for Papers

I am on the Program Committee for ICSOC 2007 (in Vienna this year), if you're doing interesting work in the area of Web services, SOA or integration, please consider submitting a paper. Details below....

CALL FOR PAPERS

ICSOC 2007 seeks original papers in the field of service oriented computing, from theoretical and foundational results to empirical evaluations as well as practical and industrial experiences, with the emphasis on results that contribute to solve the many still open research problems that are of significant impact to the field of service oriented applications. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Business Service Modeling: Methods and tools for capturing business goals and requirements, decomposition into business services, business processes, business policies, modeling, analysis, and simulation, specification of functional and non-functional quality requirements
  
  
• Service Assembly: Development and discovery, model-driven development, service composition architectures, service registries, service discovery mechanisms, semantic matching, methods and tools for service development, governance, verification and validation, deployment strategies
  
  
• Service Management: Instrumentation and service-related data aggregation, end-to-end measurement, analysis, modeling and capacity planning, definition of deployment topology, infrastructure configuration, problem determination for SOAs, ITIL processes, change management in live systems
  
  
• SOA Runtime: Service bus for mediation, transformation and routing, runtime development and service registries, integration of legacy applications, information services for data access and data integration, scalability, topology and optimization, service-oriented middleware, policy based configuration & workload management
  
  
• Quality of Service: Reliable service-oriented computing, security and privacy in service-oriented computing, SLA and policy specification, QoS negotiation, autonomic management of service levels, empirical studies and benchmarking of QoS, performance and dependability prediction in SOA
  
  
• Grid Services: Services and architecture for management of infrastructural resources, data and compute intensive applications, execution and resource allocation services for job scheduling, protocols for coordination across multiple resource managers, business-value based allocation, innovative strategies for creation and management of virtual enterprises and organizations, prototype systems and toolkits

RESEARCH AND INDUSTRIAL TRACKS

There are two independent tracks for research and industrial papers, each managed by a different program committee and with a different set of evaluation criteria. Authors must clearly indicate the track to which their paper is being submitted.

• Research Track: ICSOC 2007 solicits original research papers, which should contain results that advance the state of the art in service-oriented computing, either through theoretical or experimental analysis. The paper should clearly articulate the research contribution and innovations, the relevance to service-oriented computing and the relation to prior research. Submitted papers will be judged according to their scientific merits and evaluated on significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition.
  
  
• Industrial Track: ICSOC 2007 solicits submissions covering the state of practice and real-world experience in service-oriented computing, including papers that describe innovative service-based implementations, novel applications of service-oriented technology, and insights and improvements to the state-of-practice. Case studies from practitioners emphasizing applications, service technology, system deployment, organizational ramifications, or business impact are especially welcome. Papers should provide sufficient details on the application domain, and the service-oriented techniques used, the issues surrounding actual implementations and applications, and the lessons learned in the field.

FORMATTING GUIDELINES

All papers should be submitted electronically (in PDF) and prepared in accordance with the Springer/LNCS camera-ready format. Both research and industrial-track papers are not to exceed 12 pages, including references. All submissions should include title, authors, and full contact information.

Submissions should indicate at least two main topics and the scientific area (or areas) that best fit the content of the paper. All accepted papers will appear in the ICSOC 2007 proceedings, published by Springer Verlag as a part of its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, and must be formally presented at the conference.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions must be made electronically through the ICSOC 2007 Online Submissions Site.
Guidelines for authors on using and navigating the submissions site are also provided.

So It Goes

Slaughterhouse-Five was the first Vonnegut book I read. I still remember being strangely indifferent. I never warmed up to Vonnegut completely as a novelist, but I did as an essayist. More importantly, I came to respect Vonnegut as a human being: humorous and humanist, but unwilling to be hopeful without warrant. Vonnegut's alien-outsiders were spectators on a humanity that should but won't do better. Most importantly, Vonnegut wanted people to think for themselves, a hard and sometimes rare thing. The world is a little less rich today.

Spring-OSGI milestone

Hal Hildebrand does a better job that I can on discussing the latest Spring-OSGI milestone.

Rich Friedman blog found

The funny thing about blogs is that you just kind of discover them by accident. Suddenly, you find your friends are out there publishing away and you have to catch up on everything. I am the worst when it comes to keeping up relationships in real life, so there's a bittersweet element of that discovery to me. I should be finding out about what people are up to by conversation, but these days work gets the best of me. Anyway, I just found out that Rich Friedman is blogging. Rich was a middleware programmer for Bluestone, then technical lead for our acquisition strategy at Bluestone, then chief technologist at HP middleware, making sure that partners and customers understood what we were doing over there. Now he's responsible for middleware systems management at Red Hat.

At some point, we need to organize a feed of ex-Bluestone bloggers....

Bob Bickel blog found

Bob Bickel is one of the nicest persons I know. He's also quietly had a huge impact on the software industry, first pioneering the web application server market and later turning the JBoss project into a successful business (and flipped to Red Hat), pioneering the current trend in "professional open source." I thoroughly enjoyed working for him back at Bluestone and HP. Despite a mild demeanor, he drove his team extremely aggressively. I'm not sure I showed proper respect for what I learned from him at the time, but it shaped who I am today.


Cool to find he has a new blog. Looking forward to reading it on a regular basis.

Tuscany Multiplies

Appears that the open source SCA implementations are subdividing.
In many cases, the value of these projects are in the experiments and learning experiences that fall out of the development effort. I'm looking forward to seeing where the different teams take the various branches.

SCA PPT

Just a quick update for those who asked: Philly JUG SCA presentation can be found
here.

Philly JUG SCA Presentation

First of all, thanks to Dave Fecak and the Philly JUG for having me over. It was great to meet everyone and we had some really good follow-up discussions. I'm definitely planning to make it over for some future meetings: next one features Cameron Purdy from Tangosol (soon Oracle!).

I promised I'd post the presentation slides here. Turns out Blogger only allows image uploads. The good news: Dave is loading the ppt on the JUG site. As soon as that is up, I'll post a link back to it from here as well.

In the meantime, feel free to post follow up questions as comments here or send me an email at greg.pavlik@oracle.com. I'm on the west coast now, so bear with me if you don't hear from me right away.

SCA goes to OASIS

Big news, the OSOA alliance has contributed the SCA and SDO specifications to OASIS. Dana Gardner has an interesting take on this: it will do for SOA what J2EE did for application servers. I'll be talking about SCA on the east coast next Tuesday at the Philly JUG and in more depth in Europe at the Systems Integration Conference.

Nex-Gen Application Platform

A brief interview with Thomas Kurian on the important trends that are likely to impact Java developers.