OW2 open-source SOA stack
This article deals with an SOA stack that is mostly based on software tools coming from OW2 consortium.

Service oriented architecture needs a specified set of components in order to take all its power: I mean allowing business people to defined or modified business processes that automatically update corresponding software code (in term of service orchestration). This last objective shall be seen as the "Holy Grail" of the next decade.

However such approach needs following standardized components: process modeller such as BPMN editor, orchestration engine such as BPEL and service infrastructure such as those provided by an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).

EBM WebSourcing and others OW2 (http://www.ow2.org/ - former ObjectWeb) stakeholders provide many of those components as detailed below and illustrated by previous figure.

Design tools:

o UML modeller allows manipulating business object exchange between partners. We suggest to use Topcased (http://www.topcased.org) which a very complete UML 2.0 software (even not completely stable) available under EPL (Eclipse Public licence).

o BPMN modeller provide by STP project (SOA Tool Platform) from Eclipse foundation is very valuable (http://www.eclipse.org/stp/bpmn/index.php). It provides an implementation of BPMN specification as provided by OMG (Object Management Group) (http://www.bpmn.org/). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts who create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation (cf. Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPMN).

JBI service engines:

One of the main added value of JBI (JSR 208: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=208) standard is to provide a plugin architecture for Enterprise Service Bus that allows to add new components easily as far as there are compliant with JBI specification. Services connect to the container via binding components (BC) or can be hosted inside the container as part of a service engine (SE).

o Main SE for SOA is the BPEL engine. ObjectWeb provides the Orchestra engine compliant with BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 (http://www.bull.com/fr/middleware/orchestra.php). It is available under the LGPL license.

o Main BCs for SOA are JMS in the Java world and SOAP/HTTP for Web Services. This last one is mandatory according to JBI specification. JORAM (http://joram.objectweb.org/) is the JMS compliant implementation provided by OW2.

Execution:

Run-time containers for services are JEE servers and Enterprise service bus. OW2 consortium provides two flagships products: JOnAS (http://jonas.objectweb.org/, J2EE 1.4 certified) and PEtALS as JBI compliant ESB. They are both available under LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html). PEtALS provides lightweight and packaged integration solutions, based on JSR-208 specifications, with a strong focus on distribution and clustering.

The OW2 consortium (http://www.ow2.org) is an open source community committed to making available to everyone the best and most reliable middleware technology. OW2 mission is to develop open source code middleware and to foster a vibrant community and business ecosystem.
The OW2 Consortium was initiated on January 1, 2007 through the merger of ObjectWeb and Orientware, two leading open source middleware communities of renown industry players, innovative start-ups, prominent academic organizations and individuals from across the world.

Le Web 3 : remboursez !!!
A propos de la conférence Web 3 qui a lieu aujourd'hui: après une première journée relativement intéressante, bien qu'un peu techno-marketing à mon avis (j'y reviendrai plus tard), nous assistons a une récupération politique imprévue qui bouleverse complètement le programme de cette seconde journée.
Après la visite de Shimon Pérez ce matin qui nous a parlé d'Internet et du développement, argumentaire intéressant et motivant. La scène est maintenant mobilisée par F. Bayrou et Elkabach en attendant N. Sarkozi !!!
Qu'en ces temps de campagne électorale un tel intéret de la part de nos hommes politiques se manifeste n'est pas forcément étonnant. Cependant j'apprends que Loic Lemeur, un des principaux organisateur de la conférence, soutient notablement N. Sarkozi.
Il est vraiment étonnant que la teneur politicienne de cette conférence n'ai pas été annoncée avant. M. Lemeur aurait certainement pu trouver des sponsors qui nous aurait évités de payer pour entendre ces messieurs à la place du contenu initialement prévu. Monsieur Lemeur semble confondre son intéret personnel avec son métier ce qui est fort regrettable. Je ne pense pas que ces collègues californiens auxquels il se réfère abondamment commettent la même erreur !!

Conference Le Web3
Je vais donc assister à la conférence Le Web3 à Paris la semaine prochaine : http://www.leweb3.com/leweb3/
Le programme s'annonce particulièrement alléchant et tente de faire ressortir les élément structurants du courant Web 2.0 en France et à l'étranger.
Le programme est particulièrement dense (http://www.leweb3.com/leweb3/2006/11/leweb3_program.html) et les inscriptions fermés. Les grands acteurs sont présents et j'espère que nous allons pouvoir obtenir une idée claire de l'univers Web 2.0 qui n'est pas un simple concept marketing (comme on peut l'entendre parfois) mais une vraie mutation des usages liés au Web.

Back from IST 2006
With a little late, but the end of the year is very busy, some feedback about this interesting event.
A lot of information and some very interesting networking session, perhaps a little too much in just 3 days (around 10 sessions in parrallel).
Some noticeable presentation about FP7 and IST:
Work-program: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/istevent/2006/cf/conference-detail.cfm?id=1046
Funding models: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/istevent/2006/cf/conference-detail.cfm?id=1047
Obviously my presentation is available at the following address: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/istevent/2006/cf/conference-detail.cfm?id=1025#cmnt4732

Interoperability and open-source
An interesting event is going to take place in Helsinky next week (21-23 November 2006) http://www.ist2006.fi. It is the IST 2006 event that is dedicated to the launch of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development.
IST event will gather together all the key players of European information society technologies. The event concentrates on European policies, strategies, research activities and results in all areas of the Information Society.
IST 2006 includes a high-level conference, an exhibition of cutting edge research results from across Europe and a programme of networking sessions and workshops, with the exhibition and networking programmes defined by participants via this website.

Among all the interesting topics I select the following networking sessions:
- 22/11/2006 - 4pm – 5:30pm - European Centers for Open Source Software and ONESSI
How Europe can benefit from Open Source Software? How can Open Source be stimulated in Europe with FP7 and NESSI, the Networked European Software and Services Initiative?
- 22/11/2006 – from 9:00 to 10:30 in Room 206 – NESSI, transforming the Internet to service your life
- 23/11/2006 – from 11:00 to 12:30 in Room 207 – Bringing together the European stakeholders for Secure Services and Software Engineering
- 22/11/2006 (14.00-15.30) Room: 307 - Enterprise Networks: how to overcome the obstacles to their effective diffusion?
- 22/11/2006 (16.00-17.30) Room: Room 209 - Collaboration Upperware for New Working Environments

For my own I will have a talk about Open-Source and interroperability during the conference on the track interoperability and standard (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/istevent/2006/cf/conference-detail.cfm?id=1025) that will takes place 23/11/2006 (11.00-12.30) in room Vaasa.
A short abstract of the talk follows: "The aim of the presentation is to demonstrate main advantages of open-source model for interoperability. After the identification of interoperability issues in the software domain and its relationship with standardisation we will study it according to three points of view: human, business and technological. Main improvements carried out by open-source IPR policy model and development process will be detailed for both points of view. In particular we will demonstrate that these factors give European software market a real business advantage. ObjectWeb approach and it’s involvement into the NESSI technology platform will be used in order to illustrate these concepts."

I hope to see a lot of you in Helsinki.

Outils Web 2.0 pour l'édition collaborative

Une petite compilation de différentes lectures concernant les outils web 2 pour l'édition collaborative.

Le marché de l'édition collaborative est actuellement très actif conjointement avec la montée en puissance des technologies du Web 2.0. Particulièrement utile pour un usage nomade, il s?'agit d'outils permettant d'éditer un document et de le partager avec un nombre quelconque d'autres rédacteurs. Lorsque l'offre est combinée avec une offre d'hébergement en ligne, le traitement de texte s'exécute dans le navigateur Internet et les documents sont centralisés sur un serveur accessible par le Web.

Différentes offres sont disponibles :

- Google a récemment racheté Writely un traitement de texte en ligne. Il fonctionne grâce à une interface WYSIWYG par l'intermédiaire d'un navigateur web. Les menus, raccourcis claviers, boîte de dialogue se présentent de façon similaire aux traitements de textes habituels, tels que Microsoft Word ou OpenOffice. Une fonctionnalité importante de Writely est sa possibilité d'enregistrer des documents en format .doc, PostScript, RTF, et ODF, qui peuvent être édités ensuite par n'importe quel autre traitement de texte. Une seconde fonctionnalité majeure de Writely est la possibilité de collaborer à plusieurs utilisateurs sur un même fichier.

Google a rassemblé Writely et Spreadsheets (qui permet de manipuler des feuilles de calcul type « excel ») dans une offre Google Docs & Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com/). L'utilisation est gratuite, cependant il est nécessaire de disposer d'un compte gmail (uniquement sur invitation). Les analystes du Gartner anticipent le lancement d?une version de PowerPoint par Google dans le courant de l?année.

- AdventNet est une société californienne qui propose une offre également gratuite, ZohoWriter (http://www.zohowriter.com). Ce logiciel est très comparable à Writely. L'utilisation est très intuitive, avec une barre d'outils sous forme d'icônes offrant toutes les options les plus communes d'enrichissement et de mise en forme. Une fois vos documents tapés, vous pourrez directement les publier dans un espace libre sur Zoho.com, les mettre en ligne sur un blog, les envoyer par mail et les enregistrer sur votre disque dur aux formats Word, PDF ou OpenOffice. Vous pouvez aussi ouvrir des documents Word ou au format HTML en les important dans Zoho Writer.

AdventNet propose également Zoho Show (http://zohoshow.com) qui permet d?éditer et de visualiser des présentations en ligne (voir également Thumbstacks http://thumbstacks.com/). Zoho Sheet (http://www.zohosheet.com/login.jsp) constitue quant à elle l'offre de feuille de calcul en ligne de cette société.

- ThinkFree Online propose également une suite bureautique en ligne gratuite (http://www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo). Développée en java et calquée sur Office 2003 elle contient un traitement de texte (Write), un tableur (Calc) et un logiciel de présentation (Show). L?originalité du positionnement de cette société consiste en une offre duale : une version « desktop » comparable à Microsoft Office ou Open Office et une version en-ligne.

Il y d'autre offres telles Glide Write (http://glidedigital.com/) ou WriteBoard (http://www.writeboard.com/). Ces différents outils on été comparé par CNET (cf. étude http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-9239_7-6627472.html?tag=cnetfd.ld3).

- Instacoll, une société basée en Inde à Bangalore, propose un service appelé Live Documents (http://www.live-documents.com/) qui permet aux utilisateurs de PC sous Windows de synchroniser des documents Office entre plusieurs utilisateurs et ce via internet. Le service fonctionne actuellement avec Word et Excel (d?autres applications devraient arriver bientôt) par le biais d'une barre d?outils. Le service est en version beta et gratuit. Le créateur d?un document définit les autorisations pour les autres utilisateurs (lecture seulement, lecture/modification, impression, etc.) et envoie le fichier. Quand les autres utilisateurs ouvrent le document il est automatiquement synchronisé.

Du point de vue fonctionnel le service est très proche du service de Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server qui permet à des utilisateurs d'une entreprise de travailler à plusieurs sur des documents hébergés sur un serveur Windows. Contrairement à SharePoint, Live Documents n'héberge aucun document sur un serveur et ne nécessite donc pas de disposer d?un serveur Windows.

Devant la pléthore d?offres dans ce domaine, le problème qui reste à résoudre afin de les utiliser en mode collaboratif, c'est-à-dire par des utilisateurs disposants d'outils divers, est lié à l?interopérabilité de ces applications.

OMG meeting feedback

Back from San-Francisco (very nice place indeed!) and the OMG workshop.
I try here a short abstract about my feedback and what are the main topics, in my opinion, that were addressed.

Main subject of this event deals with three leading software engineering practices: BPM, MDA and SOA and how to merge these approaches in order to produce a significant asset for enterprise architecture.

A very relevant aspect, I my opinion, is the attempt of contributors to define a complete approach that combine BPM - as the business driver - SOA - as the architectural pattern - and MDA as the meta-model to translate BPM concepts into SOA implementation.

Many speakers stress the fact that SOA in not a revolution but mainly an evolution and I fully agree with, in particular in a technical point of view.

Let try a classification of the main issues addressed:

- SOA governance: as SOA principles and technologies become mature a very important issue that has to be addressed for enterprise is SOA governance. How do we manage service life-cycle? What enterprise organizations allow the best ROI from SOA according to reuse requirement (who knows what the available services inside an organization are)? What are the main best practices for SOA design? Etc.

- BPM and SOA management: business people are comfortable with processes and IT people with service implementation. The real question is to decide who is going to manage services: business people drive business and are the more relevant however IT people have software engineering expertise that allows service implementation. So where is the middle?

- Standardization is a very important issue in order to manage interoperability and pave the way of SOA dissemination. A particular interest is on security requirement and SLA (Service Level Agrement).

- A very interesting presentation about BPDM (Business Processes Definition Metamodel) that provides a metamodel (http://www.bpmn.org/BPDM_Documents.htm) for business process modeling, in particular for BPMN.

Remarks:

- I realize that BPEL is not yet well recognized by BPM vendor as a standard: some issues arise with XPDL for example.

- As the open-source guy of the workshop I receive quite good feedback with the presentation of a complete BPM/MDA/SOA tool chain based on Eclipse/ObjectWeb technologies. However I was quite disappointed by the low level of acknowledgment ObjectWeb has in US. We need to work hard to obtain broader recognition.

OMG workshop on SOA, BPM and MDA

Next week I will be to a very interesting workshop managed by OMG near San Francisco. This event is called "Building a Service Oriented Architecture with BPM and MDA" (see http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/soa-bpm-mda/index.htm) and will try to give a complete overview of the three key technologies which are: MDA, BPM and SOA. Despite the buzzwords I hope that we will be able to demonstrate complementarities of these approaches.

I will have a talk on Thursday the 19^th during a track dedicated to software Tool Chains. My presentation is called "A Service-Oriented approach dedicated to Internet based Business Process Networks: building a MDA based collaborative platform with open-source solutions".

Here is an abstract:

Today, enterprises networks are process driven in order to achieve business benefits, which includes strategic, financial and performance improvements, through increased reliability and agility in the definition and execution of business processes.

We will explain how our Service-Oriented approach makes easier and flexible the definition and management of the processes that will be supported by the collaborative platform.

We will describe an MDA framework based on BPM standards dedicated to our SOA based collaborative platform. The platform provides different kinds of collaborative business processes represented in BPMN notation that are translated, thanks to DSL, to deduce information system model in UML notation. It targets a SOA implemented thanks to an open-source stack from ObjectWeb SOA initiative.

The presentation will address main requirements for this architecture, in particular interoperability and flexibility and describe the overall process and tools.

Open-source and SOA articles
Some interesting articles these days about Open-Source and Service Oriented Architecture. Main objectives of these articles are to illustrate that open-source SOA solutions are ready for enterprise use.

The first paper, called Enterprise Open Source and SOA, is from Eric Newcomer a well known technical evangelist from IONA in the the last Enterprise Open Source Journal (July/August 2006) available from http://www.eosj.com/ . It describes main components of SOA infrastructure and list available business ready open-source SOA stacks from Apache, Eclipse, ObjectWeb, Red-hat and Sun.

The second paper is from Adam Michelson in SearchWebServices.com and is available here, it is called "SOA ready for download". Even if this last article is far from being as exhaustive as the previous one (in particular Petals the JBI compliant ESB from ObjectWeb is missing) it give us a snapshot of some industrial open-source solutions for SOA.

Writely

Voici un test de Writely (http://www.writely.com) l'éditeur collaboratif racheté par Google. Semble tout à fait intéressant pour publier les blogs.

Le correcteur orthographique ne semble pas disponible en Français.

Un jeu de fonctionnalité intéressant.

Quantification de réseaux sociaux

D’autres règles encore très discuté (et discutable) ont été proposées afin de quantifier quelques dimensions de réseaux sociaux :

• En 1967, le psychologue américain Stanley Milgram décrivait le «small world phenomenon» en montrant qu'il existait en moyenne six intermédiaires entre deux personnes prises au hasard sur la planète Terre.

• Dunbar (Anthropologue anglais du milieu des années 1990) prétend que le nombre d'amis avec lesquels une personne peut entretenir une relation stable à un moment donné de sa vie est limité : le fameux nombre de Dunbar (issue de La théorie du « gossip »). Cette limite serait inhérente à la taille de notre néocortex. Elle est estimée à 150 personnes.

Génèse des communautés virtuelles

Un mémoire tout à fait intéressant concernant les communautés vituelles de Paul Oberson – La genèse des communautés virtuelles –  (http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-f/oberson/memoire/mem.pdf)

L'auteur tente de définir une démarche de création (le bootstrap) de communautés virtuelles en essayant d'identifier les contextes favorables.

Il définie un cycle de vie typique pour de tels réseaux et met en évidence des indicateurs quantitatifs associés.

On y apprend notamment :

• Metcalfe, l’un des inventeur de l’Ethernet, propose une loi qui décrit l’augmentation de valeur de ce type de réseau. Sa loi s’appuie sur un principe fondamental des réseaux : le nombre de connections potentielles entre les nœuds d’un réseau croit plus rapidement que le nombre de noeuds. La valeur totale d’un réseau où chaque noeud peut atteindre tous les autres augmente du carré du nombre de noeuds. Il s’agit donc d’une croissance qui suit une progression asymptotique. Les conséquences de cette loi sont évidentes et favorisent une philosophie de collaboration. Connecter deux réseaux crée beaucoup plus de valeur que la somme des valeurs de chaque réseau.

• Reed , reprenant la loi de Metcalfe, s’est rendu compte que dans les réseaux autorisant la création de sous-groupes, le développement global était accéléré et devenait exponentiel. La communication humaine rajoute une valeur à la vitesse de développement du réseau. La possibilité de créer des sous-groupes n’incluant qu’une partie des membres du réseau pour développer des échanges plus ciblés autorise un potentiel beaucoup plus élevé.

Why open-source is so important for Europe

Some insight about open-source and why it is so important for European research program, in particular the next research framework FP7, to support it.

Context

As IST FP7 is near to start at the end of 2006 the European Commission has started consultations in order identify the main research topics, i.e. Grand Challenge, that will shape the next research program. Among the many research domains, information technologies are of first importance as express by Lisbon and i2010 agenda to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010”.

Open Source software takes mainly its legitimacy on what is commonly recognize as “software commoditisation”. Software business is neither based on fees coming from copyright but rather from different kinds of work ecosystem’s members provide.

Because I think Free, libre and open-source software is not always recognize by current european research framework we need a strong commitment with governance rules. I would like to demonstrate that such commitment is relevant for European software industry to renew with leadership and ensure autonomy on strategic domains.

Interoperability and standardisation

Interoperability has been identified as a key issue for European research. According to IDABC European initiative “Interoperability means the ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, as well as, of the business processes they support in order to exchange data and enable the sharing of information and knowledge”. Thus, interoperability concern has a lot of common with standardisation since it allows sharing the same language. Technology standards as the expression of a consensus between all industry actors have a key role in fostering healthy and competitive IT ecosystem.

Open source plays a fundamental role in the standardization process, especially in the areas where interoperability is the basis of the economic model. By their nature, open source solutions may act as reference implementations of developing standards. The availability of their source code promotes open and democratic debate around the standard specifications they intent to implement, making them both more robust and interoperable.

Open-source position promotes standards since they are at its business cornerstone; an open-source solution takes all its strength by combination with others open or closed source solutions and has little to gain staying alone, at the contrary of some proprietary solutions.

Available open-source implementation(s) of a standard allows in one hand to validate it thanks to a real test-case and in another hand to enhance its durability since such development process is mainly involved for solution based on strongly established business need. Moreover, availability of an open reference implementation for free increase dissemination and fast standard adoption.

IST project commitment

As far as open-source commitment is recognise as a priority, some governance may be settle in order to express rules that will foster emergence of a rich and consistent open-source ecosystem from European Commission funded projects.

These rules will express main arguments in favour of open-source and define some guidelines on, for example, ways to reuse previous development, licence strategy, etc. Cartography and business readiness of available solutions shall be assessed in order to provide clear view for all stakeholders.

Business opportunity for European SMEs

Open-source business models allow new comers (especially SMEs) to penetrate easily a new market. Small start-up companies can enter the software industry. While proprietary software requires big teams to internally develop and support the product, what matters in open source initiatives is the community size, not the corporate size. Many activities are actually managed by the community, lowering the cost of producing the software, considerably increasing its quality: this leads to great business opportunities to build lean companies, quicker to improve and adapt. There is a lot of start-up born around open source projects.

Moreover, open-source facilitates European IT SMEs to penetrate software market thanks to the mass effect provided by the European IT market with high skilled level.

Innovative factor and new working approach

Because OSS involves heterogeneous groups (i.e. ecosystems) of people working together, it facilitates innovation strategies and induces new innovative business models. Some classification has already been produced (see for example http://www.objectweb.org/wws/d_read/marketing/public/FLT-FederatingEcosystems-June05.pdf).

OSS seems to be a good candidate in order to reach scientific technological breakthroughs and new innovative models.

Scope for my new blog

Welcome for whom who spend some time to read me.
Let's try to define the editing charter for this blog: I will give some insight about my feeling on  technology and approaches I feel more or less comfortable with, I mean principally:

• SOA: Service Oriented Architecture (see OASIS SOA reference model for a good definition: OASIS SOA TC )

• MDA: Model Driven Architecture (see OMG)
• Open-source (see GNU and OSI for relevant definition).

I will also try to give my feeling about Web 2.0 (O'Reillly) and social networking witch are new subjects for me but very interesting and challenging ones.

My page on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jplorre