Vojtech on Tech

JBoss.CZ alive

2009-01-30T02:51:00.000-08:00

I've resuscitated JBoss.CZ, the Czech community portal about JBoss technologies, now with a new design and soon with more and more stories on a regular basis from different authors. If you are Czech, add its feed to your reader and expect more. And if you are bold enough, join us in our effort!

A new web console for JBoss ESB

2008-11-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

JBoss ESB is definitely a very nicely implemented service bus with a strong focus on SOA principles. It is an open source, backed by a living community, deployed in many enterprises. However, it has one obvious deficiency: a rather limited user interface. There is a bunch of tiny consoles - for management, configuration, transformation, but none of them really fulfills what I consider a must - comprehensive, intelligible, web-based tool for managing of all ESB artefacts. I'd like to browse and search through services, visualize a message flow within a service, create new actions and listeners by drag-n-drop etc.
You may say: if you don't like the present state, help and improve by yourself. And we did! We are close to a beta release of our web console, planned for the beginning of December. You can see some screenshots and more at esb-console.com. Stay tuned!

Oracle BEA strategy

2008-07-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Oracle is fast with the BEA acquisition, now it's clear about their product strategy. Good news from the area of application servers, WebLogic Server is taken as number one. Similarly with AquaLogic BPM and AquaLogic Enterprise Repository, both are considered as strategic in their fields (BPM and SOA governance, respectively). A slight surprise about AquaLogic Service Bus, it will be merged with the Oracle's one, but still - a strategic product. Not so cool about WebLogic Portal, AquaLogic User Interaction and WebLogic Integration, they will continue but will be converged, integrated etc. My former prediction is quite close, even I guessed a brighter future for ALSB ;)

Update: I was informed about ALSB staying much the same thing, enriched by Oracle's features, nice.

Beauty of Madrid Airport

2008-06-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

Airport buildings are usually guite ugly and the same could be said about that one in Madrid until the new Terminal 4 was built and opened in 2006. I spent there some time this Friday and was amazed by its architecture. It is airy, futuristic but still natural. Just have a look:

Note: the pictures are not done by me (because results from my mobile are rather poor), taken from Wikipedia.

BEA story

2008-05-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

If you are from the middleware business, you may find this BEA bittersweet ode worth of reading (via Stefan). I'm not an BEA employee so I can't comment the view of Stu, but seems to me this kind of criticism is important and valuable, for BEA, Oracle and all of us others when keeping our business running.
And, if you are the same looser in english as I am, you can enrich your vocabulary by the expression of "bean counters" :)

Protest against violence in Tibet

2008-03-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there is no protection of human rights, no fundamental freedom in Tibet. If you are based in Prague, join the protest demonstration today.

Plastic soup

2008-02-12T00:30:00.000-08:00

Imagine sailing in ocean, jumping into water to cool off and...realizing you are swiming in the middle of a plastic waste. Well, it seems to be a reality now. After reading of this article, I'm stunned and crushed. There is a debris of plastic floating in Pacific ocean in size of a continent!
I'm used to sort waste at home/office and now will be doing even more consistently.I don't want to meet my Danone yougurt twice!

BEA & Oracle product lines

2008-01-22T01:59:00.000-08:00

Oracle came back with another offer to BEA last week and made a deal. I don't want to meditate on pros-and-cons of this acquisition, just to make my personal prediction about future of middleware product line of this joint enterprise (don't read further if you don't like this kind of forecasting ;)
I'm positive regarding WebLogic Server as there is a broad acceptance of this application server contrary to the Oracle one. Not so sure with WebLogic Integration because of Oracle BPEL Process Manager (former Collaxa BPEL Server) and its standards-based approach. On the other hand, WLI has a broader feature set, but honestly, do we need it? In area of ESB, AquaLogic Service Bus is a clear winner for me, with an extensive support of different types of services. BPM is much more fuzzy to me because BEA ALBPM (even it's a great product) might not fit well into Oracle BPA Suite, an analytical and modelling platform. And finally area of SOA registries/repositories: both Oracle Registry and BEA ALSR are OEM versions of HP Systinet Registry so there is no clash. There is no real Oracle repository, thus BEA ALER is a winner.
In summary, I don't think WebLogic and AquaLogic platforms are intended just for maintanence, but will replace (or coexist with) some of the Oracle's actual products.
Update: After reading several "Oracle&BEA" posts saying nothing, I've found a nice summary of opinions about middleware future under flag of Oracle.

Time to shut up and code

2008-01-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

If you like REST, you have definitely heard about Pete Lacey. He is a big protagonist of this architecture style and it is always a pleasure to read his blog. His last post is somehow special, because he is leaving Burton Group, where he worked for couple of years as a consultant, now joining Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) as an open source developer. I recommend you to read his reasons, but a short explanation is:

It’s time to shut up and code.

IMHO, this shows his soul of a core developer, his enthusiasm to create something what you can "touch", what works and what can be used also by others (CSI has a specific business model by using and producing purely open source software). Last but not least, he believes sharing practical knowledge and experiences (via Web) is much more effective than writing a research paper targeted to just a limited number of your customers.

I would go so far as to say that Sam Ruby’s blog, for instance, has done more to change the world than the millions of pages minted by R&A firms that only a select few get to read.

I wish Pete a lot of luck and satisfaction in his new job!

Bodies - the exibition

2007-10-31T02:43:00.000-07:00

You may have heard about the exibition of human bodies. I visited it last Sunday in Prague and have very miscellaneous feelings. Well, it is very interesting from a medical point of view - you can see every inner detail directly on a dead human body which is conserved (all the liquids are replaced by a silicone rubber). Every bit of entrails from different angles. But, you still know it is a dead body. It is a strange feeling if you imagine it might be your friend's body or yours! I know the people have agreed their bodies will be used for this purpose, but still: do we need to present the human entrails in such a way? Isn't it possilbe to create absolutely authentic models eg. from plastic?
You may ask, why I went there if don't agree. Well, I was curious. But now I see I very much believe our spiritis, souls and bodies are interconnected and we should not split them and exhibit.

BEA rejected Oracle's offer

2007-10-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

Oracle's courting to BEA resulted next week in a bid of $6.7 billion in cash. The bid was shortly after rejected by BEA as too low.
Personally, I'm very glad, because portfolio of BEA and Oracle products seems to me quite overlapping and I do not want to see some of the BEA's to be thrown over and replaced by Oracle's (but the other way round, Oracle AS in a garbage, not so bad idea ;). Tell me, who needs four different portals?
P.S. As a BEA contractor, I might be slightly biased ;)

Building up a house and company

2007-07-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I was laughing at all the stories of my friends how big nightmare can be a house raising: left-handed workers, overpriced services, breached deadlines. Now, I'm experiencing almost eveything, probably because of the recent unbelievable construction boom in Czechia and thus lack of skilful workers. Enough of complains: we are very much looking forward to move to Libcice, where our house is located.
And to fullfill the heading of this post, you can guess what is more difficult: to raise a house or set up a company. Let's see after several years, how the house and the company will stand :)

Viable Web Services

2007-05-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

With the context of my previous post regarding "fast" SOA, I'd like to mention an approach focused on web services, suggested by Arjen Poutsma. As you may experience, strict validation of messages incoming to your web service sucks. It is time consuming, complicates service versioning and refuses messages which holds all the necessary information and thus can be processed. Remind the Jon Postel's Law, don't be strict.
The next step? Don't struggle with object-to-XML mapping, use XPath for handling the data. I don't know about any OXM solution, which is robust enough, can handle all the pecularities of XML Schema, passes the "XML schema <-> objects" round-trip test etc. If you consider XPath as slow, optimize it eg. by SXC.
To be specific enough about this approach, I has to mention Spring Web Services (into which Arjen is involved as well). You can use them tradionally with ORM like JAXB, XMLBeans etc. or use JDOM and XPath, like in this tutorial. It seems to me much more viable solution.

Forgot a toothbrush? Print one.

2007-05-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Seems like a miracle to me, but there is something called a three-dimensional printer. You just submit a 3-D plan of an item, push a button and ... within a while... you get the item. Made from a nylon plastic, but well, you don't expect it will golden, especially if such a printer costs just $5,000 and will be less in few years. I can become a sculptor, finally!

Living a second life

2007-05-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

Our project team is quite international and scattered, so our team leader came with a nice thought of renting a room in Second life. I like this idea a lot believing our work can be more efficient then. However, I should ask my wife about having such a second life. Well, just for work :)

Controversial Purple Cow

2007-04-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

This post (via Radovan) brings a very nice idea about marketing your products by using social software instead of common marketing techniques. However it's clear medium-to-large companies are not brave enough to do the suggested changes. So there is a chance for startups, I'm looking forward to see next purple cows, growing and growing :)

Frank Cohen on FastSOA

2007-04-11T02:24:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of interviews about SOA, but this caugth my eye recently. Frank Cohen adresses scalability and performance issues in a concept he calls FastSOA. I like his approach, which is practical and can be used on the enterprise level. I will not recount the whole interview here, just a short quote:

FastSOA addresses these problems:
Solves SOAP binding performance problems by reducing the need for Java objects and increasing the use of native XML environments to provide SOAP bindings.
Introduces a mid-tier service cache to provide SOA service acceleration, transformation, and federation.
Uses native XML persistence to solve XML, object, and relational incompatibility.

Never stop swimming

2007-04-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Participating on a project in Copenhagen, I often go swimming to strech a bit after the whole day sitting. There is a wonderful swimming pool there, it is elliptic so you can swim for ever. One round is about 100 meters. If you have a chance, pay a visit to this place.

WS test client with XPath validation

2007-04-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

I just needed a general web service client for testing purposes, which can create a request from an input file, posts it to an endpoint and validates a response if it follows some basic structure. Prefrably all in Java.
Well, I could use some existing tools, eg. soapUI, but I've decided to develop it by myself. It was suprisingly easy, here is a simplified recipe:
1) take the Jakarta Commons HTTPClient
2) add some other Commons stuff like CLI, Configuration, mix it carefully so your HTTP client gets all the needed parameters like endpoint URL, payload etc.
3) POST the request
4) take an XPath engine like Jaxen
5) validate a response by an XPath expression
5) bake it, serve it hot

Enjoy :)