[Arch] Pattern Based Development with Mule

I've found an interesting article about Pattern Based Development with Mule. This article illustrates how you can implement the Enteprise Integration Patterns using Mule elements. All code examplex are based on Mule 2.

[Pub] Open Source ESBs for System Integration

For our German speaking audience: in the current iX magazin Markus and I discuss the expectations on an ESB and the current status quo in the Open Source arena particularly focussing on Mule and the trinity Apache ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix. As an example we show a support-process and analyse how the process-execution can be supported by integration middleware.

Then we go into some details of what you could expect from an ESB (MOM, routing, filtering, message transformation, various endpoints, ...). I outline the Java Business Integration (JBI) standard which is in my opinion an important attempt in trying to define integration concepts and enterprise service components that can be exchanged between ESBs of different vendors.

In brief we also outline concepts of clustering and failover, mostly on the example of ActiveMQ using Broker Networks, failover protocols and the like. Finally we go into more details into the current status of ServiceMix and Camel and Mule. (But our avid blog-readers will know most of that already from various blog postings anyway).

[Pub] The tenth book is out!

Well again something to celebrate:
My tenth book is out!
(is it time to stop now?)

If was again a ot of work but the result looks good and contains quality. The Proceedings of the First International Conference on Object Databases ICOODB 2008 (ICOODB.org) have been printed and are now being send around the world.

Please drop me a line if you wish to order a copy!

Any hints for the next ten books are welcome :-)
Best
Stefan

[Tech] Update on "Maven: The Definitive Guide"

I am happy that the guys from Sonatype are continuously improving their free book on the "de facto standard" Apache Maven build-automation framework: "Maven: The Definitive Guide". The book covers most topics typical Maven users will encounter, including generation of documentation (site) and writing Maven plugins (mojos).

I think this book is very useful for the newbie as well as for more experienced Java developers. The book is frequently updated and available for online reading and as PDF download; in the recent update they put their book under a Creative Commons license.

[Event] Software and Systems Essentials Conference 2008

From April 28-30 the 2nd Software and Systems Essentials Conference 2008 took place in Bern, Switzerland.

An important goal of the conference is bringing together people from business, industry, and academia who are working in software engineering and information technology with its various aspects. Discussions and exchange of experiences between users in public and industrial contexts and vendors of software solutions (regarding software development frameworks) were in the main focus of the event. 

Main topics of the conference were software processes and the exchange of experience on the individual application in various contexts (e.g., in the public application domain), project management regarding systematic systems development processes, and software quality. Among several topics in these areas, I recognized a focus on traceability, i.e., requirements tracing from requirements analysis over design to software code (vertical traceability) and vice versa and linking requirements and specifications to software code and test cases on various levels of abstraction (horizontal traceability). 

We gave a presentation in the track "Testing and Quality Assurance" titled with "QATAM: ein Szenariobasierter Ansatz zur Evaluierung von Qualitätssicherungsstrategien" (D. Winkler, C. Denger, F. Elberzhager, and S. Biffl). This presentation is a result of an ongoing project of TU Vienna and Fraunhofer IESE  in Kaiserslautern, Germany (Institute for Experimental Software Engineering).

Summary of the presentation

 

Efficient development of complex high-quality software system requires systematic planning activities. The selection of an appropriate software process, e.g., the V-Model XT, is a success-critical activity in software development. Software processes define the sequence of steps within a software development project (e.g., what products are required at which milestone). Additionally, constructive and analytical methods support developers in building a product (constructive methods) and verifying/validating  software solutions (analytical methods). 

Nevertheless, resources typically are critical issues in software engineering practice. Thus, an optimal resource planning is required with respect to quality assurance (QA) planning for small- and medium enterprises as well as for large companies. The "Quality Assurance Tradeoff Analysis Method" (QATAM) focuses on the definition and evaluation of quality assurance strategies to enable optimal application of a balanced set of agreed methods along the project life-cycle. The given presentation includes the basic concept of QATAM and illustrates its application with respect to better planning method selection and application regarding a more efficient project execution. 

The slides of our presentation (in german language) are available for download.

The slides of all presentations will be available to the conference participants via the conference website.

Keynotes

Beside presentations and discussions of academic and industry papers, "state of the art" presentations focus on relevant topics for industry and best software engineering practice:

1. E-Government Programm Schweiz – Ein komplexes Programm in einem komplexen System (Peter Fischer, EFD) 
2. From informal process sketches to enactable process: How to represent your development process with SPEM 2.0, Rational Method Composer, and Team Concert  (Peter Haumer, IBM) 
3. Agiles Projektmanagement für große Projekte (Bernd Österreich, OOSE)

Keynote presentations are available on the conference website.

Dietmar Winkler (published and edited by Alexander Schatten)

[Arch] Apache CXF and "Code First" Webservices

Dana Gardner has an interesting interview in his Briefings Direct podcast (transcript) talking about the Apache CXF project. Apache CXF is one of the leading "Open Source Service Framework", supporting a series of service protocols like SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA. Additionally CXF plays in the concert with Apache Camel, ServiceMix and ActiveMQ.

I believe, that CXF is a great project and as I said a leading webservice framework. I also perfectly agree on their statement, that Open Source frameworks in the middleware/SOA field will more or less take over the market (I would probably not buy shares from Oracle/Bea *g*). But I feel a quite a bit uncomfortable about two fundamental concepts that were stressed several times in the interview:

1. Code First approach and slightly connected:
   
2. Abstracting too much from Webservice protocols like WSDL: "So, a lot of these more junior level developers can pick up and start working with Web services very quickly and very easily, without having to learn a lot of these more technical details.", Kulp
   

I personally believe that this is not the right way to go. I think we have to take the criticism of the REST folks (among others) seriously here, and the question we have to ask ourselves is: why in the first place do we want to use SOAP webservicess?

Because it is an easy remoting approach that a junior level engineer can click together with a wizard due to excellent frameworks and UI components? Sure not! First: a remote methode call is something fundamental different compared to a local method call; it probably should be treated as such. But even more important: Services on the basis of SOAP have some underlying assumptions:

• platform independence is needed
• Services on a rather coarse granularity are exposed
• interoperability over system/company borders are imperative, i.e., the service interface is in the center and should be considered properly and not change any minute
• remote service calls are rather the exception (coarse granularity, aggregated functionality),
• strong formalisation is needed (XML schema, service description, security...)
  
• i.e. performance losses due to XML (un-) marshalling are acceptable considering the advantages gained by this "neutral" approach
  

and probably some more. The point however is, that SOAP services are not just an ordinary remoting approach they are to expose Services under specific conditions. (For other remoting problems probably other technologies like RMI or REST are better suited.) In the cases where SOAP is a good architectural choice I would suggest that the platform neutral service description i.e. WSDL should stand in the center of attention. The idea is, that different parties can express a neutral and platform independent service description plus data-description in W3C schema as a foundation for cooperation.

The next step, not the first step is to implement the service. So my feeling about code-first approaches are that they can lead developers and architects into a dangerously wrong direction (just two annotations and the webservice is done, so we are made to believe). What we would really need are not code-first webservice frameworks, but easy to use WSDL editors/modeling tools.

Additionally a Webservice infrastructure is by definition a complex beast. Trying to abstract all underlying protocols from the developers easily gives them a wrong idea about the actual complexity of their undertaking. When (e.g. interoperability, security) problems occur, they probably have no idea about the reason and the means to fix them. So give us good Service modeling tools, but no code-first approaches. This leads us into the wrong direction.

Just my two cents.