Content Log

JavaOne Java Server Faces Session

Stan Silvert, who is from JBoss, presented a session on Portlets and Java Server Faces in the theater attached to Moscone. We don't know how many people it holds 500-1000, but it was at capacity. Everyone seems to want to create portlets with Java Server Faces.

Stan's argument is sound: you should use JSF to build portals because it was designed to build portals.

That has been our experience and is promising for Alfresco's opportunities. We have done a lot of the hard work to make it easy to use and build content management portlets with JSF.

Interesting thing for us is that we think it was our own Kevin Roast who contributed the JSF integration to JBoss Portal 2.0. At least he has been contributing major improvements.

JavaOne and Business Process Management

So far, what we have found on Business Process Management has been disappointing. We have clear objectives which can't be too much different from other attendees. Most of the discussions on Service Oriented Architectures come down to using JBI and implementing Enterprise Service Buses. This is far too heavy weight a mechanism to suport the types of workflow that are commonly used by knowledge workers.

The jBPM session from JBoss was interesting. The intellectual framework that Tom Baeyens has put together is compelling. It certainly fits our experiences with BPM at Documentum. Process hiding, just like data hiding, in process arcs makes a lot of sense, as does distinguishing actions from the wait states. We're not sure that the audience really got into it as it became more a description of how he developed his engine. The jBPM engine looks promising as it appears to be clean and simple. It is not clear how it would support BPEL, which is already the standard for workflow and business process description. UI was not very good. Perhaps it was just a demo UI, but compare it to Oracle's Collaxa engine and you would not be very impressed. It had eclipse integration which is promising, but it had its own notation.

Sonic's SOA and Enterprise Service Bus presentation was too much of an advert with the presenter putting on a Sonic cap every time he went into commercial mode. The "Supported Exception Processing Pattern" which Sonic has been influencing the industry analysts to include as a requirement for Enterprise Service Buses seems like workflow. ESB seems like turning every thing into a nail. He even said that all portlets should be implemented using ESB.

The Pragmatic SOA presentation was not very good. Here's what we got out of it. For single Sign on within context of web services, we should take a look at SAML and XML-DSIG. For handling binary data in web services, we should be looking at XOP (XML-binary Optimized Packaging).

Yesterday, the Sun guys presented the Hitchhiker's Guide to SOA. It was certainly the most entertaining session so far. The take-away of session is the only way to simplify the development of SOA applications is through the use of tools. They demonstrated Sun's Studio Creator with drag and drop BPEL, ACDC and BPMN process descriptions. We noticed in the build log that PXE showed up. Is this the same as the FiveSight PXE BPEL engine just announced in the Server Side yesterday?

JavaOne EJB 3 Session

Laura De Michele did a good job of providing a straight-forward description of the next generation of EJB – JSR-220. She recognized that the current generation of EJB is a major obstacle to adoption of the Java platform.

Some of the key points of EJB 3 is fewer classes to deal with much greater simplicity of description. Also there is dependency injection to simplify the creation of classes avoiding all the boiler plate code required by EJB 2.1 and JNDI lookups. When she mentioned that EJB 3 would use primarily POJOs or ordinary classes, there was a big applause from the audience. 

Also included are simple lookups to simplify use of JNDI and Object Relational Mapping. She again recognized the negative affect that EJB container managed persistence was having on Java adoption. She also specifically mentioned that Gavin King from Hibernate, TopLink and JDO had been part of the expert group involved in this part of the spec.

There are some great things in EJB 3, but we already have them because we have been using Spring and Hibernate. Gavin King (Hibernate) apparently had a lot of input into EJB 3 persistence. Rod Johnson’s (Spring) criticisms on EJB have had an obvious effect. We are still ahead of the curve with the technology choices we have made. 

Annotations play and extremely important role in EJB3. They describe transaction control, persistence, web service enablement, statelessness and interceptors. The annotations replace a lot of the boiler plate that was required before to get these capabilities.

As an overall philosophy, the Inversion of Contracts provides for the POJO to describe what resources it needs from the container rather than the other way around. The container will provide these resources rather than the bean searching for those resources from the container. 

She described the injection model to be used in EJB 3 for interceptors. Unfortunately, she didn’t describe what business cases they were trying to address, but she said that after “a lot of deliberation of the expert group” they decide that a chain of interceptors would provide greater control than before and after interceptors. IoC is only available on a limited, but important, set of methods: postconstruct, predestroy, prepassivate, postactivate. Method interception will be in a future release.

Java Business Integration - by David Caruana

The team announced that JBI JSR-208 was now final and went on to describe how it works. The session was well attended (despite the keynote speech). 

JBI is a meta container of containers. There are two different types of plug-ins. The first type is service containers such as BPEL and transformation using XSLT, EDI or EJB. The second type of plug-in is a binding component repsonisble for handling the protocol between the services. Protocols supported include SOAP, RMI, AS2(?).

My first reaction to this was given that you describe these service interfaces as WSDL could you not just use standard web service technologies and use BPEL to orchestrate the interaction of these services? You don’t need to use SOAP to use web service technologies, so there isn’t a performance penalty to pay. The spec as a whole is probably aimed at the integration providers rather than application developers. This is a plumbing technology. 

For us to provide a set of content services, as long as we provide our services as SOAP or one of the supported binding protocols, developers can create composite services with Alfresco using JBI.

Services are described using WSDL. A message is a path through services using a "normalized message router" so that services do not interact with each other directly. A normalized message consists of an abstract message which is the payload plus properties which is the meta data of the payload. 

Meta data provides the context of the message such as security and transaction contexts. There are different types of exchange patterns of the message. An exchange pattern is the sequence and cardinality of the messages. Patterns include in-out (request response), in only, reliable in only, request optional response (in optional out).

Message router is responsible for pushing to the appropriate message provider. Sequence is a service consumer which makes a request which is a document that is accepted by a binding component. The binding component accepts the message and transforms it into the normalized message format, which is pushed by the normalized message router by a delivery channel. The router then determines the appropriate service provider and sends the message to that service provider through yet another channel. 

JBI provides a portable way of packaging its services and installing them via a service assembly. Service assembly was described as a composite service assembly.

Whole sequence occurs in the same vm, so it may seem like a lot overhead, but given it is in the same vm it isn't too bad.

JavaOne Keynote Speeches

Jonathan Schwartz gave his usual, high-level, entertaining presentation of the state of Java. Much of it has been said before, but there was yet another step toward meeting the open source community. Sun will open source their app server after making Solaris open source. (Is this a recognition of a vendor struggling?) He emphasized  the free in Free and Open Source Software. We haven't been too bothered by Sun's position on Java, but is it enough to silence some of the pure open source critics? It didn't help that Sun went on to present four different open source licenses.

He made a big point of IBM re-upping their partnership commitment for another 11 years. Just like the EMC announcement the other day, IBM is committed to porting its products to Solaris 10. However, the IBM guy looked a bit uncomfortable talking about it.

Panasonic presented BlueRay which can store 50G with potential for 200G and will support Java with network connectivity. Clearly an opportunity for content management.

There were a lot of presentations of their JDE making development of Java much easier. Only a presentation by RIM building Java apps for the Blackberry mentioned Eclipse. It's great to see tool support for JSF. In fact, Sun's support of JSF in a couple of presentations was encouraging.

Much was discussed about SOA and web services at a high level. Open sourcing their ESB offering of JBI/JSR-208 implementation. The last speaker of the session presented Java's strategy toward SOA and Enterprise Service Buses, but most of the audience left before he revealed that the strategy is JSR-208. Dave and I left after that illuminating fact.

Good stuff in the roadmap sections of Java SE and EE platforms. Java platforms will drop J2 and the 1.x and go straight to Java-XE 5 (6/7/...). Java SE 6 (Mustang) has Longhorn look and feel in its sights. High importance to scripting and JSR-223 with the Rhino javascript engine high in priority.

Mustangwill be open in development using a new Java Research License, but only for non-commercial use. They are encouraging everyone to contribute with senior developers acting as mentors. We would like to follow a similar model, but make Alfresco available for commercial use as well.

Java Distribution License is still a proprietary license with a “honor system” license for fixing bugs, known as the Java Internal Use License.

Dolphin, Java SE 7 available in 2008, might support: direct XML constructs in the Java language, “friends” constructs for complex java apps, and method references. Interesting is the opening up of the method dispatch bytecode to allow other languages to implement methods. Providing better packaging support with metadata and versioning got a lot of applause.

Bill Shannon provided the Java EE roadmap for JEE 5 with beta at end of 2005. Support of POJO-based program got a lot of support. Annotations and resource injection will allow applications to simply make interfaces web-service enabled, provide transaction control and simplify persistence. Very compatible Alfresco's direction. Should make it easier to get people to develop new aspects for content. New persistence interface got a lot of applause with mentions of EJB, JDO, Hibernate and Toplink cooperating.

The networked workstations that we are writing this on and getting internet connectivity are from Sun and have left a lot to be desired in terms of ease of use and performance. Using open office was nice though.

- John and Dave

John and Dave at JavaOne

Dave Caruana and I are at JaveOne to see if there is any new technology that we might be able to use in Alfresco and also to talk to some more journalists who are covering the convention. I am surprised at how little content management there is in the program, but perhaps there will be discussion in some of the sessions. Given that content management is at the heart of many web projects and acts as a repository to a lot of other applications, I would have expected more.

Dave and I are particularly looking forward to the sessions on Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architectures. BPM is critical to content management and is what make content fresh, consistent and relevant. Process is often the most important context used in delivering content to users and in capturing information. We are keenly watching what is happening with BPEL4WS and jBPM. We are closely following what is happening in open source and are looking at integrating those technologies that are consistent with our LGPL license. More on that later...

Service Oriented Architectures are important for Fortune 1000 CIOs to integrate and rationalize their enterprise infrastructures. These CIOs are now demanding web services interfaces from their vendors and content management is no exception. Dave Caruana is actively working on our web services interface and is planning on attending these sessions. Dave's comments to follow...

We'll post what we find here. If you are attending JavaOne, perhaps we could meet up. E-mail us at johnn@alfresco.org or davidc@alfresco.org. Feel free to send any quesitons you might have.

Alfresco Launch

I am surprised and pleased at the response that we have received on the launch of Alfresco. (http://www.alfresco.org) I had hoped that we would be noticed when we launched the product, but the articles, e-mails and visits to our website have exceeded our expectations. We hope that you will all give the software a try and give us open and honest feedback on the technology.  By  now everyone should be able to download the product and source code that we have been working since the beginning of the year and is the focus of that launch.

In the past week, I have spoken to quite a few journalists and analysts and many of the questions have been similar. The questions reflect what the developer community at large has of open source. What makes us different? (You’d get that no matter what.)  How are you going to make money? And how are you going to build a community?

The feedback that I have received from these same people is that we are different. The approach that we are taking to content management is unique and fills an unaddressed problem. That is probably why they have written as much as they have. That is part of why we set up Alfresco is that we saw unmet needs in how people use content management. I would hope that we have learned some lessons in the last 15 years. 

But the thing that really makes us different is that we come from a very different background from the typical open source project. Most people who have done this before have stayed put in the commercial world. People in the commercial world have generally not answered the how one makes money question to their own satisfaction. Major open source projects, coming mainly from either consulting or in-house IT organizations (with IBM and Sun more like the latter), have not been in the intensively competitive commercial world.

Up to this point, the open source and commercial worlds have been largely parallel universes that occasionally touch. I have certainly seen a lot of commercial organizations use open source, especially Java-based, code. However, the people in each community don’t seem to know each other personally. I suspect this will change as people like us realize that open source is the future of software platforms. (See Why Open Source? )

In the meantime, we'll see how are own mini-collision of worlds unfolds. We have a few more articles that I know are coming out. And Dave Caruana and I will be at JavaOne where collisions like this are most likely to happen.