Raible Designs

New Jersey

This week, I'm traveling on business in the great state of New Jersey. I've been here before, but it was for a wedding and I didn't get to see much. Today I flew in to Newark, rented a car and raced the sunset to my hotel. Damn daylight savings time. I like the cold, I love snow and I think winter is great - but I can't help agree with Russell a little bit.

I'm looking forward to this week, mainly because it's fun to talk about Spring and Hibernate to people that don't know much about it. It'll also be fun because time usually flies when I travel. The faster this weekend comes, the better. It's Abbie's birthday and the first DU Hockey home game.

I can't believe Abbie is going to be 3. It's pretty incredible that DU has been national champions for the majority of her life.

Pictures from the Colorado Software Summit

Here's a few pictures from the last few days - including a few shots while driving up yesterday. One thing that's interesting about this conference is there's a huge contingent of Tapestry users and enthusiasts.

[CSS] The Zen of Open (Observations of a New Bear) by Simon Phipps

Simon used to work for IBM, on a video conferencing product. In 1994, Simon would fly all over the world to tell everyone about it. The last 10 years have brought many changes. When Simon used to travel in 1994, he needed cash and travellers checks, airline tickets, telephone kiosks and sent mail through the regular ol' postal system. Fast forward to 2004, and we have ATM cards and a "global identity card" (a Visa card), e-tickets, GSM mobile phones and e-mail. We're now in the participation age.

If we were massively connected:

Security would no longer concern only boundaries. Before the participation age, security was a matter of "how do I keep you out". Now it's "who are you can you prove that". It's all about digital identity now.

Software would have nowhere and everyone to run. Service orientation is how software is build today. Simon believes it'll happen through REST-based services, rather than by employing web services.

Software pricing should not track ephemera [definition]. We're now switching to value-based pricing.

Markets would become conversations (from The Cluetrain Manifesto). This idea led Simon to start blogs.sun.com.

Closed-room development would be insufficient. The old way was lock smart people in a room and slide pizza under the door - and then charge others admission fees to watch them work. Software that's developed out in the open gets better and better b/c you can get all the experts working on it. This is called Open Source. The initial objective of Open Source was to undermine companies like Microsoft and Sun - but now it's the best way to write software in a connected society.

Open Source in a Nutshell: a community of developers, sharing a code commons, create "wealth" from the commons, enriching the commons in the process. The "craft guilds" have been rediscovered in a sense. Open source is not communism, but more like Connected Capitalism.

There are a number of different open source licenses:

• Class A: "Unrestricted", create any work, no restrictions on licensing. BSD-style license, with the gold standard being the Apache License.
• Class B: "File-based", files derived from commons must use license B, files added may use any license. Mozilla-style, CDDL v1.
• Class C: "Project-based", all files in project must use license C if any files use commons files, GPL.

According to Simon, the best license is the one that gives the most freedom to the most people. Class A licenses promote freedom to innovate, but do not protect the commons. Class C licenses promote constant growth of the commons but limit the freedom of the developer to use their own innovation however they want. Class B licenses balance both freedoms protecting and enriching the commons but leaving innovators free to use their work in any commons.

The overlooked corners of open source: it's not licenses, there's no more limelight needed for those. However, there is a problem now - and that's license proliferation. There's too many licenses, we need fewer so it's easier to choose. We need better motivational models: how do we leave room for the motivations of diverse contributors?

The overlooked corner of open source is Governance. Apache is a good example of how Governance should be done. Bad governance is the primary vector for disease in open source. If the only way to contribute back is to go through one company that chooses committers, the project is likely doomed.

Software Patents happen, get over it. "Parallel Filing" means Corporations own patents on pretty much anything they touch. If you don't, your competitor will. The nature of US law means all must play. Using patents defensively is a routine element of corporation-to-corporation interaction. Software patents are a zone on the continuum - even their detractors have to deal with them. Until world trade is reformed, software patents happen.

So how do you protect yourself?

• Patent Grants: Research specific patents and give a broad usage grant to open source use.
• Compulsory licensing: Blanket grant of patents, restricted to licensed code. This is the strategy that Sun has used with OpenSolaris.
• Non-Assert Covenants: Covenant not to assert rights against bona fides community.

Simon believes all 3 approaches are needed to protect ourselves from software patents. He believes that #2 and #3 should be mandatory for standards bodies and open source projects.

Summary: The next phase of F/L/OSS is upon us. The Virtuous Cycle of open source needs a health check. We need to reduce license proliferation by dealing with its causes. We need to leave room for the motivations of all contributors. Don't sacrifice the freedom of developers for an ideology. Governance best practice needs an advocate.

F/L/OSS Alone is not enough for freedom - we need standards. Open standards set end users free to choose. Development and deployment are not the same thing. Standard Formats + Open Source = Freedom.

Software Patents demand multiple defenses. We need to lobby the governing bodies of our countries and put a stop to patents.

[CSS] Apache Geronimo Architecture and Community by Bruce Snyder

The main reason that Geronimo was started was to have a BSD-style licensed Java application server. The other two open-source application servers are JOnAS and JBoss, both of which are LGPL. The advantage of having a BSD/Apache licensed container is that companies can put it into their products, or develop products with it - w/o worrying about licensing issues. Bruce says IBM just validated the goals of Geronimo with their WebSphere Community Edition.

Geronimo's architecture is designed around GBeans - which are services that are pluggable inside of the kernel. To learn more about GBeans, see Jeff Genender's article "Integrate third-party components into Geronimo". The GBean is an IoC container in itself. Bruce is now showing a GBean Descriptor for ActiveMQ. There are only a few main elements in this XML file: multiple <dependency> elements and <gbean> elements. The dependency element refers to a JAR and the idea was borrowed from the Maven project.

Bruce, the poster-boy for Maven 2 only made it 15 minutes before he mentioned Maven.

For more information about integrating ActiveMQ in Geronimo, see Sing Li's article "Magic with JMS, MDBs, and ActiveMQ in Geronimo".

Deployers vs. Builders: Deployers are J2EE specific, Builders are Geronimo specific. The Geronimo Deployer is JSR-88 compliant and handles both deployment and distribution. Personally, I'm a little disappointed that Geronimo doesn't support hot-deploy out-of-the-box, but I can understand their desire to be spec-compliant first, and developer-friendly 2nd. After all, it is an IBM product.

Geronimo's deployer is currently a script that you can pass arguments into. There is also a webapp console (developed and donated by Gluecode) that's based on portlets. It uses JetSpeed under the covers and looks to be a pretty slick little webapp. Bruce started up Geronimo and showed us the console UI - it appears Geronimo's default footprint is about 20 MB.

Custom Assemblies: One of the nice things about Geronimo is that it's so configurable. Because of it's architecture, you can easily create custom assemblies. Here's a few examples:

• Tomcat + Derby + Jetspeed + ActiveMQ
• Jetty + Apache DS + ActiveMQ + OpenEJB
• Jetty + JOTM + Derby + OpenEJB
• Tomcat + ActiveMQ + Spring Kernel + ServiceMix

The Geronimo Kernel and GBeans make all of this possible. This is pretty cool IMO, especially with the whole Agile Java EE movement. Bruce thinks this is real future of Geronimo: the stacks that can be created with it. He expects the innovation and ideas in this area will come from the community and what users want.

Geronimo Community: Made up of many different open-source projects: MX4J, ActiveMQ, Tomcat, ActiveCluster, HOWL, JOTM, TranQL, Derby, Jetty, ServiceMix, OpenEJB. Rather than re-creating everything (the ol' NIH syndrome), the Geronimo team has tried to embrace and re-use other open source projects as much as possible. Many of the committers on the aforementioned projects are Geronimo committers or founders.

Bruce's favorite quote: In open source, we come for the code, we stay for the people.

Project Status: Now a top-level Apache project. Has officially passed J2EE 1.4 certification tests. The official 1.0 release date is "when it's done it's done", but the developers are hoping to finish by ApacheCon.

[CSS] Mule - A Detailed Look at an Enterprise Service Bus by Tom Bender

Below are notes I took while attending Tom Bender's talk on Mule at the Colorado Software Summit:

SOA: A collection of services with well-defined interfaces and a shared communication model is called a service-oriented architecture.

ESB: Provides a light weight, loosely coupled, event-driven SAO with a highly distributed universe of naming routing destinations across a multi-protocol message bus.

Four Tenets of SAO (as proposed by Don Box):

• Boundaries are Explicit
• Services are Autonomous
• Services share Schema and Contract, not Class
• Compatibility is based upon Policy

Properties of an ESB: Light Weight, Loosely Coupled, Event-Driven, Transactional, Securable, Distributed Network Topologies, Abstract Endpoints, Intelligent Routing, Message Transformation (inbound/outbound), Multi-Protocol Message Bus.

One of the main differences between application servers and ESBs is appservers are traditionally integrated with a hub-and-spoke architecture. ESBs, on the other hand, use a distributed integration architecture.

Mule - What is it?

Ross Mason is the founder and primary developer of Mule. From its homepage:

Mule is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) messaging framework. It is a scalable, highly distributable object broker that can seamlessly handle interactions with services and applications using disparate transport and messaging technologies.

Mule is an event-based architecture. Actions within a Mule network are triggered by either events occurring in Mule or in external systems. It's a light-weight messaging framework that's highly distributable and very pluggable (i.e. for multiple transports and protocols). Mule supports Web Services using Axis or Glue.

A Closer Look at Mule

The basic building block is a "UMO Component". This component is used to wire applications together - it's basically a POJO that can optionally implement interfaces if it wants to hook into lifecycle events. An application communicates with the UMO component through a channel (i.e. TCP/IP or JMS). This channel talks to a message receiver that works with a connector that's backed by a transformer and formats it for the UMO component (whoa, that's a mouthful - and that's only inbound!). When going to the receiving application, the process starts from the UMO component, goes though the outbound router - and plows through the whole transformer » connector » message dispatch » channel » application process again. Here's a diagram of this process that I found on Mule's website:

Mule supports many different endpoints: POP3/SMTP, JMS Topic or Queue, HTTP, File, VM (w/in the JVM), SOAP, RMI and EJB. Each of these have their own URI prefix.

I tuned out for the rest of Tom's talk (sorry Tom). The whole ESB topic is pretty dry IMO, but Tom seemed to do a good job of keeping the audience interested.

The best part about the Colorado Software Summit

The best part about the Colorado Software Summit has been the fact that I can travel home at night. Keystone is beautiful, the conference is well organized - but hopping in my car and sleeping in my own bed last night was awesome. This morning, I'll be heading to breakfast with the family, taking Abbie to school and then driving back up for some dynamite sessions this afternoon.

Tom Bender is speaking at 1:00 on "Mule - A Detailed Look at an Enterprise Service Bus", followed by Bruce's "Apache Geronimo Architecture and Community". I'm staying with both of these guys in a nice condo on the lake (across from the conference center) so it should be fun to hear them speak. I'll do my best to blog both sessions.

My favorite quote from the Colorado Software Summit

Here's a good quote from John Soyring's keynote on Monday:

... Geronimo is a subset of Websphere ...

I especially enjoyed this b/c I was sitting next to Bruce Snyder, one of the founders of Geronimo.

This quote seems to have been backed up yesterday with IBM's release of WebSphere Community Edition.

Spring MVC the most popular web framework among AppFuse users

At the beginning of October, I did an informal poll on the AppFuse mailing list to see which web framework users were developing their applications with. Surprisingly, Spring came out on top, and the component frameworks (JSF and Tapestry) are the least used. I find this interesting b/c AppFuse lowers the barriers and reduces the learning curve for all of these frameworks.

If you're an AppFuse user and didn't respond on the mailing list, please leave a comment with the web framework you're using.

On a related note, I noticed that java.net added RSS Feeds for mailing lists today. This means if you have an RSS Reader, you can subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list.

Heh, I just subscribed and there's no messages in the feed. Maybe this feature needs a little more work.

Keystone

Heading to the Summit

In a couple of hours (after my fraternity's annual Alumni vs. Actives softball game), I'll be heading up to Keystone to attend the Colorado Software Summit. I'm pretty excited about going; it's at one of my favorite places to ski, and it's the first time I'll be attending. I've heard great things about this conference, and I'm sure it'll live up to its reputation.

On the other hand, I have a good case of the "it figures". I caught a nasty cold from the kids a couple of days ago and it's sure to be in full force by tomorrow. With any luck, I'll lose my voice sometime before a talk this week - or perhaps cough my way through one of them. Do you have a good story about speaking when you're sick? If so, please share.