Bradley D. Brown

Are You Going to use Cloud Computing?
I did a keynote on cloud computing last week.  When I asked the audience how many people were using cloud computing today, nobody raised their hand (in an audience of about 300).  Then I asked how many people thought they would ever use it.  Maybe 20 people raised their hands.  How many people thought it was “real” or coming?  Same 20 or so.

Flashback to 1994
In preparing for this keynote, I had a flashback to 1994 when I was asked to do a debate on client server computing vs. this new technology call “web computing.”  I was a client server guy, so I was to debate how client server was here to stay, how it was proven, etc.  After doing my research, I realized that the computing world would move toward dynamic web page generation, web computing, etc.  At that presentation I talked about web development as an “early adaptor” technology at that point.  Sure things changed, but those who were in on the group floor understood the fundamentals and therefore saw opportunities that weren’t available later…such as Amazon.

Are You an Early Adaptor?
Cloud computing is in a similar state.  If you’re an early adaptor, now is your time to truly understand and dig into cloud computing.  If you’re a late adaptor, wait 10 years or more.  The thing I can assure EVERY company out there is that they will use a form of cloud computing at some point.  Some sooner than others.  Personally when it comes to new applications, businesses, etc. I’m only thinking in terms of this elastic computing model.  Simply put, for less than $3/hr I can spin up a SUPER fast processor on Amazon.  If I purchased that machine, it would cost me $50k or more…and I’d have to install the OS, configure hardware, install my applications and more.  Why not just fire up a virtual image pre-configured?  You can do your development, testing, etc. on a box that will cost you about $.08/hr.  Imagine what $1000 will do for you in this model vs. a traditional / physical model.  There’s no comparison.

Are You Confused?
There’s a lot of confusion out there.  There are also a number of cloud offerings in a variety of forms.  When I think about cloud computing, I think of server farms that can be spun up to run my application at the drop of a command.  Those are cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.  Then there are Application Platform cloud providers like Google App Engine, Force.com and hosted Oracle Application Express (ApEx) vendors.  These are vendors who provide a platform that you can build your applications on.  Google App Engine can be built on Java or Python.  Force and ApEx are 4GL application platforms (i.e. point and click interfaces).  There are many portal and mashup companies who feel they provide cloud solutions.   There are SaaS portal applications like iGoogle, MyYahoo, Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo YQL and more.  There are cloud load testing companies like Soasta.  There are also a number of SaaS integration appliance vendors (Integration as a Service).  Most of which mention cloud computing in their marketing literature.  So yes, there’s plenty of confusion and it’s difficult to keep up.

What’s in Your Way?
So why not move to the cloud today?  There are many reasons of course.  Just like when web computing came into play - many things come to mind.  They can likely be grouped into 3 categories: 1) Technological - security, integration, etc., 2) Financial - such as SLA, what does it cost you if you’re down vs. your SLA, etc. 3) Cultural - do you really enjoy spinning up servers?  Someone in your company might.

SaaS vs. Cloud
Many people say they have cloud offerings…and by their own definition, they might. Many of those are SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors…not Cloud vendors. SalesForce is actually both, but what most people thing of when they think of them is their CRM package online –that’s SaaS. Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is something that’s been around for a while too – i.e. timesharing, outsourcing your hardware to someone else. Cloud is SaaS and HaaS – running your applications on someone else’s hardware. The software could be used as a service – i.e. an Oracle license.

 

No Lack of Benefits
The reality of cloud computing is that the benefits are numerous. Ultimately you can absolutely reduce your costs using cloud computing. It’s all about economies of scale. To do it right in a data center is very expensive. If you can share that expense with 1000 of your closest friends – why wouldn’t you! The fact that you can spin up new instances within seconds is exceptionally powerful. All of this translates into risk mitigation. You don’t need to spend any money on hardware! I think you’ll see more seamless cloud offerings in the future. Google has a nice seemless cloud offering for example. You can run their cloud offering (Google App Server) in your own environment or in theirs. You’ll have real power from Oracle when there is a “cloud” option on a SQL statement – just like parallelism…run it on the cloud.

 

On the other hand, the variable costs can be high. If I buy a box, put some hardware on it, install software on it, I know the costs, right? Not totally – all of this setup requires time, but we often don’t consider that a variable cost. We also have to support our hardware and software – that’s all very expensive. But we tend to think of these things (i.e. salaries, hardware, software, etc) as a sunk cost, right? We’re fooling ourselves. It’s like setting your watch ahead by 15 minutes – do I really think I’m that dumb?

 

Cloud Solutions
I’ve experimented with all of these cloud providers in one form or another. Some I’ve used in production environments and others not. I think I have a pretty good handle on these technologies, but I learned a long time ago – if I’m a guy who likes my big boat, there’s always someone who has a bigger boat out there…and that’s true for all of these technologies. I know the Oracle technologies pretty well and I’m confident that I don’t know the entire stack. This is complicated stuff. I’m going to tell you my thoughts about each of these vendors cloud offerings. Again, my goal is to get you energized – to get you thinking, questioning some future direction, etc.

If you’re thinking about a new highly scalable application that you’re going to build, I sure hope you’ll consider doing it in the cloud. 

• Oracle
• Amazon
• SalesForce (Force.com)
• Google App Engine
• Yahoo Pipes
• Zoho
• Others…

Keep in mind that long term this is an infrastructure decision, so don’t take it lightly!  There are so many questions that you have to ask yourself: 

• Do you need to spin up servers or just run an application?
• Existing or new application?
• Oracle in the Cloud?
• Pay per use OK?
• Global application?
• Scaling on demand important?
• Public, private, partner cloud?

 Let’s take a look at what each of the above vendors.

 

Oracle

First off, Oracle is really a cloud enabler, not so much a cloud infrastructure provider. The preferred Oracle cloud infrastructure is provided by Amazon. You could say that ApEx running in a SaaS environment is a cloud offering. On apex.oracle.com you can build your own application there and run it on their hardware. Not really in a production environment – Oracle doesn’t provide “production level” ApEx – at least they don’t support it.

 

Oracle has numerous SaaS offerings, which is running their software on their hardware….for example CRM, ERP, etc. They say they have “Oracle Technology on Demand” but it’s all Oracle 9.2, so I’m not sure what that says since Oracle’s on version 11g now.

 

Personally I believe they could be one of the biggest cloud providers once they complete the Sun transaction. The Exadata boxes running in the cloud would be a great virtual offering!

Amazon
Amazon is one of my favorite cloud infrastructure providers…Oracle’s too – so far. That’s certain to change. With EC2 you can spin up a server in no time. You pay by the hour of computing time. As low as about 8 cents up to about $3/hr depending on the size and performance of the virtual box. You also will pay for data storage, data transfer, and other costs. But…what’s it cost you to spin up a box today? What’s it cost you to decommission a box today?

 

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)  is a true cloud infrastructure.  S3 (Simple Storage Service) is how you store your data.  You can get virtual machines in a variety of configurations – small, large, extra large, high CPU or standard CPU.  You can run as many virtual images as you would like - $.085-$2.88/hr/machine + licenses + data transfer (to S3).  And of course, you can build your own virtual instances on the OS, software, etc. of your choice.

 

Force.com
SalesForce offers what they call a cloud offering.  It’s really an “Application Platform as a Service.”  I liken it to apex.oracle.com. If you want to build a hosted Web app – Force.com might be for you.  There are entire consulting firms sprouting up who do nothing but Force.com development - I like this!  Force.com provides an ApEx like development environment,  There are are sample applications (recruiting and volunteers) that you can check out on their site too.

 

I’d like to know how do you spin up a box?  Manage reliability, performance, etc…these are concerns to me.

Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a very powerful way to run your applications. It’s basically a hosted JVM environment. It’s nice that you can run it on your own hardware too. But, the downside in my book is that it’s not all that developer friendly. There’s no ApEx-like interface.  So it’s a 3GL Application Platform as a Service.

 

But…don’t count Google out just yet. They have a number of SaaS offerings (Mail, Calendar, etc) that can be great components of your cloud solution…for free.

It’s a true Cloud (scalable, redundant, etc) environment, but can’t run Oracle.  You have to develop your own app in Google App Engine lingo - i.e. Java or Python.  You can run Java databases like Derby of course.  By default you get BigTable, which is the same “database” that Google’s search engine uses.
 
One thing I like about this architecture is that you can run it on your own hardware or run on Google (i.e. in the cloud).  Easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to scale.  An application on a free account can use up to 500MB of storage and up to 5 million page views a month.  You can also pay and configure:

 

• CPU Time
• Bandwidth in
• Bandwidth out
• Storage
• Email

Google provides the Google Data API to get to everything.  As I mentioned, there are many SaaS / hosted solutions that they have too - such as Calendars, Documents, App Server, etc.

 

Yahoo
Yahoo is a content company.  They don’t really seem to have any cloud solutions.  They have one that’s currently been introduced to universities only, but that doesn’t seem all that interesting to industry.  Yahoo’s been talking about their cloud offering for a while now. In April they finally released it to universities – i.e. a limited beta. But again, don’t count Yahoo out – they are a content company.

If you want weather information, stock information, traffic, etc…they have the content. All of us love SQL, and Yahoo has YQL. Is the Y long or short? EEQL, IQL, ICKQL? YuckQL?

Actually I’m a big fan of YQL as you’ll see in a minute.  Yahoo provides many great developer tools (YUI, YQL, APIs).  In fact, YQL is quite powerful.  It returns data as XML or JSON.  You can also store your own data on Yahoo (Google offers this too).  You can query your own XML through YQL.  And…Yahoo Pipes are great!

 

Zoho
Zoho considers themselves a cloud provider. Personally again, I’d say that’s a stretch. It’s more like a Google Documents on steroids. It does have some nice APIs and a JDBC driver.  Zoho as in Soho, so I have to wonder - is it for small time companies?  Again, it’s more like ApEx on a server than Cloud.  They say they have CloudSQL…all marketing hype.  It’s really more like SaaSSQL…  They do have JDBC and ODBC drivers, which is pretty cool!

 

Others
As I mentioned, there are MANY other cloud providers. So take some time to pick your cloud provider. This is an infrastructure decision.  Think about what you really need right now.  Do you need SaaS or Cloud?
Do you need to move from your hardware to someone else’s?  What kind of scale do you need?  I’d recommend you hire an expert…so you make the right decisions.  As I mentioned, it’s tough to study up on all this stuff.

Cloud with SOA?
What’s SOA – Service Oriented Architecture. SOA is an architecture, not a technology. So it contains a lot of components, best practices, etc. Many people say that SOA is a best practices approach to best practices. SOA bigots will say that SOA is just Web Services – in fact, you can do SOA without Web Services. Sure, that’s true, but I think the best place to start on your SOA journey is via Web Services. What are web services? Just an open standard API. You already have services or APIs. You already have data. So why not expose your existing data and business logic through an open API?

What’s your path to cloud? Start with web services. Start with something like YQL and see how it works. Integrate some Yahoo data into your applications. For example, I send myself emails with all of the weather updates for the town I live in – Littleton, CO. My plan is to integrate this with my calendar and figure out what city I’m in or going to be in and send weather updates for my current location…and traffic info…and events of interest, etc.

What are the steps to success?  I believe a company should:

 

• You have services (packages, data)
• Figure out which service you want to expose internally or externally
• Create web services based on your existing services
• Pick a product to create your services - iPerspective, Jdeveloper, …
• Try out Yahoo YQL

 I’d also encourage you to check out Yahoo Pipes. Pipes allows you to prompt for information, use YQL, draw it in a map, overlay data and more. The maps you see here are 2 maps I created that show current traffic on a map. The map on the bottom of the page shows the culinary events that are in town. Again, I plan on merging this information with my “current” location and sending daily emails of maps and other items of interest. So let’s take a look at how you can do this with ApEx…

CGQ
I wrote a product that we call CGQ – consumer gateway for queries. It allows you to write a query against ANY Web Service. We have another product, iPerspective that creates Web Services based on your existing assets – i.e. data in any database or business logic in any database (T-SQL, PL/SQL, etc.). So CGQ allows me to write a query against any Web Service. The services can be ones I created or ones already in existence…or in a cloud. Using CGQ I could query from YQL or fire off an EC2 server or CRUD data, etc. VERY powerful stuff and to the developer it simply looks like SQL and/or PL/SQL code.

 

CGQ Query 1 - Get all of the places named Littleton
If we take a look at this query, it’s pretty simple.  It “virtualizes” the Web Service from Yahoo, so the Oracle engine thinks it’s an Oracle table:
 
select text_column1 place_type, text_column2 name,

text_column3 country, text_column4 state,
text_column5 county, text_column6 postal_code,
text_column7 locality1, num_column1 centroid_lat,
num_column2 centroid_long
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘placeTypeName,name,country,admin1,admin2,postal,locality1′,
‘centroid/latitude,centroid/longitude’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20geo.places%20
where%20text%3D%22littleton%22′,
‘place’, ‘results’,
‘xmlns=”http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/schema.rng”‘)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

 
Sample CGQ Query 2 - Get the detailed weather for 80123
 
select text_column1 date_1, text_column2 day1,

num_column1 Day1_Low, num_column2 Day1_High,
text_column3 Weather_1, text_column4 date_2,
text_column5 day2, num_column3 Day2_Low,
num_column4 Day2_High, text_column6 Weather_2
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘yweather:forecast[1]/@date,yweather:forecast[1]/
@day,yweather:forecast[1]/@text,yweather:forecast[2]/
@date,yweather:forecast[2]/@day,yweather:forecast[2]/@text’,
‘yweather:forecast[1]/@low,yweather:forecast[1]/
@high,yweather:forecast[2]/@low,yweather:forecast[2]/@high’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20weather.forecast%20
where%20location%3D80123′,
‘item’, ‘results’,
‘xmlns:yweather=”http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0″‘)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Query 3 - Get the upcoming events for a location
 
select text_column1 date_posted, text_column2 description,

text_column3 name, text_column4 photo_url,
text_column5 distance_units, text_column6 start_date,
text_column7 start_time, text_column8 ticket_price,
text_column9 ticket_url, text_column10 venue_address,
num_column1 distance, num_column2 latitude, num_column3 longitude
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘@date_posted,@description,@name,@photo_url,
@distance_units,@start_date,@start_time,@ticket_price,
@ticket_url,@venue_address,@distance,@latitude,@longitude’,’’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20upcoming.events%20
where%20search_text%3D%22music%22%20
and%20location%3D%22Denver%2CCO%22%20
and%20radius%3D1′,
‘event’, ‘results’)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Query 4 - Traffic in a Radius
 
select text_column1 date_posted, text_column2 description,

text_column3 name, text_column4 photo_url,
text_column5 distance_units, text_column6 start_date,
text_column7 start_time, text_column8 ticket_price,
text_column9 ticket_url, text_column10 venue_address,
num_column1 distance, num_column2 latitude, num_column3 longitude
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘@date_posted,@description,@name,@photo_url,
@distance_units,@start_date,@start_time,@ticket_price,
@ticket_url,@venue_address,@distance,@latitude,@longitude’,’’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20upcoming.events%20
where%20search_text%3D%22music%22%20
and%20location%3D%22Denver%2CCO%22%20
and%20radius%3D1′,
‘event’, ‘results’)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Now It’s up to You!
I can assure you that the cloud is real. I can assure you that you’ll use it in your business.  There’s a natural progression to get started.  Give SOA a try.  Test out a Cloud provider.  Learn!  I have some questions for you:

 

• Did I get you thinking?
• Are you more curious than before you read this?
• Do you see how it might apply to your business?
• Still don’t see a fit? Why not?

Bradley D. Brown soa

Oracle Open World (OOW) is just a few weeks away.  It’s going to be a busy week for a lot of people!  Rolta TUSC will have a LOT of presentations that week.  We have 2 booths at the conference.  Numerous demo stations will be at the booth.  It’s going to be a fun week!  I have 3 presentations.  1 on Monday, 1 Wednesday and the final one Thursday morning.  I’ll be arriving on Sunday and heading home on Thursday.  I always love a week in San Fran!  Here are my presentations - please come see me!

Title: Wimpy Web Services Versus Powerful, Flexible Web Services
Track: Oracle Develop: Service-Oriented Architecture
Date: 12-OCT-09
Time: 11:30 - 12:30
Venue: Hilton Hotel
Room: Yosemite C

In this presentation, Brad will discuss the importance of strong Web Services, the difference between wimpy services and powerful flexible Web services. Many companies today are attaching SOA MBOs to their technical teams. These performance metrics often measure based on quantity rather than quality. What is quality? Reuse? Performance? Flexibility? Brad will discuss this topic in detail.

Title: Building a Mashup with Application Express
Track: Database
Date: 14-OCT-09
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Venue: Moscone South
Room: Room 252

In this presentation, Brad will talk about how to develop a mashup using Oracle Application Express. Traditionally people think of ApEx as being an “Oracle database” tool only - not a mashup tool. However, Brad will show how you can consuming Web Services to access data from any source - Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Access, Excel, Cloud Databases (like Zoho), etc. In Brad’s presentation titled “Scalable Oracle ApEx” he explains how to create an n-tier architecture for ApEx. This architecture provides unparalleled scalability to your organization. This presentation explains the implementation side (i.e. the specifics) of this solution.

Title: Scalable Oracle Application Express: Case Study of a True N-Tier Architecture
Track: Database
Date: 15-OCT-09
Time: 09:00 - 10:00
Venue: Moscone South
Room: Room 306

Do you like the power and flexibility of Oracle Application Express (ApEx)? But…are you frustrated by the fact that it chews up database cycles generating dynamic HTML pages? Do your architects and DBAs go mad thinking about this? I know I sure have!  This presentation will demonstrate a solution to this architectural dilemma! A reference architecture is provided along with a case study that this presentation is based around. You’ll see exactly how to scale ApEx (inexpensively) within your environment.

Bradley D. Brown ajax, bpel, mashups, oracle, oracle application express, rest, soa, web 2.0, web services

I created a white paper out of the content in the below posts.  If you would like the 5 part series in one document, you can download it Recession-Proof Agile SOA White Paper.  Enjoy!

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile soa

Your Guide Along the SOA Adoption Path

I’ve been talking about Agile SOA, which is an iterative method of working with the business and IT to develop services that better serve the business.  In other words, using our methodology, you’re building an optimized business with assets you already own!  Not all at once – not over night…very much via releases over time.  This is powerful.

So let’s talk about how some customers have implemented our methodology and software.

You can see in the figure that we recommend implementing services in iterations.

Real World Examples

We’re going to take a look at some real world examples now.

Bombay Stock Exchange 

Legacy Modernization

First, let’s talk about a Periscope example.  The Bombay Stock Exchange uses Periscope.  They have a lot of data on Stratus platforms.  They wanted to do ad-hoc reporting on that data.  But there weren’t tools like Cognos, Brio, etc. that work on those platforms.  Periscope makes the Stratus data appear in an Oracle database – as if it’s Oracle data.  So any tool that can access Oracle can report on the Stratus data.  This simplifies life for the exchange.

Exchange:

–        Stratus system – high uptime requirements

–        Ad hoc reporting through Periscope

–        Simplifies access and control/auditing

IntelliReal

B2B Integration

One of our customers is in the real estate intelligence business.  We created a number of services around existing business logic and data.  The services were initially used to develop a UI that was used by most of their customers.  When customers asked for customization of the UI, our customer would offer that everything they saw in UI was simply a service that they could use as they saw fit.  The B2B customers would then use the exact same services to develop their own user interfaces, workflow processes or integrate applications.  What you see here are examples of how different companies used the exact same data.

The beauty of building services was that we could use our own services for the UI. 

In this first figure, you can see that this is from the IntelliReal site.  Enter an address and pick your report type.  This call the respective service that often generates a PDF and other times returns data.

 After entering an address and requesting a detailed online report, the user can see a list of objects that exist for this property.

The following figure is a PDF that gets generated when a user requests an Intelligent Property Report.  One service returns the data for this PDF and another service formats the data and generates a PDF.  This way customers can call the data service if they wish to generate a similar report in a different format.

And this figure shows the geosearch functionality.  Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit.  For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.

And this figure shows the geosearch functionality.  Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit.  For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.

The figures below all represent ways that different customers used the same data as above.  They similar call the same services that IntelliReal uses internally and then they graph the data however they choose.  For example, you can see that this page shows a simple Google map for a property and a few details about the property.

Another vendor had their own mapping package to display the data on a map.  You can see they displayed an index, range for the property value and so forth.

As I mentioned above, IntelliReal displayed the market volatility data in a heat  map.  This customer wanted to graph the data for a specific property and then to put it into a table at the bottom.

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

In today’s blog entry I’m going to talk about our Agile SOA technology!

iPerspective

As I mentioned, iPerspective is our technology that enables our Agile SOA methodology.  iPerspective makes all of your data and business logic look like Web Services and Periscope makes all of your data look like it’s in an Oracle database.  In other words, both are virtualization technologies.  They make non-common platforms operate in a homogenous environment.

Periscope

Periscope is our technology that turns any service into a query.  In other words, you can query from a Web Service as if the data is coming from your database.

Imagine for a minute if you had the ability to write a query from a Web service.  I’m calling this “Service as a Query” or “Query from a Service” or “Query Service” for short…

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a query against a Web service from http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ that contains an operation called getBank.  The service contains a bank ID (biz).

select bankName, bankId, location, plz

from   thomas_bayer_bank_service

where biz = 20041133

Powerful, right?  Absolutely!  Or let’s say you want to query from http://www.abundanttech.com/ ”dead or alive” service and call the getTodaysBirthdays operation (that has no parameters):

select *

from   todays_birthdays

Or let’s say you used Yahoo Pipes to pull Oracle’s current stock price and then you want to query from a RESTful service to get this information - now:

select current_stock_price, link, details

from   yahoo_pipe_oracle

Or what if you want to query from Google:

select *

from   google

where  searchString = ‘Bradley D. Brown’

Web Services allow you to run a program on another server as if it’s on the same server.  You don’t need to know the operating system, the hardware platform, the programming language or much of anything about the source system.   You simply run the program on another server.  That’s what a Web Service is.  Just think about the power of being able to query from ANY data source as if that data is in your own database.  That’s what I’m calling a Query Service!

Rolta’s iPerspective product allows you quickly expose your existing business logic and data as Web Services.  As discussed below, iPerspective adds key features to your service deployment.  Rolta’s Periscope product gives you Query Service functionality right out of the box.  You can query from ANY Web Service with a simple SQL Query!  Imagine the power of this type of functionality.  Any product that uses a JDBC driver can now query from any Web Service as if the data is on the same system.  That’s powerful!

Differentiators

Here are some of the key iPerspective differentiators:

·                     Federated (i.e. cross DB) queries

–     Security

o   i.e. if you want put a digest, LDAP, single sign-on layer on top of services – with a button click

·                     All different bindings of the WSDL (i.e. old formats to new)

·                     Release management - Grouping of objects into different releases of services

·                     A repository of your services -

o   i.e. a pretty complete stack all in one

·                     Extended object support – we support a lot of things that JDev didn’t in the past – i.e. overloaded functions in a package, record types, and MANY, MANY more – basically any Oracle ERP package/API can be turned into a service

·                     Dynamic service - We have a service type that allows you to call it and pass in your SQL statement and we have security options that allow you to restrict what objects can be used and you can lock down the gateway or allow the service to accept this and you can pass in a federated query too

·                     Virtual private service - ability to provide access to a service that gives a customer only their data

·                     ApEx, Sensedia and UDDI support - We deploy our service repository to a number of other repositories

·                     RESTful services - with a click, you can make your release a RESTful release

·                     Auto deployment - we can deploy to 1 server or 100 at once

·                     Open Adaptor API – we have an open API for Security, Gateways. Code generation

Open Architecture Model for iPerspective

iPerspective is the middle man between your data or business logic and your consumers.  Data meaning databases, files, etc.  Business logic meaning code that you’ve already written.  By consumers I mean the things that will use your existing data and business logic.  Things like mashups or dashboards, workflow or BPEL processes, or applications that will integrate to other applications.

iPerspective is built on open technology and it’s an open architecture as well.  What does this mean for you?  If it’s built on open technology, why not just go out and download all of the open source technologies on your own?  Well, they have shortcomings and they are difficult to pull together.  We’ve done the hard work for you.  You might ask – what do you mean by an “open architecture?”  iPerspective provides open APIs to allow you to add new functionality to it.  If you want to interface to some data source that we don’t support today, it’s easy to do so.

iPerspective sits between the source data and business logic and the consumers…so it includes security.  iPerspective is flexible – it has an open architecture.  You can add your own data sources, gateways, code generators, security, etc.

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile soa

In today’s blog entry, I’d like to talk about our Agile SOA process - the BeTteR process!

 

 

The BeTteR Process

Our BeTteR process is an Agile SOA methodology…so let’s talk about that now.

TUSC’s SOA Guide: the BeTteR Methodology

This methodology reduces risk.   It also ends up taking far less time to get to your final solution.  It’s really a pretty simple, but effective approach.  Using our iPerspective technology, you develop services within minutes.  It’s literally as simple as exposing existing data or business logic or writing new business logic (i.e. courser granularity) or data logic (i.e. a SQL query or a view).  Using Agile and iPerspective, we build a service and then the end user can see what’s built using rapid prototyping and tools like Oracle Application Express or any service consuming product (there are MANY)…in other words, they get to “try” it out.  Then we revise the functionality based on the feedback loop…which results in building the new services and so on.  This FAST feedback loop accomplishes the goals on the left…

Build, then try, then get feedback and revise – quick turns.  This is only possible with iPerspective…no other way!

BeTteR process:

·                     Reduces risk

·                     Shorter time-to-solution

·                     Simple approach

·                     Built-in precision tuning

With iPerspective:

·                     Build services in minutes!

·                     Manage services

·                     Flexibly!

·                     Easily!

Flexible Deployment and Fast ROI

On the bottom of the figure below, you’ll see all of your applications, business logic and data throughout your organization.  On the top, you’ll notice those service consuming products – i.e. mashups, mobile applications, application to application integration, workflow processes, etc.  In the middle you have your services.  iPerspective exposes those existing assets as business services…

iPerspective provides for flexible deployment, which results in fast ROI

iPerspective is effectively a middleware.  It connects your applications to your consuming apps.  Mashups, app to app, or workflows…it creates Web Services…

TUSC: Your SOA Guide

With Agile SOA, you can create quick turns between your business and IT groups.  This positions you to provide efficiency, risk reduction, and corporate learning to your company.  We have a number of service offerings around SOA.  These start with what we call SOA Today and move up the chain from there.  iPerspective is our software solution that allows for these quick turns.  We would love to help you through your SOA journey – no matter where you are on that journey.  Some people are still trying to valid whether SOA is real – they might be trying to understand why there is value in SOA and we have customers who have been doing SOA for 5 years.  Let’s talk a little more about SOA Today…just in case you’re on the early part of the SOA learning curve.

We also have services wrapped around our technology.  We can start at education (SOA Today), a roadmap, an assessment, etc…we have a complete line of SOA services.

SOA can fight your fears and position you well for the economic recovery

·                     Efficiency

·                     Risk reduction

·                     Corporate learning

TUSC is your SOA Guide to success!

·                     SOA Today - Fast transformation to service-oriented IT

·                     SOA Maturity - Optimizing your enterprise operations

·                     iPerspective - Linking your services to your business needs

Gaining Early, Lasting Buy-in

SOA Today is our starting point for SOA.  It starts with the workshop that you see in the upper lefthand quarter.  This is where we talk about your requirements and what you’re trying to accomplish.  The next step is the bootcamp, which is where we apply the requirements to the principles of SOA.  From there we go into visioning – once you know your requirements and about the principles of SOA, we can work together to figure out the roapmap for your first release of services.  In the jumpstart we’ll develop 2-5 services after a comprehensive design and architecture review.  The process is iteriative, so it just keeps going from there…

Let’s talk about iPerspective more now.

This figure shows SOA Today and what it typically includes:

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

Yesterday’s blog entry was a great segway for Agile.  Let’s talk about the agile-based development methodology.  Keep in mind, Agile can be part of the entire cycle – not really just development.  In other words, it’s part of the design process, testing, everything.

Agile Provides QUICK Results

The advantage of Agile is that it provides quick results.  A release is a group of iterations.  An iteration is a short period in which you’ll complete an entire cycle of design to development.  Many things occur concurrently rather than in serial.  This is part of the power of Agile.  Additionally, the cycles are short.  Internally we initially did 1 week iterations.  We later moved from 1 week to 2 week iterations.  So every 2 weeks we’re determining which features we’re going to get into our product and at the end of the 2 weeks, we have an official release of the product.  We do bi-daily builds of the entire product.  If you break the build, you buy the donuts or bagels for the team!  One build is for the US developers and the other is for our team in India.  But…since we tend to be developing nearly 24×7, the builds are really for everyone – anything that’s checked in, gets built.  The build is automatically checked to make sure the primary functionality is working.  Good  builds are automatically deployed to all test servers.  Each day the test team gets to work on the latest and greatest build!  If you have a new feature that MUST make it into the product, how long will it be before you actually get to see it?  For us, it’s 4 weeks at the most…2 weeks at the least.  I guess technically it could be within 12 hour…i.e. in the next build.  With our Agile methodology, you can produce results quickly!  Agile is not for the weak or meek.  It will accentuate your flaws.

In the construction industry, we say we “stacked the deck” with contractors – i.e. when you bring in the drywall, paint, carpet and other trades in all on top of each other.  That is pretty much what Agile does too.  The product management team is determining the priorities (i.e. for specific stories) for the next iteration, while the design team is estimating stories in Small, Medium and Large (shirt size) chunks.  The teams then meet to determine which stories will be included in the iteration…and the process goes on from there.

If a develop runs out of things to do – there is a constant backlog of stories – i.e. what we should work on next, etc.  This is powerful!  You don’t see results like this in a waterfall project.

Again, quick iterations are key – there’s still design – unlike RAD or XP.  You’re stacking the deck like in contracting.

Agile is:

·                     Short iterations allow your customer to see what they are asking for quickly

·                     It does not imply a lack of design, rather it’s more like stacking the deck

·                     Agile provides a constant backlog of “ready to develop” tasks

The Agile Scrum

“Two Pillars” of Scrum

There are 2 pillars of the scrum - team empowerment and adaptability.  I’ve worked on projects where the project manager said “you have 16 hours to complete the task.”  And I’ve thought – huh?  That’s not possible…or there’s more than you think is here…or the more I dig, the more I find.  You can read the bullets here.  The beauty of this process is that you can adapt to changes when they occur.

Empowerment, changing with the business…that’s what Agile does…it does not fix the issues – it highlights them in a HUGE way!

Team empowerment

·                     Once teams are given work to do, they are responsible for figuring out how to do it.

·                     The team does the best it can during each increment.

·                     While a team works, their only interaction with management is to tell management what is getting in their way and needs to be removed to improve their productivity.

Adaptability

·                     Scrum uses “punctuated equilibrium”.

·                     The team maintains an equilibrium during each increment, insulated from outside disturbance.

·                     Increments are punctuated at the end of every sprint so that the team and management can evaluate what should be done during the next increment; this decision is based on what the team has accomplished and what the environment dictates is the next most important thing to do.

 Once Scrum is underway, teams and management find it easy to focus.  Every request is easily evaluated by, “What’s that got to do with delivering the code?”

Sprinting

I’ve provided a sample sprint planning meeting agenda below.  On the left, you can see how detailed the “chunks” of work are based on the stage it’s in.  For example, you will likely know chunks of items that you want to accomplish in the next release – for example, rework UI.  You might have huge undertaking that are past the next release – such as develop end user workbench.  From there, you can see that the closer the stories are to the current sprint, the smaller the items are.  For the current sprint, every task needs to be outlined – i.e. it must be VERY detailed!

This graphic shows how things go from concepts down to tasks.  But the design is constant.  We spend an entire day or 2 at the beginning of every iteration / sprint.

 Sample Sprint Agenda

·                     Opening, Welcome, Intros, Agenda

·                     Product Vision & Roadmap

·                     Development Status, Architecture, Previous Sprint

·                     Velocity In Previous Sprints

·                     Team – Availability and Capacity

·                     “Done” Review Definition

·                     Product Backlog:  Review and Select

·                     Tasking Out – Estimates – Ownership

·                     Challenges – Dependencies – Risks

·                     Review:  Capacity Required

·                     Review:  Risks & Mitigations

·                     COMMIT!

·                     Parking Lot, Action Items

·                     Close

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

We (Rolta) recently annouced a partnership with Rally.  Why?  Because Agile makes you more productive.  It will help you succeed!  One such press release was in Tech Rockies and all 201 press releases are available as well.  I thought I’d take some time to blog my thoughts about Agile over the next few blog entries.

In this series of blog entries, the goal is to help you, the reader understand why Agile SOA will make your efforts successful.  Service-orientation / SOA is not best done in a huge waterfall effort.  Long, big projects are killers especially in tough economic times.  The quicker you can show success, the quicker you’ll win those new projects, get more business, save money, or whatever your goals may be.  The Agile process allows for quick wins through quick turns.  Like in the retail business, quick turns are good!  Quick turns will give you quick feedback and allows you to change as your requirements come together or change.  It’s also important to know that our approach is a best of breed approach to SOA.  In other words, you don’t need to pick an entire technology stack day one – rather iPerspective gives you the necessary components of the stack to get you going today.

Agile is a development methodology that’s not RAD, not Extreme Programming (XP) or anything like that…it involves releases of the entire piece of software through iterations.  The whole idea is to allow the business to work with IT, to see the results, provide feedback, etc.  You see a couple of the important terms above – quick turns and quick feedback.  Traditional SOA has been done in a waterfall method – there’s no value in re-writing things for the sake of re-writing.  In other words, there’s no direct value in SOA – the value is in “x” – something else.  With SOA you get to re-use existing assets, but if you don’t need to reuse anything…it would be of no value. SOA might allow a company to do some new things – like mashups, application to application integration or a new workflow.

The ability to rapidly modify service offerings is becoming a key to success in today’s turbulent economy. Many companies are turning to SOA to help their business reduce development effort and achieve agility, but implementing SOA effectively has proved a daunting challenge all its own. How can today’s IT managers and CIOs realistically propose SOA and quickly deliver benefits without risking their jobs?

This series will explain why historic SOA implementations have failed, how you can benefit from innovative software that fundamentally transforms the complexity of implementing SOA to an “instant” task, and how an Agile, iterative approach can deliver rapid ROI for your business and ultimately lower total cost of ownership. In a time where budgets can be cut at a moment’s notice, this paper aims to ensure you derive value from your SOA initiatives in weeks and become the “hero” for your business.

Introduction

First let’s talk about our Agile SOA methodology and then will share some case studies on how organizations generate revenues quickly, get feedback from users, and ultimately save time and money.  Some people save money by using having rapid feedback with end users.  Others use it to quickly demonstrate what can be done with the services and then leave it to their B2B customers to develop their own UI when customers ask for functionality beyond their out of the box UI.  So they save money by not having to do the UI enhancements or workflow development themselves – rather they drove it out to their customers.

First background on SOA will be provided, we’ll talk about Agile and how it works, then we’ll talk about how you can use Agile and iPerspective to give you quick turns, which will result in quick wins.  This is our BeTteR process (build, try, retry)…so let’s get started.

Topics in this series include:

·                     Introduction to Service Orientation

·                     Agile, Agile, Agile

·                     Quick Turns (with iPerspective)

·                     BeTteR process

·                     Build, Try, Revise

In this entry, I’ll cover the Introduction to Service Orientation…

Slaying Daemons and Ghosts

We all have those daemons and ghosts that keep us up at night…hopefully not every night, but it happens once in a while.  What is that keeps you up at night?  I’ve been in business for myself since I was about 10 years old.  From delivering newspapers and collecting weekly to starting TUSC, which what was a $50M business in 2006.  I can assure you that cash flow became a concern when I was 10 – people didn’t answer their door when I rang the bell – for their $1.40 a week newspaper…and when you’re collecting $50M in revenue, DSO (days sales outstanding) increases.  Each day equates to $140k and at 10% interest, that’s a net cost of $14k in interest per DSO…that adds up to a lot of money in no time!  So if you can reduce your DSO, you’re making money!  Cash flow is a daemon for most every business.

Has your firm cut “fat” and then “muscle” and you’re now into the bone?  What’s next?  I’ve been there!  Everyone picks up more and more and everyone’s “happy” to have a job – as they say “it beats the alternative” – right?  It does, but the more you can do, the better off you’ll be.

Then there is the uncertainty and risk of it all.  When will we hit the bottom?  If we knew that, we could do a perfect pro-forma and figure out exactly what to cut and when…but it’s not that simple is it?  So how do you survive?  When will it turn?  Are we at the bottom now?  Obviously the more you can save and the faster you can save it…the longer you can hold out before you have to make any cuts.  The more you cut, the longer it will take you to recover.  The greatest time of opportunity is when the market recovers.  That’s when there is a shortage of firms in business and that’s when the profit margins are at their highest.  You’ll far exceed your losses in gains – but only if you survive.  So it’s a tightrope that we all balance.

The faster you can learn from your users, the more you stay ahead of things, the more you’ll be ahead of the curve.  How can you accomplish this?  Quick wins!  If you can support an Agile enterprise, it will streamline your enterprise.

How long does it take you from the time you have a great new idea until you actually see it?  With Agile, the maximum time is 2 times your iteration time.  Our iteration time is 2 weeks, so the maximum time is 4 weeks.  More about this shortly.

The bottom line is that long projects won’t fly when you’re trying to save money – quick wins are the key!

What keeps you up at night?

·                     Cash flow in a declining world economy?

·                     Efficiency: doing more after cutting into the “muscle?”

·                     Uncertainty and risk?

·                     Surviving until the recovery

Positioning for the recovery

·                     Learning faster, better -> ahead of the curve

·                     Infrastructure and processes to reliably support an agile, streamlined enterprise

Service-oriented Solutions

This is a quote from Gartner, #G00163409:

“Most midsize and large software projects target a service-oriented software model.  Service-oriented applications are modular, and the modules (services and clients) are loosely coupled, shareable and distributable, and are encapsulated behind separately documented programmatic interfaces. Support of such architecture requires a multifunctional, underlying application infrastructure technology often assembled by users from products of potentially different vendors. Some users prefer a best-of-breed approach to selecting their enabling technologies, although this approach requires users to act as system integrators (SIs) in assembling the end-to-end enabling platform for the project.”

In the past we were very technology oriented.  I’m sure you remember terms like “re-engineering” – it’s better to fit the business process into the technology – not really, but that’s what we thought at the time.  Companies moved to COTS (comes off the shelf) implementations because it was better for them to purchase software than it was for them to write it.  Sure, you might ask, who would write a database software package?  I can’t tell you how many order entry or ERP applications I wrote over my career.  People customized Oracle Applications to no end in the early days.  Then we learned that practice was a bad idea – most of us learned the hard way.  I was on a project in the early 90s where the ERP customization had been in progress for years.  When the next version of Oracle Apps came out, “customizations” killed everyone. 

Now we’re service-oriented.  Someone recently said to me “this SOA thing isn’t anything new.”  That’s true, it’s really not – someone else summed it up very well – “SOA is really just a bunch of best practices of best practices.”  In other words, just because you put an SOA in place doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up.  In my early SOA efforts, governance (i.e. operational excellence) wasn’t discussed, so we learned those best practices the hard way.  SOA can easily put components of the architecture right into the heartbeat of a company.  I recently talked to one of our DBAs who mentioned that a customer had all of their services running through one DB box that was processing 3500 transactions per second…therefore , they could afford ZERO downtime.  That’s risky!  I’d venture to say that’s not a best practice.  And they are an SOA shop…

Service orientation gives you an open API to your business, data, and business processes.  Platform independent, technology independent…i.e. we’re not technology oriented any more…

SOA provides you with an open standard API to your entire business.  That’s service-orientation!

Technology-oriented (then)

·                     Traditional business applications – “one-size-fits-all”

·                     Business processes created to utilize technology

·                     “Re-engineering”

Service-oriented (now)

·                     Standard information and process “services” that can be mixed and matched to solve business problems in a standard, reliable, flexible and efficient way

·                     Technology created to serve business purposes

·                     Business Intelligence, Business Process Management

Benefits of Service-Oriented IT

The benefits of service orientation are real.  Imagine having an open standard API for your entire business.  Any system can communicate with any other system – transparently.  So rather than moving and copying data throughout your organization, you can get the data from the system of record (single source of the truth) when you need it.  Traditionally we have replicated data throughout our organizations.  Copies of data everywhere – i.e. stale data throughout.  I was at a government facility the other day and they said – “we have access to yesterday’s information, but not today’s.”  They are making decisions about people’s lives with day old data!

Do you want to invent the wheel?  Do you want to re-write your systems?  Of course not.  You have years of development in your existing business logic.  In fact, in many organizations the person who wrote the original code has been gone for 10 years now.  It’s a black box.  Or…you might have a packaged application (i.e. COTS) that you don’t have the source code for.  And nearly every COTS provider makes it clear that if you modify their source code, you won’t be supported.  They also make it clear that if you put data into their database without going through their APIs, you will not be supported. 

Well the good news is that unlike historical architectures that required a re-write to migrate to them, SOA allows you to re-use your existing data and business logic – i.e. wrap it.  This is a first!

This sounds like a great concept, but as you study SOA, you’ll quick say that you don’t want to expose everything you have today as a service – i.e. programs are too granular (i.e. fine grained) to be useful in their raw form.  Composite services allow you to combine services into a larger (i.e. course grain) service.  BPEL processes allow you to orchestrate services – i.e. put workflow around services – even granular services via RMI (which is fast).  The bottom line is that some people refer to the reuse of your existing logic as “Legacy modernization.”  Clearly this is efficiency for your organization.  The benefits of legacy moderation are that you’ll have no new spend for these services, no new training  is required ($, comfort, user error – i.e. you get to program in whatever core competency you have today); and it will meet your regulatory requirements.

If you implement a service orientation using Agile, you’re able to accommodate changes quickly!  If you remember programming 101, it’s best to make one change, then test it out fully rather than changing 20 things and trying to get your program to work.  Well SOA is the same way – rather than developing 20 services at once, you can use Agile with short iterations and releases. 

Wouldn’t it also be able to build services as you prioritize them – i.e. as the business is changing?  It’s similar to Just in Time (JIT) inventory.  This is Just in Time Web Services!

If you can put some predictability in your service orientation efforts, you’ll be able to ultimately reduce your risk.  It’s pretty simple really!  This strategy will position you for the recovery by building your corporate knowledge one service at a time…not literally one service per iteration, but you get the idea.  This provides for continuous improvement.  Services will be used and re-used!  This process encourages and support information sharing!

Reuse of assets is pretty cool and Agile makes it fast to see the results.

Consistency across enterprise

·                     Single source of truth

·                     Reuse and efficiency

·                     “Legacy modernization”

·                     Agile – accommodates change

·                     One vs. many access points

·                     Predictability -> reduce risk!

Position for the recovery by building corporate knowledge

·                     Continuous improvement based on multi-use

·                     Encourages and supports information sharing

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

There are a lot of components to a complete SOA stack.  The good news is that you don‘t have to build your entire stack day one!  You likely already have your computing and network components.  You likely already have your business applications.  SOA gets built around everything you have today – even the existing services.  SOA is an architecture, not a product you buy.  We have more information on the stack, building the stack, governance, and more…so if you‘re interested in learning more about the stack and how these things fit together, please send us an email or give us a call – we would be happy to talk to you more about this.

The good news is iPerspective either fits into an existing stack or we give you a complete stack…it‘s your call.

The SOA Train is Here!

Gartner has something they call the hype cycle.  It’s a cycle that they say every new technology goes through.  People get excited about new technology very quickly.  Take Twitter for example – I’m thinking it has to be at the top of the hype cycle – and will soon crash.  Once people get beyond the hype and get back to reality, the technology tends to hit a new low, then slowly rebuilds.  Depending on what part of the curve you’re comfortable implementing a new technology will depend on your interest in SOA or any other technology.   If you’re an early adaptor, you missed the curve for SOA…but cloud computing might be more up your alley right now.  SOA has passed the hype cycle and is into the safe zone.  So at this point you’re not an early adaptor – nor a late adaptor.  Just like Goldilocks said in the “3 Little Bears” said – “this bed is just right…”  You time might be now.

Internal sales – we’re past the early adaptor stage – it’s time for others now…

SOA Utilization

IDC took a look at services within organizations that were using SOA to figure out what categories their services fell into.  If we focus on a few service categories, we quickly notice that 58% of the services either wrap an existing interface, query or update data or perform data transformation.  We’re going to come back to our technology that supports our methodology in a minute, but the circled categories are easily created using iPerspective (our technology).  You’ll get to see more about this in a minute.

The circled ways companies are using services are what iPerspective does immediately.  It’s 58% of the picture out of the box.  We have other things like security services, we can do such as event notification, etc.

SOA Is Alive and Well!

The Burton group did a great job of exciting the SOA world and creating viral hype for the community by saying SOA is dead – brilliant!  But…it’s not dead.  Long live services – but monolithic, top-down, waterfall SOA projects…yes, those are dead.  Who can afford to wait 2 years to see the results of something you start today?  Nobody can.  The business changes far too much in 2 years.  In times like today, 2 months is too long!

As I discussed above, legacy modernization – i.e. using your existing assets is key.  There is a shortage of skills and talent within most every organization today.  Most adaptors of SOA said this was a challenge to support a HUGE SOA initiative.  Again, our technology that backs up our methodology, iPerspective, answers that challenge by automatically taking care of complexity and removing the need to know new programming languages and paradigms in order to exploit the advantages of SOA.

SOA is not dead, but as I mentioned above, SOA doesn’t give you ROI…and services are alive – just not the big stuff…

Monolithic, tops-down, waterfall approaches have not worked:

·                     Multi-year

·                     No significant ROI

·                     Cultural turmoil

Burton Group: SOA is dead!?

·                     According to Burton Group in 2008, SOA initiatives have stalled out in some cases:

o   The techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration — which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?”

·                     No! Service-oriented is very much alive!!

·                     iPerspective automates and requires no new skills!

Comparison of SOA Approaches

The TUSC approach or methodology empowers rich customer interactions through Agile SOA

We believe that

·                     SOA should be delivered in days, not months or years.

·                     Agility is the ability to be flexible, quickly – this is critical in both your approach and technology benefits

·                     Simplicity and delivering rapid value are paramount

·                     There is a better way to deliver SOA Today.

·                     Traditional and technology-oriented approaches take too long, require the business to wait as it changes, lacks agility, etc.  Agile is by far the most productive development methodology I’ve ever experienced.  We use it for all of our internal product development.

Our approach is iterative, small projects, quick ROI…

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

As I look into the future of SOA and WOA, numerous applications are still waiting for you to build them. If you’re looking for an opportunity to innovate and build a SaaS or Cloud offering for the world, I’d recommend you think about a SOA / WOA application that communicates with everything else in the world. Today this is SO easy to do too!

When I started studying the static pages of the Web in 1994, I immediately saw an opportunity to build pages dynamically. Originally this was called CGI programming. I immediately started developing dynamic Web applications and talked about how this was going to change the world. That people were actually going to build “Transactive Content” applications and that people would make millions doing so. Amazon is a great case-in-point.

After developing my first Web applications, I needed data from other Web applications, so I turned to scraping HTML data, turning it into XML and getting my needed data from other sites. At that point, I knew that system-to-system integration and sharing of data was going to become important to our future…which clearly it was.

I began talking about dynamic XML, which quickly evolved into Web Services as we know them today. SOAP (i.e. SOA) is sometimes a little heavier than “need be” so RESTful services (i.e. WOA) is ideal for AJAX-based client applications and the like.

When I started talking about Web Services (in about 2003), I discussed a number of applications that could be built that could revolutionize the world as we know it. Companies like Facebook have capitalized on the concepts I’ve been discussing for years now.

As I mentioned, building applications that talk to other applications is so simple today. Products like Rolta TUSC’s iPerspective make it easy to expose your existing data and business logic as SOAP Web Services or RESTful Web Services. Imagine the power of building an application and instantly being able to expose your entire application through an open standard API (i.e. Web Services).

The beauty of application-to-application integration is that if you build an application and connect it to the world, people can use your unique IP however they wish to use it. If you create a flexible or dynamic open API, your customers will be able to get the data they want, when they want it, how they want it. It also allows you to focus on your core skills and allow others to focus on their core skills.

So, stop, take some time to think about the application you’ve been dreaming of…it’s possible today! The application that I talked about some years ago Orbitz has capitalized on - booking flights, hotel, cars, all on one system. I took it a few steps further in my presentations in 2003, but for intensive purposes - they have an application that does a lot. But not this far. Imagine if you built this 2003…why not build it today? I’ll use it!

Imagine this…

Let’s say you want to build an integrated travel and scheduling application. As I mentioned, there are plenty of travel companies out there already. There are also plenty of scheduling applications as well.

Here’s a use case. Let’s say that I’d like to make a business trip to TUSC’s Chicago office. I would need to book a flight, rent a car, book hotel(s), and then I’d like to make appointments with “key” customers.

As you know, you can arrange the flight, car and hotel through one service (e.g. Orbitz)…so where’s the value? Well…what about the “rules” of your travel? How about “scheduling” your days of the trip?

Imagine an application where using your online assistant, you could begin by defining the initial rules for your travel preferences. Your “assistant” is external to your company of course. Let’s say that I would like to make the trip in the next month and I would like to spend the least number of days possible (2 minimum to 4 maximum) and visit the most customers possible. The application allows me to predefine numerous rules in my profile - just like you would communicate to your assistant.

Rules such as detailed hotel, airline and car rental preferences, how long a customer visit takes on average (e.g. 2-3 hours), meeting invitation / letter to customers and prospects, spend the least amount of time in a city possible, arrange appointments around dates that offer the least amount of money on flights, hotel and car rental possible, start as early as 6am and end as late as midnight and so on. Again - this is what my assistant already knows about me - so why not automate these rules?

Now - what about those key customers? As you know, your hosted / SaaS CRM application already contains this information. You might also need data from your ERP application to determine “key” customers. But in an open API world, it’s very easy for us to integrate all of these applications. In my rules, I might define that “key” customers should be ranked by revenue or longevity or whatever criteria I wish to use for this trip.

Using my integrated application, calendar invitations (this is an open standard today) are automatically sent to customers and prospects. Customers then accept (or reject) the invitations - which are not for a specific date - just “will they meet with me for 2-3 hours?”

After this initial invitation is sent, 8 people accept my offer. We know the address of each of our customers, so schedules are calculated based on drive time, 2-3 hour meeting time, availability of people, etc. It turns out that in the next 4 weeks, only 2 of the weeks will work based on everyone’s schedules – the block of time required (3 days – M-W, T-R, W-F)
Flight, hotel and car rates for the available blocks of dates are gathered based on preferences and wala, a trip date is selected! All automatically!!!

Everyone’s calendars are updated (my calendar, my wife’s calendar, my assistant, the 8 appointments and the people they want at the meeting). The reservations are booked - including the hotel (2 different hotels), car, and airline.

As the trip date approaches, schedules are automatically adjusted and confirmations are sent at key points in the process (based on people’s profiles).

My iPhone contains all of his travel information of course. When I arrive in Chicago and pick up my Hertz Gold service, my car’s NeverLost is loaded with each address for the day. Traffic information is also communicated to select the fastest route to my destinations. As I drive to my first customer visit, On the way, I’m read (i.e. text to speech) updates about the customer – recent transactions with customer, problems, emails, etc.

My hotel for the evening required no cancellation fee and a last minute rate became available. The hotel changed on the fly. My iPhone calendar is updated and car directions are updated. My spouse and assistant were notified of change too.

As can be expected, one customer cancelled, so a new prospect was invited and accepted – everything was updated once again. When any meetings are finished early the car noticed, customers were contacted to move appointments up when possible.

At the end of my trip, I ended up finishing the 3 day trip 4 hours early, so my flight was automatically changed to standby for the earlier flight. I got home 4 hours earlier than I originally planned, which my wife knew about because she was kept up-to-date by my “assistant.”

Is this dreaming? In 2003 people thought I was dreaming when I explained that all of this is possible with Web Services. Today it’s absolutely considerably easier than it was then.

My point? Dream - think of an application and build it! Don’t re-invent the wheel. There’s no need to do so now that SOA and WOA can help you integrate what already exists. Build an integration platform…why not?

Bradley D. Brown ajax, collaboration, rest, soa Insights SOA WOA iPerspective TUSC SaaS Cloud

As promised, today I’m covering SLATES from my Web 2.0 article.

SLATES is an acronym that Oracle has publicized and readily discussed. It stands for the components that make up an Enterprise Web 2.0 application. SLATES stands for Searching, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions and Signaling, as discussed in this section.

Search
Search functionality is something that Oracle has been providing for years. Today it’s called Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, but it was originally known as Oracle Ultra Search. It is a robust search engine for data files, your Web applications, email and more. When it comes to executing searches (i.e. queries) against a relational database, Oracle has always been king. For years, Oracle provided functionality to search large character objects (CLOBS) as an add-on product called Oracle interMedia. However, as of Oracle 9i, this functionality was embedded into the Oracle database and is now called Oracle Text. If you’re hoping to search data spatially, Oracle historically provided this functionality as a separate license too, but as of Oracle 10g, it’s embedded into the standard edition and is called Oracle Locator.

In other words, using all of the available search features of the Oracle database (and Oracle Enterprise Search), you’ll be able to provide powerful search functionality in your Web 2.0 application. Other search choices include using a hosted solution such as Google or Master.com. You can also purchase a Google Search Appliance, FAST or Verity to provide this functionality for your application.

Links
Helping users maximize their efficiency is key to a Web 2.0 application. By tracking what “links” users click on and use, the application can figure out the relevancy or popularity of application components. This capability allows the application to automatically be user-usage customized. By learning about what people use (i.e. aggregating this information) and customizing the look and feel of the application based on usage, users should have better user interface (UI) experiences. Tracking performance at the component level will also help triage your database administration focus.

Oracle’s content tracker will manage this process for you. Tools such as Oracle Application Express (discussed below) have usage tracking built into the applications.

Authorship
The ability to take notes and discuss topics in your application are important functions for a successful Web 2.0 application. Numerous open source offerings will fill this need. Depending on the application, you may find it as simple as storing information about records in your database. For IntelliReal (www.intellireal.com), users have the ability to blog their comments about any property in the United States. This information is stored in the database in a simple table structure. Users can indicate whether their comments are only available for their eyes, available to everyone in their company or available to the public. Hosted applications such as BlogSpot (http://bradleydbrown.blogspot.com/) are also available for your applications.

Another great source of authoring functionality lies with a wiki server - another open source offering (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki). If you’re not familiar with a wiki, according to the most successful wiki, WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia), the definition is: “A wiki is a medium which can be edited by anyone with access to it, and provides an easy method for linking from one page to another. Wikis are typically collaborative websites, though there are now also single-user offline implementations. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.”

Yet another way to think about authorship is that it’s similar to the Oracle discussion forum functionality. Oracle provides a free Oracle Application Express (Apex) forum application on the Apex Web site (http://apex.oracle.com/).

Tagging
Automated categorization of application data and content through rules and intelligent algorithms is another important component for a Web 2.0 application. If you haven’t looked at Google Mail’s tagging or content categorization, you’ll want to do so. The ability to easily group things together, provides for a whole new level of application.

Extensions
Providing a flexible architecture that can grow into Web 3.0 is going to be key. The ability for you to seamlessly extend your application via extensions provides for a composite application that to a user will appear as if you developed it completely on your own.

In this section, we’ll discuss Web Services, REST, BPEL, SOA, Mashups and Portals so that you’re familiar with a variety of Web 2.0 extensions that are available.

The Service Oriented Architecture is a message-based architecture that uses a number of message types to accomplish its goals. As you’ll soon understand, Web Services and REST are basic units of message communication, and BPEL adds a workflow layer to your messages. We’ll discuss SOA last since it’s a combination of the other components. The foundation for this section is built using Web Services or REST components.

Web Services
Web Services can be described as the ability to provide machine to machine interaction over a network. “Web” refers to the network. “Services” are programs or function that you probably already have and are using in your business. In other words, Web Services provide you with the ability to run a program that exists on another server as if that program is on the server executing the program. This capability allows one machine to communicate with another machine – i.e. system-to-system integration. Web Services can be executed in a closed network (i.e. intranet) or open network (i.e. over the Internet). Using Web Services provides internal and external application integration. If you’re interested in more uses of Web Services for internal and/or external integration, please see the references at the end of the paper.

Web Services can be used for activities including:

• Extracting real-time or historical weather, traffic, stock quotes and currency rates
• Gathering search engine data from Google
• Looking up property values, comparable property details and more from IntelliReal, Zillow, etc.
• Verifying and charging credit cards
• Looking up and ordering books or other items from Amazon
• Performing D&B credit checks
• Mapping data points using MapQuest, Google, Yahoo and Virtual Earth; retrieving lat/longs and driving directions
• Performing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) activities – add new prospects, etc.
• Using Electronic Directory Assistance
• Performing calendar scheduling and management

Web Services allow one business to transparently use functions from another business as if everything is owned by them. The Terabitz site discussed previously (http://www.terabitz.com/) is an excellent example of a site employing Web Services. And I also have another white paper (Internal and External Application Integration through Web Services) that discusses how IntelliReal (http://www.intellireal.com/) employs Web Services (another excellent example of the use of Web Services).

If the Web Services are deployed on Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Or
acle Web Services Manager allows you to remotely monitor and manage your Web Services. While Identity Management has typically been focused on securing and managing user-to-application interactions, most organizations also need to manage interactions between the applications themselves. Web services provide a simple, standardized way to connect applications over the Internet, but they require management of security and other runtime operations to work effectively. Oracle Web Services Manager—a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products—is a software solution for managing the operations of Web services and the interactions between these services.

For more information on Web services, see the reference section at the end of this paper.

REST
As defined by Wikipedia, “Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding in 2000,[1] one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification. It has since come into widespread use in the networking community.”

Think of REST as a simplified method of calling Web Services using a URL (i.e. GET and POST methods). Many vendors provide REST solutions on top of their Web Services. We sometimes refer to these as “servlets” that call the Web Services and return a simplified data type – i.e. a PDF or simple object.

SOA
As defined by Wikipedia, “Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural design pattern that concerns itself with defining loosely-coupled relationships between producers and consumers. It has no direct relationship with software, programming or technology by any means, however, is often confused with an evolution of distributed computing and modular programming.”

Oracle SOA Suite is a complete set of service infrastructure components for building, deploying and managing SOAs. Oracle SOA Suite enables services to be created, managed and orchestrated into composite applications and business processes. With Oracle SOA Suite’s hot-pluggable components, organizations can easily extend and evolve their architectures instead of replacing existing investments.

Oracle’s SOA suite components include:

• Oracle JDeveloper 10g
• Oracle Business Rules
• Oracle BPEL Process Manager
• Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
• Oracle Web Services Manager
• Oracle Enterprise Service Bus

BPEL
Again, according to WikiPedia, “Business Process Execution Language (or BPEL, pronounced ‘bipple’, ‘bepple’ or ‘bee-pell’), is a business process modeling language that is executable. The origins of BPEL can be traced to WSFL and XLANG. It is serialized in XML and aims to enable programming in the large. The concepts of programming in the large and programming in the small distinguish between two aspects of writing the type of long-running asynchronous processes that one typically sees in business processes.”

BPEL is emerging as the standard for assembling a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow, radically reducing the cost and complexity of process integration initiatives. Oracle BPEL Process Manager offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use infrastructure for creating, deploying and managing BPEL business processes.

BAM
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM) is a complete solution for building interactive, real-time dashboards and proactive alerts for monitoring business processes and services. Oracle BAM gives business executives and operation managers the information they need to make better business decisions and take corrective action if the business environment changes.

The benefits of BAM include:

• Rich, visual dashboards — Highly-visual dashboards present information in real-time through a completely thin, browser-based client
• Powerful, real-time analytics — Process and analyze event data using advanced complex event processing technology
• Built for business users — Business users can personalize dashboards and build their own reports and alerts with near-zero coding

Composite Applications and Mashups
A composite application or mashup is a Web application that combines data (i.e. from Web Services) from more than one source into a single integrated tool.

Many mashups exist that use Web services from Google, eBay, Amazon, Zillow, etc. Yahoo Real Estate provides a mashup of property values from Zillow, eAppraisal and Reply!

Signaling
Signaling will provide your users with the ability to be alerted based on specific conditions that are met. IntelliReal users can be alerted based on properties that meet specific conditions. For example, any time a property is updated (you might want to watch your own home’s information), is listed on the MLS market (you might like watching homes in your neighborhood to see who’s listed their property), is listed by owner (if you’re a realtor, you might want to contact the for-sale-by-owners), is sold (you put an offer and it was rejected), the list price is decreased (you’re waiting for them to lower the price), has a MLS list price less than the actual value of the house (in the event that you’re a fix and flipper) and more. These alerts are all driven through database queries that use UTL_SMTP to send emails to customers. There are many methods that can be used to alert your users.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication also provides an excellent method of letting users know when relevant content changes within your Web 2.0 application. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a ‘feed,’ ‘web feed,’ or ‘channel,’ contains either a summary of content from an associated Web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite Web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. RSS content can be read using software called an ‘RSS reader,’ ‘feed reader’ or an ‘aggregator.’ The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.”

Bradley D. Brown Links, authorship, bam, bpel, extensions, mashups, rest, search, signaling, slates, soa, tagging, web services