Open Source Census

Open source census.  Built with JRuby.  Don’t make my mistake and download from the homepage – comes bundled with Ruby and JRE (30+Mb).  The actual app is a measly 0.3Mb (assuming you have Ruby and JRE installed).  Still scanning as I write this

Links for 18/12/08

OSS in the UK

Matt Asay, whilst recognising the UK lags Germany and France on OSS, highlights Pentaho perhaps being taken into the NHS.

Matt also links to a podcast with a big company IT exec from the UK.  The conversation is interesting, but the revealing item with which I concur, is the strength of MS in the downturn – they are pervasive in the UK, and I suspect in-house IT teams haven’t the skills nor the appetite to change.

I worry that this will put UK plc at a strategic and productivity disadvantage with our continental neighbours.

They also predict the downfall of Ruby in 2009 – I don’t share this view.

Indeterminate process

The recent $4m series-A funding of Appcelerator, Larry Augustin is an investor and Mark Fleury an advisor, introduced me to RIA + SOA != MVC.

This caused me to think about fuzzy processes, the ones followed by knowledge workers, where there are clear start and finish points, but what happens in the middle might not be so transparent [I'm not sure if this is exactly what the indeterminate process is and the web has few references on this concept].

Since web resources provide links in their responses do we not have everything needed for processes to build themselves automatically?  The nearest analogy I can think of is chess.  We know when we start and finish, so the instance of a chess game is easy to capture, but we can’t be sure of what happens in the middle.  This is different to designing a chess game ‘happy-path’  before hand.

Intalio Business Edition

Good early review by James Taylor on the changes to Intalio’s BPM offerings.

BPM the new frontier for FLOSS

Extract from the Open World Forum Roadmap 2002, p61:

“Recommendation #11
BPM/Management will be the new frontier in FLOSS applications.
Beyond infrastructures and even ERP, the management of the mashup IT and business services of tomorrow will be key to the future. Large communities must develop key initiatives, to build open foundations for these tools, around large multi-vendor communities such as Apache and OW2.”

The new frontier?  Or a new frontier?

Anyway, checkout open source BPM group on LinkedIn!

Open World Forum

I missed it, although I wished I could have attended, because Open World Forum incorporating the 2nd Qualipso conference had some great speakers and sessions and was taking place in a wonderful town.

OWF have published a 2020 Floss Roadmap.

Paris feels like it is gaining real traction as a centre of excellence for open source software development and leadership.

Not only are there numerous OSS conferences taking place there each year, there are some very well known commercial OSS projects based there, such as Talend and the OW2 Consortium.  Interesting to map this network as it continues to evolve.

The political centre of gravity clearly extends to Belgium where the European Union are strongly pro OSS and, unlike the pointless UK government, actually seem able to turn words into tangible action.  And whilst thinking of Belgium, Devoxx taking place this week in another great town – Antwerp, has Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo on JRuby, Migual Valdes Faura on the PVM, Paul Sandoz on JAX-RS, Stefan Tilkov on RESTful design, as well as Christina Lau on BPM 2.0 (who I mentioned yesterday).

Lots of reasons to be based in Continental Europe just now if you want to forge a career in OSS.

BPM 2.0

I’ve mentioned REST-based BPM frequently on this blog and was able to express my ‘frustrations’ at IntalioCon earlier this year.

But, there is movement in the market, and after a 3+ month gap in her blog posts, Christina Lau is presenting IBM’s take on BPM 2.0.

‘To build a true BPM as a Service ecosystem that leverages the web and provides value to business and IT, many services must be made available through REST‘

REST track at QCon was widely reported, Random Stuff has the main links and WorldWideWebber was blogging real time.

The madgreek recently posted a good piece on open source SOA.

There has been recent debate about BPEL on the blogs.  BPEL is a tool for WS-* orchestration for enterprise integration.  The realm of the enterprise architect.  But BPM isn’t software engineering.

I continue to be excited about BPM and REST-based services.  The use of links that kinda auto-magically determine the process trajectory at run-time rather than being coded into the process before hand is, I think, a new dimension to what we are currently doing with BPMS.

On-demand needing a change in mind-set

I’ve been working over the last few days with a couple of relative newcomers to the on-demand application software space.  One is bpm and the other webforms.  Of course on-demand software isn’t anything new per-se and we all use it everyday.  The Google search engine is, after all, an on-demand service.

However, my use of these two applications, and the need to get the two to work together, has caused me to  take stock of my understanding of the space.  I know this is going to sound dumb, but I was both surprised and slow to realise the significance of httpfox telling me about the POST requests being made each time I completed a field on my first hosted webform (which was embedded into another web page).  It just hadn’t occurred to me that the data was going back to the form provider!

I guess this was because in my mind I was using form design and provisioning services not data management services.  I didn’t want or need the form vendor to have the data – that needs to go to the bpm provider – but only temporarily, since the bpm service will route it to a persistence service.

So, I now have a few possible routes I can take.  The first is download the form code (if that service is provided).  This means I’m using a form design service.  Since I’d not ever need to persist the form with the service this is something that I could use for gratis within my 3 form limit.  But not much of a paradigm shift for software.

The second is to POST the data back to the form provider and then in turn POST to the bpm.  However, this is going to be a bit tricky.  The bpm service, whilst Atom based, doesn’t offer a documented REST api, and then there are the difficulties with authorisation that I fear haven’t really been worked through.  And I’m not sure the webform vendor is geared to this.

The bpm service provides a simple field in which to paste html/javascript to create basic webforms (inline CSS etc) and has a webforms designer on its route map.  But why?  I want to use the best in breed services available to build out my processes, I don’t want a closely coupled integrated stack of ‘jack of all trades’.  I want loose coupled, composite on-demand service based processes and service providers who are prepared to help me get there.

On-demand webforms:

Formdesk / FormLogix / FormSpring / Frevvo / Icebrrg / Wufoo / jotForm / Sidewalk / The Blue Form / The Form Assembly

On-demand bpm:

Cordys and here /  Appian / RunMyProcess / Skemma / Lombardi / Intalio / ProcessMaker / Eccentex / Integrify / Pega /

Intalio Developer Edition

Spent yesterday evening at the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London with Arnaud and the guys from Intalio getting the score on their release schedule.  They are doing a whistle-stop tour of briefings in major European cities, so having been over to IntalioCon in June I thought I would make the shorter journey to London to catch-up.

The most interesting development from my perspective were the intentions around Intalio Developer Edition.  This is a pure open source play which will enhance Intalio’s credentials in the OSS arena.

The stack builds up from the foundation of the Apache ODE bpm server.  Instead of Tempo, workflow utilises Singleshot as the task manager.  Singleshot is a Ruby app.  Above ODE and Singleshot is SimPEL, a scripting language for coding BPEL.

Intalio plan to develop bindings for this stack to perform with a number of languages.  The first release will liekly have support for PHP, Ruby and Java.  If I can make a distinction between enterprisey and web 2.0, I think this is going to take BPM to a new cadre of developers.

Once something firmer is released I’ll have a worthy topic of interest to take to ncl.rb.

Oryx

Yesterday I noted bxModeller.  Oryx is another new entrant in the on-demand, collaborative BPMN editor market.  Looks very slick, but haven’t used the tool.  Doesn’t appear to support XPDL and they are working on BPMN – BPEL translation.

I’m working on a BPMN training course just now and Oryx would provide a nice way to get the attendees modeling without having to take the time and trouble of loading software onto delegates PCs.