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Posted on Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:02 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]
Best open source developer tools - Drools - Business Rules Management System.
Best open source plaforms and middleware - JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform - ESB.
Posted on Mon, 4 Aug 2008 17:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:27 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:12 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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The JBoss SOA early adopter Swedish Railroad has been blogged about here earlier. Matt Asay picks up on this deployment more recently here.
Additionally, I presented Open Source SOA Value and Strategy at Red Hat Summit and SOA World in late June. CIO e-magazine picked up on the Swedish RR example and other current status of open source SOA and future projections here. In particular, we see the convergence of EAI, SOA, BPM, EDA and CEP into a set of integration styles that may be implemented using a common platform - the 2nd generation ESB or SOA Platform. A flexible platform like this is a more cost effective and simpler (reduced to no need for separate architectural bases for EAI, SOA, EDA, BPM, etc...) way to implement an agile IT and enterprise in the future.
Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 16:04 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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I met Bruno when he was a customer of JBoss, Inc. back in 2005 at JBossWorld Barcelona (Spain). As a customer, he was a leader in adopting open source for high value SOA projects. As a colleague at Red Hat, I continue to enjoy working with him. Presented below is an interview with his perspective as a user/customer of open source for SOA.
Bruno Georges was Enterprise Architect and Head Of Development for a privately held, major global company in the Oil & Energy industry, of over 10,000 employees with over 140 billion dollars in yearly revenue. Today, as a senior technical manager at JBoss, a Division of Red Hat, Bruno Georges offers some insight into real-life business factors that cause CIO's to choose JBoss.
Q: Bruno, what was the business need for the project. Why change at all?
The majority of our IT budget was spent in maintenance, rather than investing in added value. The primary challenge was raised during a global meeting we held on SOA adoption. Growing complexity resulting from integrations meant budget spent in re-wiring and maintaining multiple source of “business knowledge / business rules” and corporate processes. We were suffering from duplication of these processes, and running the risk of accidentally not updating one of them. It was getting too dangerous: we urgently needed to reduce time to market, decrease risk through exposure, and protect ourselves from wrong financial reports and statements.
Q: What kind of new services were needed?
Integration Services really, ensuring that services were decoupled from each others, with well-defined boundaries. The integration service needed to take responsibility for validation, routing, transformation, and enrichment,etc.. before forwarding this to our core business services, for example, accounting, treasury, trades, etc.
The company's core applications and systems relies partly on Enterprise Java. These applications rely on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) , where coarse grain interfaces to Accounting, Treasury and Commodity Trading systems can be invoked over the network.
The business challenge revolved around migrating these Core Business Services from one Enterprise Java platform to another without any noticeable downtime, loss of performance, assuring data integrity and more importantly, without affecting financial transactions like trading activities, currency hedging, etc. Other business challenges included planning, where it was crucial to run the migration project without disrupting any existing deliverables.
Technical challenges were encountered during the planning of the migration, such as managing the dependencies of the services to migrate, based on whether or not they were using vendor-specific features. The aim of the migration was that it should bring equivalent - if not better - performance, quality and stability.
Q: Was there a particular desire to employ open source technology? If so, why?
We initially identified that we needed to implement our S.O.A. plan at the lowest cost, and with minimum risk. Then the question was raised of whether to use alternatives to commercial products to follow our SOA initiatives with minimum risk and expenditure. It was from identifying these specific requirements that we decided to seriously assess open sources alternatives such as JBoss.
Total Cost of Ownership was a main concern. Moving to a company-wide SOA implementation based on proprietary solutions (i.e WebLogic) would have reached 7 digits, especially considering that we were in the middle of a hardware refresh cycle, moving away from 1-2 CPU machines to 8 core Sun boxes.
Q: How did the project happen in terms of actually getting it underway?
First I arranged a meeting with (JBoss CTO) Sacha Labourey to discuss how we could approach this. We then decided to go ahead with JBoss's 3-Day Assessment offer. From this point we decided to further extend the assessment to come up with a more accurate picture of the resource and planning involved. In the meantime we also assessed local providers and partners like HP and Syseca to identify who could lead the migration and support us afterwards.
We hired JBoss professionals and Red Hat Partner Syseca to support us during the migration. Careful planning and regular reviews were conducted to prevent any issues and conflicts with existing projects or deliverables. Few internal resources were involved to reduce impact on daily activities and existing projects.
The Services forming our SOA have been migrated in 2 steps, the first one being a small and fairly low risk application, so we could give our engineering and operations some production experience and start building a new support and monitoring infrastructure using JBoss ON.
Technical issues were addressed directly with JBoss using the Customer Support Portal. We were really impressed to see JBoss's leading developer and guru Scott Stark getting involved when things got difficult.
Q: Why was JBoss technology considered?
The maturity of the product was important. and of course, the low price! But other things were especially important, too - like the local and global availability of JBoss expertise (Partner: Syseca), Because I was working for such a huge company, Red Hat's global presence was critical.
Q: What solution was finally decided on? Did this result in any savings? Any efficiency advantages?
The vendor selected was JBoss, due to its impressive market share, product quality and support offering, of which there is no equivalent in the open source application server landscape.
JBoss Enterprise Middleware provided a consistent open source platform and choice of tools to build our new infrastructure and applications. Also it offers a comprehensive set of products and a clear roadmap to support our SOA and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) initiatives.
Q: How long did the project take to deploy?
There were two phases: the first one took three months, and the second and final phase was completed six months later.
Q: What was the most interesting aspect of the project, from a business point of view?
There were many examples, but one thing I especially noticed was time-to-market in an M&A situation. For example, we could now - and did - integrate very quickly with a company which had totally different accounting systems and technical / developer resources. The time-to-market to integrate two totally different platforms (.Net and Java) was dramatically reduced by the use of simple industry standards. What's more, we were able to confirm and validate the in-built functionalities and logic as we progressed. Validation of these milestones was even built into our migration contract, in order to contain, measure and insure against any business risk. This could then be prototyped with minimal effort and in less than one day. Unbelievable! No change was needed in our application/ implementation, or within the infrastructure, and the protection of the existing investment allowed full re-usability of existing infrastructure and resources. To be specific, we did not alter existing IT landscapes, hardware, or business processes, which was great. Another example is where jBPM helped us to reduce the development life-cycle, and allow business analysts to interact with the developers at the “right level”. i.e, the process definition.
Q: How did the JBoss solution improve the business bottom-line?
The great thing about an SOA project is that it brings business stake-holders together to agree on common corporate business policies, processes and rules. Long term business benefits will include removal of license costs on commercial products [through Portal and Integration solutions], and significantly reduce our capital expenditure. In addition, rollout of new business processes became a much simpler exercise, including analysis, implementation and validation.
Q: How was business improved as a result of the new deployment?
The first benefit was financial. We moved away from WebLogic products to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, saving up to six digits yearly. As a result, I was then able to invest more into staff training and development, technology, intellectual IT assets, and other high-value areas.
Executive management can now add more requests for the next Financial Year, and will see that resources are allocated more efficiently. IT department gained credit with the companies business folk. Perception is better, business sponsors become confident that IT is investing in the right direction, and subsequently become more ready to sponsor such changes.
Q: Any advice to other companies considering JBoss Enterprise Middleware?
Go ahead, don't wait. The longer you wait, the harder it will get.
Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 14:58 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Tue, 3 Jun 2008 10:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Fri, 30 May 2008 10:16 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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This is the recording from April, 2008 with lots of detailed information and demos.
Posted on Tue, 13 May 2008 11:03 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Tue, 13 May 2008 10:19 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:07 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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We announced six SOA partners - ActiveEndpoints, AmberPoint, Information Builders iWay, SOA Software and Vitria - supporting the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. These partners also made their announcements as well:
We thank our partners for their great support and look forward to working with them and our customers to expand the market and beneficiaries of SOA!
Posted on Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:11 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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In 2005, not long after I joined JBoss, we began working to define a strategy to deliver a next generation SOA Platform to the enterprise and mass markets to expand the opportunity for businesses to leverage SOA integration and business process automation. We talked with customers and potential partners throughout the process and in mid-2006 embarked on a strategy that leveraged existing and mature Jboss.org open source projects, customer contributions (including a major existing custom ESB donation that had been running for over 3 years at the time, and the open source community at large. JBoss ESB 4.0 made its debut at the end of 2006 and was followed up by a 2nd generation ESB in August 2007, JBoss ESB 4.2. JBoss ESB 4.2 became the platform for our early adopter program which has about a dozen enterprises spanning multiple industries such as transportation, financial, manufacturing, government and others. The JBoss productization team then turned their attention to delivering an enterprise ready and consumable JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.2 announced today, February 14 2008 with planned delivery by the end of the month.
Unlike other open source ESBs which are developer frameworks, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a comprehensive 2nd generation SOA integration and business automation platform. As described with the delivery of JBoss ESB 4.2, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform brings together several integration technologies to enable enterprises to leverage past investments while building new modern SOA integration solutions. These integration technologies include enterprise application integration (EAI), SOA integration with an ESB, business event management with JBoss ESB's event-driven architecture (EDA). Further, with JBoss jBPM, business processes and workflows may be automated and finally, JBoss Rules is designed to enable complex event processing in the next release of JBoss Rules and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.
Having these technologies integrated into a single, enterprise distribution improves productivity of developers and IT overall. The SOA Platform is designed to be very flexible, enabling small, focused ESB deployments that may be federated across the enterprise with out requiring an application server. Leveraging JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can take advantage of advanced clustering and JEE features to enable a highly scalable integration deployment. It is this combination of past, present and future integration technologies coupled with great deployment flexibility that define the 2nd generation SOA Platform.
We welcome our SOA JBoss Advanced Partners – ActiveEndpoints, AmberPoint, iWay Software, SeeWhy, SOA Software and Vitria. These and future partners add significant value to Red Hat-based SOA deployments on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
We look forward to working with our customers to help them deploy this new, advanced SOA Platform to help improve their businesses. Our growing community continues to innovate with future projects in complex event processing and SOA Governance starting with JBoss DNA, an open source repository project. We have the new Red Hat SOA resource center available for further information. Stay tuned. It will be fun, and for our customers, productive and profitable!
Posted on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:10 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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The term collaboration describes the work people do together to complete a task, build a product or deliver a service. People have been collaborating for tens of thousands of years to solve problems facing them collectively. Today, efficient and effective collaboration are critical to the success of the 21st century enterprise and value chain. Businesses find that they can deliver a superior customer experience, garner customer loyalty, improve financial performance by collaborating across the value chain and even with competitors in some cases.
Over the years, the tools of collaboration have evolved. The earliest electricity-based collaboration tool was the telegraph. Tools improved throughout the 20th century culminating in primitive Internet tools as well as advanced and expensive proprietary portal software and enterprise content management. Only the highest “dollar value” projects could afford these advanced collaboration; others were relegated to the basic Internet tools available – email, web sites, user groups, etc. The 21st century has seen several trends – open source software, more advanced Internet tools such as wikis and blogs, and advanced but simpler to use portal and content management - converge to change this picture significantly.
Against this backdrop, Red Hat and Alfresco have collaborated to build an integrated collaboration solution that capitalizes on these trends and magnifies their benefits. The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is designed to bring advanced collaboration and social computing to a larger market ranging from local team collaboration up through value chain collaboration across multiple enterprises. Red Hat and Alfresco do this by bringing together the leading open source portal, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with Alfresco's Web Content Management.
Jboss Enterprise Portal Platform (with default content repository)
JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform provides an open source and standards-based environment for hosting and serving application and information in a portal web interface, publishing and managing content, and customizing users’ experiences. JBoss Portal simplifies access to applications and information by providing a single source of interaction with corporate and internet-based information. Standards supported include the JSR168 portlet standard, Java Content Repository (JSR170) and WSRP.
JBoss' standalone enterprise portal offering provides basic out-of-the-box web and departmental content management support for enabling users to contribute, organize, and maintain content used within a single JBoss portal deployment. Users can upload documents and create simple HTML content fragments, with support for file-level version control and simple browsing using a standard content directory browser.
JBoss Portal is most frequently used as a departmental, functional area, enterprise intranet portal, or value chain extranet portal. JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform is also increasingly being used as an enterprise SOA user interaction platform. Emerging use cases for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform also include customer and community facing portals.
Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (standalone)
The Alfresco ECM solution is a enterprise platform for managing all business documents, digital assets, and web content in an enterprise. The Alfresco solution supports integrated services for collaboration and records management and provides advanced services for content tagging, federated search, business process management (workflow), security, transformation, lifecycle management, and compliance. Alfresco ECM provides a simple to use, simple to roll-out ECM alternative to traditional products from established vendors such as Documentum, FileNet, Interwoven, and Vignette. While comparable with these traditional vendors in terms of product capabilities, Alfresco's open source business model, out-of-the-box usability, and modern application architecture centered around Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, and JavaServer Faces (JSF) make it a must-evaluate product for any organization looking to launch any new ECM initiative.
Alfresco ECM is seen in many collaboration, document management, image management, records management initiatives. It also may be found as a key product delivering many standalone (non-portal based) web content management initiative, including:
Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution
The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is a complete solution combining best of breed, standards-compliant J2EE enterprise portal and enterprise content management platforms. This solution is available through the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) which is an online environment for purchasing integrated, enterprise open source solutions.
Pre-integrated and certified on a complete Red Hat Linux / JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Server stack, this combined offering enables customers to get up-and-running quickly with a major enterprise portal application with a no compromises-architecture to provides rich content delivery and integration services via the JBoss Portal and rich content services via the Alfresco platform. This solution extends Red Hat's JBoss Portal Platform and ECM offerings with out-of-the-box JSR-168 compliant portlets for provisioning content collaboration, document management, and web content management services directly within the portal environment, and a rich, lightweight, JavaScript-based extension framework for readily surfacing any Alfresco's managed content or content services directly into any portal page.
Major Product Capabilities
Red Hat and Alfresco see the Team Collaboration Solution being primarily deployed in the following scenarios.
At Red Hat, we are excited to collaborate with Alfresco to bring this leading, open source collaboration solutions to people around the world working on a wide range of tasks, projects and solutions to enable them to simply and affordably enhance their collaboration experience, speed time to market, reduce error and misunderstanding and improve customer and user satisfaction.
Click Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution to get to RHX for more information.
Posted on Wed, 5 Dec 2007 16:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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Posted on Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:26 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]
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E-mail: JBoss Employees
