As usual, day one back from a conference has disappeared in a miasma of hurried catchups, email rationalizations and a numbing sensation of generalized low-grade horror.
Day two must mean the summary of the conference experience. I'm looking at my twenty-four pages of notes with mounting distress at the level of detail. Some ruthless editing is in order. I've previously written about the Monday line-up, and followed with a partially incendiary post that spiked my stats and has probably ensured that I will have a crowd around me at my next talk. Remember, everyone, that pitchforks are sharp and flaming torches are hazardous items indoors.
Tuesday 24 March
Enterprise Build System: Model Driven Architecture on PDE Build runtime
At some point in the past, Kagan's company had constructed an Eclipse tool for our service testing framework, so I was recommended to go along to this talk. I got to see about fifteen minutes of it before being interrupted by a call that I couldn't defer. Unfortunately, this meant missing the demo part. Overall the subject matter looked interesting. It addresses the issue of constructing Eclipse builds and products, which, for some unknown reason is more difficult than it should be - mostly it's the failure modes that are impenetrable. However, because of my vendor/consumer hat, the profusion of build approaches fills me with more trepidation than delight. You know the feeling - you're watching the Cambrian explosion here, much experimentation of body plans and capabilities, and you are all positive but really you are gritting your teeth waiting for the Pliocene to arrive so you can use the stuff in anger. Conclusion - interesting. Next step - contribution to Athena maybe?
Koen Aers presented this session, wherein BPMN was hung within an inch of its life, cut down from the scaffold, eviscerated on the windlass, had its intestines burnt in front of its eyes and finally had its corpse quartered and dispatched to points north, south, east and west. My little joke. It wasn't that sort of execution at all. Basically he showed how jBPM 4 can execute your BPMN-described models. He gave a quick intro to the charmingly retro little grayscale icons used by BPMN. Koen also said that the BPM/Workflow is a jungle of standards. I think he understated the case a little. It's probably more like the particle decay cloud that emerges from the collision point of two positron beams, except a lot slower. Hopefully convergence will occur at some point in our lifetimes. Conclusion - informative. Next step - /me will leave this kind of thing up to the experts.
Here we go. This is the collection of short talks that I was curating. The point of these tiny talks was to bring people up to speed with what's going on in the SOA Tools Platform project. Jerry spoke about the STP Policy Editor New and Noteworthy - not too much changed here, but some interesting elements have been added to help you edit Distributed OSGi remote services configuration files. Next up was /me with Enterprise Integration Designer: New and Noteworthy - this is where I got to practice being the bearer of bad news. This component is currently sleeping deeply, with no real effort being made to support it except by yours truly. A plea for help ensued, complete with cute puppy picture. Want to contribute? Take a look at the Wiki and get in touch! In a carefully-planned sweetener to disperse the bitter aftertaste induced by bad news, Vincent then presented SCA Tools: new & noteworthy. Now this project is really lively and is constantly adding new features. They've made some changes around the capability to extend the metamodel with new SCA artifacts and included an XML editor for defining composites and component types. Above and beyond the immediate application to SCA runtimes like Tuscany and Frascati, I think that this tool has great potential to help people construct composite applications in this brave new OSGi world we are entering. Finally, Adrian brought us up to date on Integration of SOA Editors in Eclipse using the STP Intermediate Model. There's another big potential here as the basis for a SOA-style repository model. Conclusion - you tell me. Next step - this will be the subject of another post!
Practical Process Orchestration using Eclipse SOA
In this talk, Dietmar introduced us to some of the BPEL-y stuff that he's been working on, based off the Eclipse BPEL project. If you view the stats, this talk got totally panned, with a lot of -1s. Two things come to mind straightaway. First, I think that the material in the talk wasn't really quite ready for presentation. If an attendee wanted to go off and do some work with this, they needed to download and build the BPEL project first. That's ok in my book, but many attendees might expect to be served their meal on a plate, rather than being handed a bag of raw meat and other ingredients. Personal taste applies, but know your audience. Second, the stats seem off. Last time I looked, I didn't see any +0 votes in the stats for this talk, and there was at least one - mine. So I'm not so sure accurate reporting has occurred here. Conclusion - somewhat confusing. Next step - tighten up and have downloads.
I think there will need to be an aside soon on the Eclipse BPEL project. Not now though. There's more sessions. No wonder we were all hosed at the end of the week.
This was a quick intro from Ricco about a nascent initiative to produce an industry-aligned working group in Eclipse about all SOA things. More on that as it gains more support and strength later. And, for those of you who are quick to turn around and say that SOA is dead, I have two words for you: Ker. Ching. That will be all. Conclusion - watch this space.
Galileo: delivering the next major release
Last talk of the day. Rich and Markus lead us through the Galileo build, and dammit, the room is out the door again. Grr. Since I spend time looking inside the guts of this particular monster, I bailed early, before the funk started to rise in the room. Conclusion - I know where the bodies are buried already. Next step - keep shovelling.
At that point I retired to the bar for beer and sushi with some other Progressians. Having a distributed organization, and in an environment where the travel budget fairies have gone to the bad, conferences can provide valuable meet-up opportunities. The Wednesday writeup shall ensue...