I’m not going to explain what workflow is as I’ve probably blogged enough about it already. But the JBoss Workflow (jBPM) guys are coming to Dublin on June 6th. If you’re into workflow (and if you’re doing any sort of software for large business you should be) then this is a do not miss event and we’re privileged to have it in Ireland.

The JBoss workflow guys are dream guests. They just asked for a couple of venue suggestions and they finally went for the Guinness Hopstore where Barcamp ran last year. Next thing we got was an email saying that the JBoss Workflow event was go. So for the benefit of people flying into Dublin, here’s the information we gave on where to stay and things to do if you’re making a weekend of it.

(More information on the event on Tom Baeyens Blog)

How to get there

Dublin is pretty well served by direct flights from Europe and the US. Aer Lingus and Ryanair are the two biggest airlines flying into Dublin - but there are plenty more (list at FlightMapping.com).

Things to do

• Tour of Guinness brewery and visit the Gravity bar (one of the highest in Dublin)
• Dublin Pub Tour and general social scene (it’s a coincidence that the first 2 items are drink related!)
• Tour of Scenic Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough
• Liffey River tour by boat
• Dublin Bus tour - including it’s Georgian buildings and coastline
• Newgrange - 2000 years older than the pyramids, in the stunning Boyne valley
• Windsurfing , Kayaking or Rock climbing in Viking Carlingford Fjord.
• Trinity College Dublin, 400 years old university , right in the city centre including the 1000 year old ‘Book of Kells’
• For the more curious , Belfast is 2hrs away by express train in Northern Ireland.
• Get lost in Phoneix Park, the worlds largest city centre park.

Places to Stay

I don’t tend to say in Dublin hotels too much (!) but the following I know are reasonably good value (and quiet / clean)

• 3 of the Jury’s Inn (Christchurch is just down the road from the event location, but the IFSC and Parnell Street are also good)
• Academy hotel is ok, if slightly more expensive , if you’re stuck.
• If you want an airport location (about 20 mins / 20 Euro Taxi from the city centre) the Premier Inn chain are pretty good.
• Hotel Isaacs is budget but decent , central and near the main bus / train stations.
• Morgan hotel is where the presenters were put up for the Dublin Java conference. Central but Slightly more pricey.

For people from the community, there’s also plenty of ‘budget’ backpacker type accommodation.

I like this sample as it explains what Business Rules are, in a way that professional (i.e. non technical people) can understand. This one I originally posted on the O’Reilly Java and JBoss Drools blogs. If you were around in Dublin last month, you’ll notice that it’s also the sample that I talked through at the Irish Java Technologies Conference.

Like many countries, the Health services in Bangladesh can’t get enough doctors. Training more is not a solution ; Qualified doctors often leave for better pay elsewhere. Given the urgent need for trained medical staff in rural areas so save lives (often children dying of curable diseases), what are health workers to do?

The solution that the Health workers came up with was IMCI - or Integrated Management of Childhood Illness. It takes what the Knowledge in Doctor’s head’s and stores it as a simple guide that health workers can follow. When a sick child is brought into the clinic the health worker is able to follow the simple step-by-step instructions to make quite a sophisticated diagnosis.

I’ve no medical training beyond simple CPR (and if you’re relying on that then you’re in real trouble) but even I can understand it.

Look at the pale blue box in the diagram above. It’s a set of medical rules: Are there any danger signs? What are the main symptoms? What combination of these symptoms are there? What is the age of the child? How long have they been ill? Depending on the outcome of the rules, go to the next set (the pink / yellow /green) boxes and apply the rules that you find there.

That’s Rules and RuleFlow.

• Rules are ‘when something is present , then do this’. And not just single rules, but many of them. Together, loads of simple rules allow you to come up with quite a sophisticated diagnosis.
• Ruleflow allows you to group your rules. If you’re a health worker with a sick child you want to do the most important checks first. Depending on the outcome, you then apply the next set of medical rules: Pink if they need urgent referral to the hospital, yellow if the clinic can cope , or green if the child can be looked after at home.

As gory as it sounds, everybody, including the doctors, are happy that their ‘brains have been put into a PC‘ (or in this case , a set of paper cards). The Doctors are happy because they can (guilt free) move to better paying jobs. The medical workers using the system are happy because they can help the sick children that they see every day. And the children gain because the better availability of medical knowledge (via Rules and RuleFlow) is literally the difference between life and death.

The slides for ‘Life and Death Workflow using JBoss jBPM (Java Business Process Management) are here. PDF , about 800k for 41 slides. I’ve included full notes (even though I won’t get a chance to use them during the presentation), so that they should make sense when reading them online instead of seeing them live at the IJTC.

I’ve been promising people that I’m going to sell my car during the presentation. So here’s a picture of it. Isn’t she a beauty?

All offers of workflow consultancy work to consultancy@firstpartners.net.

Note: If you’re linking to the slides, please link (here at this page) rather than the PDF (the location of which may change in the future).

I’m dipping in and out of the presentations at the Irish Java Technologies Conference (IJTC Dublin), so I’m not going to get to see the top 10 speakers. I will update this as it goes along, but my notes on the conference so far are ….

• Bernie Goldbach came all the way from Tipp on the off-chance that he would get 3 minutes with Joel Spoelsky. Given that it’s a 4 and half hour round trip, I’m glad that he got his interview.
• Joel, as ever, was a very good speaker. His message for software developers; soft rounded corners matter. Think iPhone instead of Samsung brick.
• David Syer of Interface 21 was talking about what’s next for Spring (2.5 and 3.0). A lot of good stuff coming up; support for the latest Java Enterprise specs, Webflow , OSGi (deploy bundles , not applications), configuration using annotation instead of XML
• Shaun Smith of Oracle. Covering building JPA Applications (Java and Databases) using Eclipse and Java. Now, I’m not a great fan of Toplink (I prefer Hibernate) , but the open source work including the work on the Eclipse IDE , and it’s support of the JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) standard, and it’s ability to transform Java Ojbects into loads of things (e.g. XML instead of Database Tables) is making me want to take a 2nd look.
• Caught talking in the Lobby : Shaun of Oracle Toplink and Emmanuel Bernard of Hibernate. I was vaugely disappointed these two didn’t come to blows (being from rival projects). There were actually nice to each other and exchanged business cards. Fascinating conversation though …
• James Strachan , Iona and Apache, speaking about messaging patterns. He takes the bean soup that is messaging and integrating your applications and makes it seem really simple. He’s also talking about Apache Camel, ActiveMQ and ServiceMix

Other People Blogging about this:

• Luan O’Carroll , who put a lot of work into making the conference happen.
• The O’Reilly GMT announcement of the Irish Java Conference.
• The Aquarium blogging about the conference “around the corner”.
• Web2Ireland.
• Bill de hOra, who has a good blogpost about the conference.

Links to our JBoss jBPM (Workflow/ Business Process Management) presentation slides to follow shortly …

Not (too blatant) a plug for the Irish Java Technologies Conference (IJTC). Although if you’re around Dublin on the 7th / 8th / 9th November I’m told you’re more than welcome to drop in. This post is more a quick review of the people who are speaking. It’s also an invitation to check out their websites and see if any of the technologies they are promoting could be of use to your project.

Here are the top 10 projects that I’m looking forward to checking out.

10) Java and Microsoft SQL Server : It’s still a brave Microsoft person that comes to a Java conference. Shows MS recognition a substantial amount of Java deployments persist their Data to a SQL- Server database.

9) Eclipse STP (and SOA) - Service Orientated Architecture is the buzzword of the year. If anybody can put substance behind the hype , it’s the guys From Iona.

8) Eclipse JPA and Dali. Hibernate pushed Object Relational Mapping (ORM) to be the standard approach to database access. The manager of the ‘other’ ORM Project (Oracle Toplink) should give a interesting coverage of the tooling developments.

7) Apache Geronimo - by Jeff Genender from Apache Foundation. So long the ‘other’ Open source application server, this is now becoming credible in commercial deployments.
6) Java Update - Simon has been working as a lead Java consultant for Sun Microsystems. He’ll be talking about Java Standard Edition 6 and Java Mobile Edition. But what I’m really interested in is Java Enterprise Edition 5, Scripting, Java Realtime and Java FX.

5) If scripting is your thing fellow Onjava Blogger Dejan Bosanac is also speaking on this subject. He’s talking about Scripting within the JVM, which will be one of the hot topics for 2008.

4) iPhone v JMME - I don’t get the buzz around Mobile (give it another 18 months , we’ll all be running Java Application Servers on the mobile). But many people are interested in it - this talk is how to make you Mobile Java apps as slick as those in the iPhone.

3) JBoss Drools Engine (Drools) - I’ve blogged (a little bit) about Drools before. I’ve also been fortunate enough to hear Mark Proctor speak and you will come out an convinced that the natural home for Business Logic is in the Rule engine.

2) JPA and Hibernate - There is a very strong possibility that Emmanuel Bernard will be returning to Dublin to talk about the Hibernate project that he leads. Having seen his recent talk, and given the level of interest in Hibernate, I expect a strong turnout for this one.

1) Spring 2.5 - Spring has been around for more than 5 years and is making serious inroads in the the Enterprise Java community. Sam Brannen (from Interface21) will give details on the latest on the major update to Spring (2.5) as well as what is planned for the future.

Disclaimer: I’ll be talking about Java Workflow (based on on JBoss jBPM). But compared to these guys, I’m way down on the Z-List of presenters.

Other People Blogging about this:

• Jakub Korab, one of the conference Organisers
• Luan O’Carroll - another conference Organiser
• Web 2 Ireland
• The SPOT Blog.
• Tom Raftery
• Clare Dillon, Microsoft
• Dejan Bosanc’s Personal Blog
• Dr Root
• The Spring Framework Blog

Most websites do one thing : grab information from the user, and store it in a database.

For these simple websites , using Enterprise Java is like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - you’re much better off using a solution like Ruby on Rails. Off course, once you go off the usual path (e.g. to implement complex business rules and workflow) things become a lot more difficult. That’s how we make a living - a post for another day.

So, if you’re a business person looking for a web site ‘that has to be done by the end of the week‘ or a technologist looking to solve the pain of ‘I can’t believe building web sites is still so difficult‘, then it’s worth checking out Ruby on Rails.

A good place to start is Rails for All, which has recently moved home to Google Groups, and. The official announcement is below.

Rails For All - No more RFA email Hello everybody, This may be the last email you will get from Rails For All. You loved our email updates you say? Well, we have created two Google groups for your reading pleasure - one for discussions and one for announcements. Good stuff. Tell all your friends.

See you there!

Sincerely,

Robert Dempsey

Founder Rails For All, Inc.

—————

Promoting Ruby on Rails to the developer and business communities

More posts on Ruby

This an in progress draft of ‘Financial knowledge capture using Rules , Workflow, Search and Enterprise Web 2.0‘, complimenting the Red-Piranha Open Software project.

Chapter 1 - Introduction - notes

Chapter 2 - Problem Domain - good draft

Chapter 3 - Red - Piranha Framework - good draft

Chapter 4 - Technical Overview - draft [new]

Chapter 5 - Financial Workflow - draft [new]

Chapter 6 - Financial Calculator and Business Rules - draft [new]

Chapter 7 - Adaptive Search - good draft [new]

Chapter 8 - Future Work and Conclusion - notes

Chapter 9 - Appendices - notes