People and Technology

Tom has a good post on the jBPM (JBoss workflow) community day held at the Guinness brewery in Dublin. Warning - slides may contain pictures of people drinking beer.

How to combine (jBPM) Workflow and (Drools) Business Rules - here’s the summary. Slideset is available on this blogpost.

• Workflow (e.g. JBoss jBPM) is great - it allows you to take spaghetti code and draw it as a workflow diagram (flowchart) so that it can be reviewed by the business (the nice people who pay our wages). You then attach standard (Java) actions to these steps.
• Only problem is when you come to a decision node (the one circled in red below): How do you decide to go left or right (in the workflow)? Normally this is coded in Java - good for us, but hidden from those nice business people (which means that this is more room for errors-in-translation).
• Business Rules allow you to keep those decision making rules in Plain English: When something is true , then do this. That’s it. The rule engine does most of the hard work.
• Integrating Workflow and Rules is easy. Use JBoss Seam (link) or do it by hand (link). And it works on non-JBoss web / app servers such as Websphere, Oracle Application Server, Tomcat and Weblogic.
• Repeat x6 : Use workflow and rules. Use workflow and rules …

In a maybe related development, Tom Baeyens is now using strangely Rules-y like examples over on his workflow blog ….

Update: Shortcut to slides (pdf, with notes following) here.

Speaking at the JBoss jBPM community day tomorrow and I’m nervous. I’m nervous because I’m standing up and talking to a group of people that really know their stuff about JBoss workflow. And talking about a project (JBoss Business rules) which has a friendly rivalry with it.

So here goes

1. Slides in Powerpoint emailed to myself (check)
2. Slides in PDF available online (check).
3. Slides in Open Office on laptop ready for presentation (check)

More details on the jBPM wiki if you’re interested in attending the event. Anybody give odds on the laptop bluescreen again (like what happened at the Irish Java Technologies Conference)? It’s not what happens, it’s how you deal with it.

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.

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.

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

We’ve given Enterprise Java Training, Struts 2 Training (the most widely used Java-Web framework), and now it’s the turn of JBoss Rules (Drools) , Workflow (jBPM) and Seam. A lot of the material is coming from the forthcoming Masters Dissertation on Enterprise Web 2.0:

The course (summary below) is a private session. If there’s enough interest I’ll setup a public training session, or cut it back to 1 hour and do it as a ‘free’ intro session.

If you can’t wait for that, Mark Proctor’s blog has a lot of useful rules information, and Tim Shadel has the pdf of a presentation that he gave in Phoenix Arizon on his blog.

Knowledge and Process Management

JBoss Rules, jBPM and Seam

Executive Briefing

Description:
Success or failure in your business depends on dealing with information faster and better than your competitors. This briefing shows you how the JBoss Business Stack (Rules , jBPM and Seam) can do this and how to apply it to your organisation. Crucially, the briefing shows you when not to use these and details the alternative approaches.

The briefing will give delegates an overview of JBoss Rules within a web / enterprise development environment, how to architect an distribute rules within multi-tier applications and how to link these components with existing sources of information using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).

Audience:
This Briefing is suitable for IT Managers and Directors, IT project managers and technical staff who need an insight into the latest JBoss technologies and business processes, and business managers who need to be aware of the new application models and to give buy-in and commitment to applications developed within it.

Duration:
Half-day

Objectives:
On completion of this Briefing, delegates will:

• Understand the benefits JBoss technologies offers your business and the key areas where it should be used.
  





• Know how to successfully use JBoss Rules, jBPM and Seam with new and existing systems and technologies, including the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
  





• Be able to boost projects using pre-built components and frameworks and be able to choose the right one for their needs.

• Be aware of the main precepts of good application design within the Java component framework, as well as knowing the main Enterprise Java architecture components, terminology and acronyms and their interaction.

• Understand how end-to-end applications are built using the JBoss frameworks (Rules, jBPM, Seam) and appreciate their organisational impact.

Presenter Biography

Paul Browne has 13 years experience delivering IT Projects in the Financial, IT/ Telecoms, Pharmaceutical and Public sectors. An author on JBoss Rules for O’Reilly Books, he has delivered courses for Limerick Institute of Technology, Siemens, Dell, Trigraph and IACT. Holding a Degree in Business from UUC, he is awaiting conferral of an Msc. in Advanced Software Engineering from UCD.

Briefing Content

Introduction and Problem Space

• Delegate introduction

• Trainer introduction

• Course introduction

• The problem we are trying to solve

• Who is JBoss

• 3 Tier Applications

• What is a rule engine

• Alternatives using Java

• Alternatives to Rules

• Alternative Rule Engines

• Section Summary / Intro to next section

Rule Engine overview

• Business Rules (examples)

• Sample Business Uses

• If then statements – can we do better?

• Rete Algorithm

• Forward and Backward Chaining

• Domain Specific Languages (DSL)

• Decision Tables (what the user sees)

• Decision Tables (for the Developer)

• Rule Editors

• JBoss IDE (Red Hat Tools)

• Advanced Rule Language

• System Development Roles

• Section Summary / Intro to next section

Integration and Deployment

• Web environment

• 3 Tier system

• Integration with Spring

• Integration with EJB

• What is workflow

• What is jBPM

• What is Seam

• Seam and JSF

• Seam and jBPM

• Drools.Net

• Section Summary

• Course Summary and Feedback

Do you remember Dustin Hoffman in Rainman? He was an idiot-savant (not the PC Term) that was a genius at Mathematics, but had talent for little else. Too often we’re like that - genius in our own niche (IT, Law, Sales, Marketing, Finance) but useless outside of it.

ShareIT is an attempt to break outside of these niches and share useful knowledge in the small business sector. The slides below are from the first ShareIT event in Cork (held last week), with a follow up event in Dublin (Microsoft Campus) on April 28th.

(Updated with links to the Dublin Event)

Most people building systems run into the following problems again and again:

• How to capture Business rules , in a way that both the Business users and the computer can understand.
• How to capture the flow of actions in a system, in a way that both Business users and the computer can understand. This flow is across multiple users, and may extend over days or weeks.
• How to deliver a system to the user (e.g. Via the Web), but to give the user a rich interface , similar to what they are used to on the desktop.
• How to maintain and enhance older systems , now that Java has been mainstream for more than years.
• How to take advantage of the new Features afforded by Java 5 and EJB 3, and what business problems to the solve.
• How to build components for reuse in all environments (Web , Enterprise, Command Line and Desktop).
• How to map information in a Java System to and from a Database (Persistent Storage or Legacy System).
• How to deliver value to the business at every point in the project.
• How to use the many resources and solutions already available in the Java community.

It’s to address problems like these , that I’ve been asked to put together a Advanced Java training. It’s early days yet, but I’d like to get your input as to what you’d like to see on such a course.

Full details of the Advanced Java course are available on the knowledgebase / Wiki. Leave your comments here.

Update: I posted a similar question on the (technical) O’Reilly Books Java blog. If you’re interested in seeing the responses , click here.

It’s been a while since we posted a pretty picture on the blog. Not an Andrea Corr or Paris Hilton kind of pretty picture, but one to liven up the general flow of text on this site.

Just as well then that IBM has announced ManyEyes , an online Service to take boring old numbers and turn them into the kind of graphics that you see below. It’s pretty simple to use : upload your data in a table (Excel like) format, then select how you want to view it. They even provided a wizard to allow you to link the results on your own site.

For example: This is the Value of 1 US Dollar against the Other Major Currencies (Euro , Yen, Sterling , Yuan).

Interesting, in this Ajax-y world, that it’s implemented as a Java Applet. Maybe Bruce was right?

The best thing about doing presentations is the questions you get asked at the end. Apart from the stomach churning moment of ‘will I be able to answer this one?’ they give you a new angle on things that you may have always assumed, but force you to think of in a different way.

Take one of the questions after yesterday’s Enterprise java presentation at DCU. One of the topics mentioned in the final ‘putting it all together’ was the Agile and RUP (or other upfront design) methodologies. The question , coming from an attendee that was keen on using Agile , was ‘How do you do Architecture in an Agile project?’

On the face of it this seems a contradiction. Agile in it’s most extreme form is ‘make up just enough design as you go along’, with automated tests to make sure changing things later is a relatively low cost and pain free process. In real life most projects are a balance between Agile and need some element of a more formal process (often trying to answer the question ‘how mucn is this going to cost?)’

So , how do you merge Agile with an upfront design process? It’s easier than you think.

Most systems built the ‘traditional way’ do not get all their design done in one go. They might start out with the best of intentions for phase 1 with a clean sheet but over the months / years people come and go, business requirements change and different phases try to deliver different things. Over time the original clean design twists and turns and you work hard to try and make it work out ok. Some of features you thought were key may end up getting thrown out as too complicated.
Now Agile architecture is a similar situation. Each weekly / monthly iteration is like phases on the larger project , with twists and turns that may be unexpected. The difference now is that you have a safety net comprised of your (J)Unit tests, to allow you to make radical changes if your blueprint ends up in a cul-de sac.

Yes, it is ok to have an idea the bigger picture and where you like to go with the design. Yes, a good architect will find reasons in the current release to build towards that design. And yes, a good architect may admit that some of the design features he / she thought were required weren’t actually needed. The difference between Agile and Upfront architecture is in when you find your ‘Don’t really need it’ point. With Agile , you find it just before you build it. With upfront design / architecture you find it when it’s already too late.

On Wednesday, I’m presenting on the topic of Enterprise Java at DCU (Dublin City University) , in conjunction with Trigraph.

I’ll blog later about bits and pieces of the slides (for commercial reasons I can’t publish the full set here), but the overview is below.

The Irish Times carried a report on the Death of Caspar Weinberger in it’s weekend edition. Mr Weinbeger was a contoversial but highly intelligent figure in Ronald Reagan’s Presidency (he was the US Secretary of Defense). A lot of things have already been said about him, but one almost trivial incident stood out from his obituary.

During the 1980’s , Mr Weinberger wanted to increase the Defence budget. Given that Mr Regan had a very ‘pictorial’ view on life, Caspar’s entire presentation consisted of three cartoon figures.

• A Solider figure , made to look as wimpish as possible (short of wearing lavendar), to represent the Democrats Defence Policies.
• A Nerdy Solider figure , wearing glasses and with a briefcase, to repsent the ‘balanced’ approach his opponents in cabinent wanted.
• A Rambo like figure, armed to the teeth , representing the Billions he thought the US should be spending on Defence.

Mr Weingbeger got his Billions. You may or may not agree with his objectives, but as presentation skills go, he can still teach us a lesson. Forget the details - you can talk about those later. Cartoon like images are what stick in people’s minds.

Will update this with feedback from the ‘How to talk to your boss about agile’ event, but in the meantime, here is all the slides and links to articles used in the Agile presentation.

We’re giving a talk about ‘how to talk to your boss about agile‘ for the Irish .Net Developers Association next Tuesday in Buswells hotel Dublin.

More details (including the slides themselves, as a preview of what you are missing) are available here in powerpoint, openoffice, pdf and flash formats. The slides explain how 4 pictures of bridges can explain the difference between Ad-Hoc , Predictive, Agile and XP projects. No , really , you do want to check this out.

Links to a lot of the sites / articles / tools used in the presentation are here on Del.icio.us. More posts on this blog about using agile techniques on projects are here.

The Bridges are:

• Old Drogheda Bridge from the 1200’s - Quick and Dirty or Ad-Hoc project. Got the job done , and fast . Was patched a load of times, but eventually fell down under the weight of the traffic.
• New Drogheda Motorway Bridge - Predictive Projects. Very easy to specify what you want (I want a bridge going from A-B to carry a motorway) and very easy to know when you are finished.
• Drogheda Railway Brigde - Agile. Once the longest Iron Girder bridge in the world.Built in the 1850’s and the spec has kept on changing since. This included a complete rebuild in 1925 without losing a single days traffic. How’s that for unit testing?
• Bungee Jumping off bridge in Queenstown - Extreme Programming (XP). Great fun if you’re doing it (and can be pretty effective), but scary for anybody watching.

As a sample of some of the pictures (which include lego people showing everything that can go wrong on a team), check out the image below.

.
Image from
TheBrickTestament.

Yesterday we presented the Irish Web 2.0 Event at the Morgan Hotel , Temple Bar , Dublin - the other half of ‘we’ being Fergal Breen of IrishDev. Being a Web 2.0 event, we made it a bit more interactive than your usual presentation, so I ended up learning a lot. Here are the top things that I didn’t know before yesterday:

1) In Ireland at least , awareness of Web 2.0 is highly concentrated in the tech , and not the business community. 90% of the audience described themselves as technical , despite the event being co-hosted by the Irish Internet Association (IIA), a business group. I expect this to change over the next 6 months following patterns elsewhere.

2) Walter (from Sxoop.com) described the recent Web 2.0 conference in London. One thing he said surprised me: He said that there was a feeling that developers in the area were doing it to ’scratch their own itch’ (a good thing) but were hostile to ‘Enterprise’ development (bad as somebody has to pay the bills!). A gap in the market for an ‘Enterprise Web 2.0′ conference perhaps?

3) 10% of the Audience were Johnny Cash fans. Johnny Cash is a perfect example of the ‘long tail’. 18 months ago (before his untimely demise and biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix) it was nearly impossible to get his records (in Ireland at least) - a classic case of ‘long tail’ demand. Now, he’s a blockbuster again, so mainstream shops are stocking his CD’s in high profile positions. In 18 months time , will be back on the long tail again?

4) Google has huge mindshare amoung Ajax developers and Web 2.0 people. Nearly every single person present had used Google maps (so much so that we didn’t need the demo video). Most were also aware of the awesome Ajax stuff coming out of the Googleplex such as the Ajax based XSLT transformation and image handling libraries.

5) People don’t want to do Javascript. While Ajax has rekindled their interest in this language, there was almost a relief that that frameworks such as DWR and Dojo do most of the work for you. To be fair, many people’s opinion are based on Javascirpt circa 1999, but there was a definate preference for using Atlas ,Ajax.net and Java Server Faces (JSF) / Oracle ADF.

6) There was a healthy representation of Microsoft people. Given that the consensus is that Web 2.0 and it’s Ajax capabilites are the most serious challenge to Redmond on the Desktop, it’s healthy to see such a strong interest. Healthy as in competition (from Firefox) has given us Internet Explorer 7 and will continue to drive innovation.

7) Nobody can agree what Web 2.0 is. This is not surprising considering that Web 2.0 is about individual experience. Big, shared, events like the Superbowl (or Champions League final , for us that prefer our football in other formats) are now the exeption rather than than norm. Even these events will be customised - choose your own camera angle, choose which sports blogs you read leading up to the game , choose the device (TV , PC, Mobile) that you want to watch on, and when you want to watch.

There is a healthy balance of Buzz and scepticism around Web 2.0. A lot of the companies (such as eats.ie) that are ‘doing’ Web 2.0 would not use the web 2.0 label. They’re doing the Ajax / online hosting / word of mouth marketing / self funding / continual updates thing , but they find that the label just gets in the way.

9) Some people were concerned about ‘how do you test Web 2.0 and Ajax apps?’. The answer - the same as before , only involve your users. While Ajax gives us incredible power (including the ability to ‘break’ the web browser), people have got used to certain conventions with Web and PC apps that will take time to evolve.

10) There was a lot of interest in using Agile techniques to deliver Web 2.0 apps (e.g. Flicker s update of code every half hour). Which is a nice lead in for the Agile event at the Irish .Net Developers Association.

Finally , if you are going to a joint presentation (with the two speakers stepping in and out as required), try to see the final version of the slides more than 10 minutes beforehand. You know who you are (Fergal!). Luckily , the feedback from the people so far has been good (e.g. Robert Burke. I think the word ’superb’ was used. Was Kieran at the same event ? !

If you’re looking for the slides / materials , they’re available at this blog post.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably either been to (or missed) the Web 2.0 Presentation for Irish Dev / Irish Internet Association in Dublin. The Guys from the Java meetup (the Irish Java User Group - IJUG) will also be along.

Links, Slides and related material for the presentation are below.

• Paul’s Web 2.0 Links on Del.icio.us
• Paul’s Ajax Links on Del.icio.us
• Paul’s Sun Java Article on Ajax , Java and Struts - from technical part of demo
• Information on the Knowledgebase that didn’t make it into the presentation (draft form)
• Link to Slides (PDF , Powerpoint , OpenOffice and Flash Format)
• Link to Video (Windows Media Format)
• Link to Final Slides as uses in the presentation (powerpoint format)