Don’t you hate it when you spend months (or years) working on a pet project / book / mad take over the world idea, then somebody comes out with something even better?

Yep, it’s just happened to me. Years working on the idea of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ (even prior to web 2.0 in the shape of Red-Piranha). Month’s working on a Masters Dissertation on applying Web 2 techniques to the Finance industry (pdf link). And somebody comes out and does it even better.

Not just better. But much much better.  The sort of better as in ‘If I had this earlier, I’d have just copied it and changed the words around a bit’. The book is available from Manning as ‘Collective Intelligence in Action‘. A free, first chapter (Understanding Collective Intelligence) is available here (pdf).

So what’s it about? We’ve all heard about the Wisdom of Crowds idea. But what if you need to actually implement it on your website? This book shows you how to (using both concepts and practical code, as well as the theory behind all of it that I was missing). It includes

• Intelligent, learning search, using Lucene.
• Extracting data from blogs using web-crawling.
• Executing Real time feedback on facebook-like sites.
• Scalable data-mining techniques to manage the torrent of information
• Making personalised recommendations based on all of the information.

Disclaimer:Manning provided me with a free review copy of the book - but no strings attached. And , maybe if I’m nice enough to the Author (Satnam), I can persuade him to talk about making millions using JBoss Drools and Complex Event processing in the book.

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.

Update: The presentation to the Irish Java Technologies Conference: Life and Death Workflow, using JBoss jBPM is partly based on this training session. (Link to Slides)

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

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

Thanks to Eoghan, there are going to be some changes around here. He’s just announced that we’re the winner of the 2000 Euro worth of web design work. For a sample of his work , check out the redesign that he has done of the Barcamp Dublin site.

I actually tried to convince Eoghan to pick somebody else with even more readers (in a mercenary get some more exposure kind of way). He’s sticking with the person choosen by his random number omiter.

So the question is, What’s your favourite colour? What part of this website do you think needs an upgrade - this blog, the main FirstPartners.net ‘Corporate site’, or the wiki / knowledgebase? What changes do you think should be made?Or should I save the prize for the forthcoming mad, take over the world attempt part 2 (Red Piranha)?

Further Kudos to Eoghan for carrying out some Charity work as well: tuppenceworth.ie, entered by Simon McGarr, the other is a project by IQ Content for the Red Door School, entered by Laurence Veale

This post was originally titled ‘Readers Wives Questions’

Mike from Galway writes …

I read your blog regularly so I thought you might have
some insight to a specific topic i’m currently researching in GMIT,
Galway. My current research title is “An Evaluation of the Uses of
Object-Oriented Web Application Frameworks in the Irish Services
Sector”. This basically involves examining the usages of web
technology, services and SOA in service companies, such as [name]
Insurance

I’m in the process of doing a masters myself and I still haven’t got a final title for the dissertation! There are a couple of areas that I think are worth covering:

• Does innovation stop at the firewall? How are the raft of publically available Web2 / SOA innovations going to be adopted by business?
• Is SOA too complicated? Why has Google moved from SOAP to a more simple (but still XML-Web based) API?
• Is Security scaring people off? Do current security solutions (based on simple human based web interactions) cut it with the more complex machine based transactions?
• Is it a ‘Winner Takes all’? Connecting to a web service takes time and (some) money. Will there be a series of ‘mini microsofts’ in each sector, with nobody willing to (spend money) to connect to the company in 2nd place?
• Do Business people know (or need to know) what SOA is? What is the ‘killer application’ that we have them knocking at the IT department’s door to do an implementation.
• Are the skills widely available to do SOA / Web Services implementations? What are the preferred technologies to use?

Anybody else have any suggestions? I’m guessing that Mike would be very interested in hearing from Irish companies currently doing an SOA implementation. Email me at PaulB [at-sign] firstpartners.net , and I’ll pass any contact details onto him. Otherwise, just leave a comment!

It didn’t go down too well when an elderly relative asked me over Christmas ‘what exactly do you do?’. After fobbing him off with the usual ’something in computers’, he was shocked to find out that I spend most of my time ‘Grabbing people’s brains and shoving them into a PC’.

This kind of blog-related-violence is normally associated with Twenty-Major (Warning , Parential Guidance required , unless you’re over 80), so before you call the police , let me explain.

Look at your hands. Unless they’re scarred and calloused (from the weekend’s DIY) the chances are that you work in the knowledge economy. You could work for a Bank , Insurance company, Legal company or be a medical professional but most of your work consists of one thing:  You push pieces of paper around that have some magical value.
Or you would push pieces of paper around if it hadn’t all been computerised in the last 10 years. Now you swap files and emails to get things done.  And you swear on a regular basis when the computer can’t find the information you’re looking for, or someone doesn’t understand the email you sent them. But the important bit, the information processing,  still remains in your brain.

Which brings us to Red-Piranha (site update in progress) and the shoving of people’s brains into a computer. While we can copy an MP3 music file (with Adam’s and Bono’s imagination in it) and send it around the world, but we can’t photocopy your brain. We don’t want all of it, just the part that gets the magical value-added work done. The bits about drinking beer and playing volleyball on the beach we’ll quite happily leave with you.

So this is what Enterprise Web 2.0 is all about : getting the computer to take a load off your brain so that you’ll have more time to spend on the beach drinking beer. Chapter 3 (draft) of our Enerprise Web book has just been put online, which shows you exactly how to do this.

I’ll blog about it in more detail later, but I’ve just posted the first chapter of the Enterprise Web 2.0 book online. It is being written as a dissertation for the Msc. in Advanced Software Engineering in UCD , Dublin. The working title is ‘Financial knowledge capture using Rules , Workflow, Search and Enterprise Web 2.0‘.

To kill 4 birds with one stone, It also serves as a manual to the updated Red-Piranha project.[link to old website (search only). New website in progress] .

Yes, it’s incredible , but true. Red Piranha is everything (well , not exactly everything) that I’ve learnt in 7 years of Java consulting, all wrapped up in a nice easy to go bundle. It’s Enterprise software that gets knowledge out of people’s heads and into a PC (no , it’s not as painful as it sounds!).

I hadn’t checked the stats for a while , so I’m astonished to learn that 25,000 people have downloaded a copy from sourceforge. What’s more amazing is that these downloads are for version 1 - a sort of ‘mini Google’. As I write this post the latest (beta) version is being made available to developers. This moves it firmly into the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, adding workflow, rules and rich internet application capabilities (including Ajax and mashups) - more on this blogpost.

By the way , if you’re looking for more information on Enterprise Web 2.0 , you can check out Jerry Bowles blog on this area.

And the results of the Virtual Java Meetup are … here. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

If you couldn’t be bothered reading the entire thing , the results of the Dublin Jury on ‘what technologies should I be learning in the next 12 months’ are:

• Web services are going to be big, but only if they can be simple.
• EJB 3 and Netbeans are both worth taking a look at again, they are now much better than the previous versions that gave them a bad name.
• Middleware (e.g. workflow and Rules Engines) are interesting in a corporate environment, but there is a high barrier to entry.
• Struts , and to a lesser extent JSF , will continue to be dominant Java Web frameworks, despite not being the best technical choice.
• A lot of companies are still using Java 1.4, but may make the leap to Java 6 (Mustang).
• Service Orientated Architecuture (SOA) is a nice idea, but not so many projects have been implemented using it.
• IDE’s (Netbeans / Eclipse / JDeveloper) can deliver a lot of value, but only if backed up by lower level tools (e.g. Ant and Maven).
• More for the next 24 months , keep an eye on Apache Service Mix.

Stub article - more to follow

Over the last couple of months, been working on a series of Articles for O’Reilly (online) . The articles are on J2EE / Drools (more later) , but it’s been an interesting process - about 4 weeks total effort (if you count it as a day job, in reality it was spread over many evenings and weekends).

The staff at O’Reilly have been very helpful - even if I went about the process backwards (whereas normally you pitch a couple of paragraphs as a summary , then get go-ahead to do the full article). The hardest / most tedious part was formatting the article in simple html , given that it was initally written using Word / OpenOffice.

The Article will be publish on OnJava in the next couple of days , source code for the article can be downloaded here.

I’ve got several sites online at the moment ranging from firstpartners.net and the red-piranha enterprise search tool , not forgetting this blog.

A common theme with all of these is the ability to get search engines (like google) to index them. After all ,what is the point of maintaining websites if the content goes unread. How do you notify the search engine of your brand new content? Google site maps are one way - an xml document that you submit with all the relevant details. Included is a tool to generate the sitemaps , written in Python. Still playing with it , but it appears that (a) the format is easy to generate and / or (b) the script will run in Jython (java+python).

The folks at Drools and have been talking about integratng the frameworks ‘for the next release’. They’re not their yet , but there is some sample code available at .

In the meantime , there is a useful article on drools at java.net. (Drools Article Link)

Red Piranha uses Spring , a J2EE lite framework, for both it’s Presentation Layer (Spring MVC instead of an alternative like Struts) and for it’s mid tier.

I describe it as J2EE lite , as while it gives you most of the advantages of an EJB Server , it is a lot easier to deploy. It is also more flexible , allowing you to run your code in J2SE , then move to J2EE (either a Web Server like Tomcat , or a full application Server like JBoss , Weblogic or Websphere) when you are ready.

The article on how to get started with Spring is at: http://www.springframework.org/docs/MVC-step-by-step/Spring-MVC-step-by-step.html