Open SOA - Digital Business Ecosystem

Google shows phone prototype to vendors

2007-11-26T13:11:00.000Z

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9028763

Very interesting to see the war in getting closer to the customer/user is finally in the form of mobile phones. In the IT sector, it started with the PCs, then to Laptop, PDAs, MP3 Players and finally to an all in one form. Let's keep a close watch on how this area develops.

Training Content

2007-01-30T12:05:00.000Z

This is more or less the technical DBE training content available on this weblog. While not a perfect structure (pretty much all the materials overlap more or less), it is structured in terms of technical areas such as servENT/DBEStudio, presentations, videos and demos.

ServENT/Fada/WebServices

- What Time is IT? Date GUI Service

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2005_08_01_opensoa_archive.html

- What Time is IT? Date Service

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2005_08_01_opensoa_archive.html

- From WebService to DBE Service

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2005_09_01_opensoa_archive.html

- Service Aggregation

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/12/service-aggregation-in-fadaservent.html

- Quick Service Prototyping

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/12/quick-service-prototyping.html

- DBE Service Execution: Give it a REST

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/12/dbe-service-execution-give-it-rest.html

- Service as a Webpage: Information Handlers in servENT

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2007/01/service-as-webpage-information.html

DBEStudio/Portal

- Importing OWL Ontologies to DBEStudio

ohttp://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/10/importing-owl-ontologies-to-dbestudio.html

- Create your Own (DBE) Semantic Search Engine

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/10/creating-your-own-dbe-semantic-search.html

- Tagging/Labeling Software Services “Web 2.0” Style

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/11/tagginglabeling-software-services-web.html

- DBEPortal Service in servENT

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/11/dbeportal-service-in-servent.html

- DBEStudio Tutorial

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/11/dbestudio-tutorial-ver-022swallow-ver.html

- BML and Bio/NanoTech Scenario

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/11/bml-and-bionanotech-scenario.html

Presentations

- BML presentation

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/03/bml-presentation.html

- BML TreeMaps

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/05/bml-treemaps.html

- DBE at LUG Radio Live 2006

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/07/dbe-at-lug-radio-live-2006.html

- Creating a Development Work-Flow Poster

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/09/creating-dev-workflow-poster-pre-alpha.html

- BML For Business Networking

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/09/bml-for-business-networking.html

- DBE Recommender

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/10/dbe-recommender-visualisations.html

Videos/Demos

- DBE (ExE) P2P WebCam Demo

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/04/dbe-exe-p2p-webcam-demo.html

- DBE (ExE) DateService with OpenLaszlo Interface

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/04/dbe-exe-dateservice-with-openlaszlo.html

- WebCamera Semantic Search: A Trivial Example

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/05/webcamera-semantic-search-trivial.html

- SugarCRM + DBE + OpenLaszlo

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/05/sugarcrm-dbe-openlaszlo.html

- Calendar Demo with Semantics

o http://opensoa.blogspot.com/
2006/08/calendar-demo-with-semantics.html

A true DBE community

2007-01-18T14:41:00.000Z

A brief overview of software services that have been integrated into the Digital Business Ecosystem Project.

Service as a Webpage: Information Handlers in servENT

2007-01-09T12:50:00.000Z

During the previous examples we have seen that we can invoke services via a custom commandline client or even using a REST-like approach. As the servent is integrated with Jetty, it is possible to extend the our service to implement a Handler (org.dbe.servent.http.ServiceHandler) that extend (or is based) the Jetty Handlers.

By implementing the ServiceHandler interface (2 methods init() and handle()) we can provide the service with a Web interface via the service real endpoint that can be used to interop with the service. This way is also ideal for implementing the REST that we discussed earlier. (However we need to search for the service as we need to know the real endpoint)

To integrate a ServiceHandler in our service, we need to do a couple of things. First of all is to declare in deployment.props that our service has a Handler. This is done by assigning the property “handler” to point to the class that implements the ServiceHandler interface (see below)

File: deployment.props
anapplicationName=HelloWorldServiceExample
smid=HelloWorldServiceExample
adapter=org.dbe.examples.HelloWorldServiceAdapter
handler=org.dbe.examples.HelloWorldServiceHandler

The second thing that we need to do is to implement the declared hander. See example below. In our case we have called the service itself from the Handler.

And it is accessed with for example with a web browser by pointing to the endpoint of the service, as a standard URI. In our example the output is the webpage itself.

Service Aggregation (In Fada/Servent)

2006-12-28T17:17:00.000Z

Inspired by one of the examples (Aggregation) available on swallow cvs, the following code example/tutorial shows how we can search for services on the P2P based on their FADA entries. The FADA entries are usually the SMID or Service Manifest ID.

For simplicity, the examples have a simplified HelloWorld service that uses straight POJOs than do not use xmlrpc holders like in the other previous examples.

On the example 2 services are deployed which implement the same interface, and are published with the same SMID.

Once the services are published (done identically to the previous tutorials where we execute the included deploy.sh), we can inspect the Items registered in our local FADA node. The figure above illustrates the Items in our node with the one of the Entries (the SMID) equal to "SampleAggregator".

With this information and the java class interface, we can then lauch an search to find services that interface and that has Entries. This is achieved with the following code:

Our method receives a String Array of SMIDs (only one in our example) and uses that and the class signature to search for suitable services. The search is a boolean search (1 or 0) in the sense that only returns services that exactly match our query*.

In our example, we simple execute a remote method that retrieves the endpoint of the service. The figure below illustrates the output results once the services are deployed and running.

Please download below the Eclipse projects with source code and scripts necessary to run this example. The file contains 3 projects, one for the ClientAggregator and two identical modified HelloWorld sample services that can be used for testing.

AggregationExampleProjects.zip

* This is as far as I can tell, however it might not be

Quick Service Prototyping

2006-12-28T13:30:00.000Z

The following presentation illustrates how to do quick service prototyping. Instead of using DBEStudio to create service semantics and generate service skeletons (and implementation and service deployment), we just code the adapters directly and copy the classes to the servENT deploy directory. We achieve service re-deployment by simpy copying the classes on top of the old ones and restarting the servENT.

This technique could be useful when we want to quick turnaround for service prototyping.

QuickServicePrototyping.ppt

Sample Service Project for Eclipse with shell scripts (bash). This example is used in the presentation.
HelloWorldServiceProject.zip

10 Reasons Why SOA/Software as a Service Means Business

2006-12-22T19:35:00.000Z

http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=781

DBE service Execution: Give it a REST*

2006-12-22T13:40:00.000Z

A typical DBE Client requires several parameters to make a call to a service. For example to invoke a remote method requires 3 pieces of information (at least):

- The service manifest ID (or SMID). This is the unique identifier of a service on the DBE. The service semantics (BML) is usually wrapping the SMID and when you search for services using BML, you end up getting lists of SMIDs which can be executed. SMIDs are similar to GUIDs.

- The operation name, or method that we want to execute. In our case, this is the getMessage(method) (see below)

- Input and output parameters (class as signatures and object references to the input values and the output holders). In our case signatures are [String.class,StringHolder.class].

(See the client example below)

Following a similar principle to the DBEPortal (DBEPortalClient) in which services are executed ondemand via a "proxy" which figures out how to call the service given the SDL , one of the ideas could be to provide a REST [1] like mechanism to the DBE that could work the same way, where just by reading/writing (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) URIS, we could easily interop with services deployed on the DBE. However there is a small problem:

Conceptually REST is designed for resource update/retrieval and the DBE P2P service execution paradigm does not map directly (technically or conceptually) to the REST philosophy. Discussing this idea with the servENT guys (thanks Juanjo!), some of the issues were highlighted. However REST have been used in many different context regardless of a pure “REST” approach.

With this in mind, I have developed a very simple servlet that allows the execution of service via a REST-like interface if you provide (skipping the SDL, BML, etc).

The idea is to pass the necessary information for the service to be executed as url parameters (servlet uses GET, not POST, it should be implemented correctly). This makes possible to call the service from any scripting language or anything that can read an url, including wget J and of course a web browser.

The URI would look like this:

http://localhost:8080/servlets-examples/servlet/RESTAdapter?

servENT=http://localhost:2728& (Entry point to the P2P network)

smid=SM-809a38c771586296bc35988043ebf8a81f5724d5-10& (the SMID of the service)

method=getMessage& (what method we want to execute)

inputValues=HelloWorld& (values, comma separated such value 1,value2, etc...)

inputTypes=String&(types of our input objects)

outputTypes=StringHolder (types of our output objects)

The approach is the following, we pass the node entry point (servENT), the smid, the method we what to execute, the values (inputValues, and the method signature (inputTypes&outputTypes). As we are executing the service directly (no BML/SDL), we need to specify the signature. This is basically the same info that the ClientHelper needs to execute the service as shown earlier. This is OK for prototyping.

The results of this approach are displayed on the image below, where you can for example from python quickly execute the service/method once it is deployed:

Please contact me if you are interested in discussing/improving something like this.

[1] Some rest resources:

Introductory article:
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2004/12/01/restful-web.html

Original Concept
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

An Practical Example
GData protocol that uses REST, RSS and extends the Atom protocol to provide a simple approach for resource reading/writting/updating/deleting (service execution in our context)
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/protocol.html

*(This post is concerned mainly with service execution using fada/servENT not so much with the service semantics, BML and so on)

Update: Forgot to mention that this approach can only work at the moment with simple types (Integer, String, etc) and XML RPC Holders in Java speak.

DBE & RedHat/JBoss & Codecamp

2006-11-30T08:07:00.000Z

Some ideas as a result of the workshop:

JBoss could implement some servENT architectural pattern
or the ExE could be integrated into JBoss
A JBoss node could be a DBE Node
and services deployed on JBoss could be accesible via the DBE

This is my interpretation of the events, so for a more detail summary, head to the ITA DBE blog:
http://dbe.ita.es/wordpress/?p=88

Also, a codecamp was run with 20+ companies:

You can see the results and feedback from the codecamp here:
http://dbe.ita.es/wordpress/?p=79

Tagging/Labeling Software Services "Web 2.0" Style

2006-11-28T17:26:00.000Z

The following presentation illustrates how by using basic BML models you could achieve similar functionality to "Tagging" in the so called "Web 2.0". Basically, the main idea is to add metadata to our software services. This can be achieved by having very simple BML models and data, using the expresiveness of the SSL (Semantic Service Language) part of the BML.

ServiceTagging.pdf

DBEPortal Service in servENT

2006-11-27T17:34:00.000Z

Just checking some of the servent new features on the last release. One of the new things is the inclusion of the DBEPortal service (see above figure). The DBEPortal service is web based entry point for searching, discovering and executing services (S&D&E ) on the DBE. Besides running services, the portal can also be used for the deployment of static or dynamic webpages.

We have used previously the portal for showing different features for S&D&E. However on this release the Portal service has been integrated and now we can start exploring its features.

For example, when we install the servENT, we have the option of filling in a form to specify some basic details of the business Once the form is filled and the servENT installed (and running), it deploys a ServiceManifest (SM) which can be use for later S&D&E of the portal itself (and other portals). On the example earlier, we have added for example the keyword “screws” to our business domain. Also, we have added location (Leicestershire/Leicester, not shown).

We can then use the portal to search for itself. If we have more servENT nodes connected to our node and they run the portal, then any search will also be performed P2P on the other portals. The figure below illustrates the search of different type of business by location, restricted to the keyword “screws”. As the search is performed through out the P2P network, results are displayed according to their relevance (see above figure).

(Note: for this feature to work the port 80 on the portal machine must be free, however the Portal service can be configured to run on a different port).

note: added Portal figure

Also servent 0.3.8 Released!

2006-11-27T14:13:00.000Z

Here you are, point your browsers to:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=138511&package_id=211750&release_id=466893

Just in! DBEStudio 0.3.0 Released

2006-11-27T12:40:00.000Z

From the DBEStudio Announcements list:
(This release is for servENT 0.3.8)

Dear DBE Studio Users,

We are proud to announce the release of the DBE Studio, version 0.3.0, and the DBE Studio Examples, version 0.3.0. This release includes bug fixes from 0.2.2 and some new plugins, such as identity manager, security, connection manager and a UI generator. For more information please read the sections below or go to our home page.

Best regards,

The DBE Studio Team.

Download & Installation Instructions

Download and installation instructions can be found on our website (http://dbestudio.sf.net).

In addition to the recommended update site install and archive install, an all-in-one installation will be available tomorrow on our Sourceforge site. This includes the DBE Studio, Eclipse, GEF, EMF, WTP and Open Laszlo. For more information please go to our download and installation guidelines on our wiki site.

Release Notes

This release now depends on the latest Servent release (0.3.8).

Changes Log

· Plugin: Connection Manager 0.3.1

o Created and integrated for all ExE communications

· Plugin: Perspectives 0.3.0

o Updated for new Servent release (0.3.8)

· Plugin: Preferences 0.3.0

o Moved connection fields to the connection manager preference page

· Plugin: Security 0.3.4

o Added and integrated new plugin

o Moved some security preferences from the identity-manager plugin over

· Plugin: Security 0.3.4

o Upgraded plugin project to Servent 0.3.8.

· Plugin: Studio Examples 0.3.0

o Upgraded plugin project to DBE Studio 0.3.0 and Servent 0.3.8 (includes SM 2.0 support).

· Plugin: BML Data Editor 0.3.0

o Updated plugin to ConnectionManager from servENT ClientHelper

o Updated file handling

· Plugin: ODM Editor 0.3.0

o The SF bug with request id 1565041 was fixed

· Plugin: Copy & Paste 0.3.0

o Plugin added and integrated

· Plugin: Identity Manager 0.3.0

o Plugin added and integrated

· Plugin: KB Toolkit 0.3.0.

o The plugin was upgraded to support the vesrions of Knowledge Base libraries.

· Plugin: Ontology Viewer 0.3.0.

o Added servent toolkit plugin to plugin dependency list, due to problem with missing log4j jar.

o Errors on the OWL structure were not shown to the users importing an OWL ontology. This was fixed.

· Plugin: SDL2Java Compiler 0.3.0

o Integrated with the connection manager plugin

· Plugin: SDL Storage 0.3.0

o Integrated with the connection manager plugin

· Plugin: SM Creator 0.3.0

New Service manifest editor
Corrects bugs:

Connection to KB/SR freezes workbench
Cannot select bml data file
Cannot select bmldata data file

· Plugin: Service Exporter 0.3.0

o Added restriction of adding .lzx and.html ui files only in wizard.

Adds SM file to generated DAR.
Fixed code to support updated SM model.
Upgraded to use the connection manager plugin for deployment tasks.
Fixed bug for creating deployment.xml file on unix and mac platforms.
Fixed bug when null pointer is thrown when SM does not exist.
Fixed bug when two SM files exist.

· Plugin: SSL2SDL Compiler 0.3.1

Add ConnectionManager
Correct bugs:

Error when select project sub folder for sdl file
Modify the positon of the Dbe Studio tool action in the menu

· Plugin: UI Generator 0.3.1

o Added new plugin

BML and Bio/Nanotech Scenario

2006-11-21T17:01:00.000Z

The following presentation illustrates a possible use of BML to describe products, services or processes of small companies working on the advanced science/life sciences areas such as biotech and nanotech. The presentation also illustrates some advanced usage of the QueryFormulator/templating tool plugin inside DBEStudio.

Bio-NanoTechScenario.pdf

DBEStudio Install: Update Sites for Eclipse

2006-11-20T12:50:00.000Z

This is a list of the update sites that I use when I install DBEStudio from the scratch*:

EMF
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/emf/updates/site.xml

GEF
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/updates/site.xml

DBEStudio
http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net/install/

VE
http://update.eclipse.org/tools/ve/updates/1.0/

WTP
http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/

(Then select these VE/JEM, VE/VE and WebToos/WTP)

OpenLaszlo Editor installs via a download and a Local Archive Update via the Update Manager
http://www.eclipse.org/laszlo/release/0.2.0/

* At this point in time. This post refers to the forthcoming version of the DBEStudio 0.3.0.

Service Oriented Architecture 101

2006-11-20T12:17:00.000Z

Over at the JBOSS Blog, there is a nice article where they discuss the concept of Services Oriented Architecture on the JBOSS/RedHat stack platform, why it is important, and why the concept is going to stay with us for a while:

http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/pfricke/2006/11/17/SOA_101.txt

OpenLaszlo UIs in DBEServices

2006-11-16T07:52:00.000Z

Just to explore some of the features of DBEStudio, the screenshot shows the UI designer from OpenLaszlo integrated into Eclipse. The key point of this integration is the java RPC (DBEPortalClient) that is used to search, discover and execute DBE Services. The OpenLaszlo scripts syntax and semantics are a combination of XML and JavaScript, while taking advantages of the Laszlo Rich Internet Application capabilities. For those who know xhtml and javascript (and RPC), it should feel right at home.

This example and more are available on the DBEStudio examples package, so that you can get started quickly.

JBOSS + DBE Workshop

2006-11-15T16:59:00.000Z

The 24th of Nov (just before one of our famous CodeCamps ;) ) there will be a workshop at ITA where we will learn from JBoss/Redhat about the OpenSource business models, OS communities and also technical introduction to the Service Integration, WebServices, Enterprise Service Bus and P2pP in JBOSS.

There will be also round tables discussing the community aspects, Governance, Sustainability and also technical aspects. For more information about this event, please subscribe to the Swallow or DBEStudio sourceforge lists.

DBEStudio tutorial (ver. 0.2.2/Swallow ver 0.2.12)

2006-11-13T16:54:00.000Z

This tutorial covers the basics of developing an ExE service with Studio, from modelling to deploying and executing a service. The tutorial shows the different steps required to go from a simple model to adapter and then client generation, deployment and execution of the service . The tutorial does not focus on the semantics (just to obtain an SMID for our service), as this will be dealt with in one of the next tutorials with more details.

So, without further ado:

DBEStudio Simple ExE Service Tutorial

Sun opens source Java with GPL V.2

2006-11-13T14:19:00.000Z

Java SE, Java ME, and Java EE and yes, and it is called OpenJDK!

https://openjdk.dev.java.net/

Wake up and smell the (Java) Coofee!

2006-11-13T12:17:00.000Z

Sun is releasing Java under an opensource license....

Could this be true? under the GPL?

Lets wait for the news:

http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/index.jsp

Swallow 0.3.5 Released

2006-11-09T12:21:00.000Z

Swallow 0.3.5 has been released, however please do not try to use with the current release of DBEStudio (0.2.2) as some of the components need to be updated. For more info:
http://swallow.sourceforge.net/

CodeCamping in Zaragoza (07/11/06)

2006-11-09T11:39:00.000Z

I've just been in Zaragoza/Spain in a "CodeCamp" organised by the Instituto Tecnologico de Aragon (ITA). Although we had some problems with the toolsets, we managed to go through the basics of creating and deploying a service with a group of 10 local sofware companies (SMEs).

Zaragoza is such a fantastic place and the whole city is very busy getting ready for the Expo 2008. The picture above shows the new developments around the the river Ebro for the Expo.

For more details about the code camp, please visit the DBE weblog in Aragon:

http://dbe.ita.es/wordpress/

We got lots of feedback and also a, from the scratch, installation guide was produced:

Codecamp feedback: http://dbe.ita.es/wordpress/?p=69
Installation Guide: http://dbe.ita.es/wordpress/?p=67

Also, yesterday a new version of the servENT was released!!
http://swallow.sourceforge.net/download.html

DBE at ISBE2006

2006-11-01T12:50:00.000Z

The team at UCE is presenting today a paper, "Regional catalysts: learning our roles in developing a digital ecosystem", regarding the DBE-related activities in the UK-West Midlands Region at the Institue for Small Business and Entrepeneurship conference 2006, which is held this year in Cardif/Wales (UK).

Regional catalysts: learning our roles in developing a digital ecosystem

ABSTRACT:

Type of Paper: Research

Objectives: The paper analyses the experiences of three regional catalyst partners in a digital business ecosystem project to add to our understanding of the intervention processes between catalysts, SMEs, and regional agencies.

Prior work: The paper draws on recent explanations of regional ICT initiatives specifically from a project and institutional focus.A technological view tends to talk in terms of SME ICT readiness and their place in an e-adoption ladder-or to question the determinism of assuming there is such a ladder. (E.g. Pavic, Simpson, Koh, 2005). An institutional view (Jianxin, Millman, Martin, 2005) looks at the relationship between government and other public agencies e.g.bureaucracy for SMEs to cope with in accessing support or funding. A socio-cultural view looks at the ways in which a region develops norms that encourage or discourage a climate for innovation(Jones and Mohon, 2005;Mitra, 2005;McClelland and Atherton, 2005; Martin; Warren Smith, Adams, Roper and Scott, 2005)). A project management view (Price and Atherton, 2005;Costello and Thompson, 2005) looks at the inputs, processes and outputs of a specific interventions.The current paper adopts the project perspective and considers the institutional relationships between the project and local agencies. We wish mainly to compare and understand the effectiveness of the three regional catalysts’ practices in terms of their ability to meet project goals.There has ben no similar report on regional catalysts in an open source ecosystem project of this type.

Approach: The relevant part of the project has adopted a participant-observation approach based on the role of the regional catalysts-responsible for recruiting, assisting, and promoting the work of a number of SMEs(target 250 across Europe).A number of in project reports have been used as evidential triangulation methods.

Results: Results show that three European regions have adopted some similar and some different institutional methods to support this project. These differences may indicate areas of development and improvement in the regional network relationships.

Implications: The implications of this project are that regional networks of SMEs, policy makers,and regional catalysts can develop their mutual interactions in order to compete.New regions to the project can evaluate the project findings in designng their support infrastructure. Existing regions can reflect on the arrangements they have in place to see if there are opportunities to build on the processes and provisions that exist

Value: The paper offers an insight into the challenges facing new and experienced ICT catalysts in European regions.It adds to our understanding of the relationship between SMEs and European research projects.

Keywords: Regional, Catalyst, Digital, Ecosystem

Links:
Institute For Small Business and Entrepeneurship
http://www.isbe.org.uk/

ISBE 2006 Conference
http://www.isbe2006.org/

Paper Track:
http://www.isbe2006.org/trackabstracts.php?t=E

Paper Abstract
http://www.isbe2006.org/abstracthtml/70.html

Importing OWL Ontologies to DBEStudio

2006-10-31T16:44:00.000Z

The following presentation illustrates the process of importing an already exisiting OWL-DL ontology into DBEStudio to be reused in our BML Models:

ImportingOntologiesintoDBEStudio.pdf

DBEStudio 0.2.2 Released

2006-10-31T11:47:00.000Z

For those like me that havent upgraded their DBEStudio yet or havent realised, there is a new release which includes bug fixes and some new features.

For instructions on how to update or how to install it, please visit the DBEStudio site:
http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net

Creating your Own (DBE) Semantic Search Engine

2006-10-18T11:19:00.000+01:00

The DBE by default comes with 2 different search engine interfaces. One is integrated within the DBEStudio (QFSDT or Query Formulator and Semantic Discovery Tool) as a Eclipse perspecive and the other is integrated within the, soon to be released, DBE Portal, which in turn is also based on the QFSDT codebase.

If for whatever reason the default ones are not enough or if you want to create a complete new way of searching for DBE real world and software services, it is not too difficult to create your own.

If we keep things simple, we can quickly extend the portal QFSDT library and create our own semantic search engine with, literally, 10 lines of code.

As an example, the figure below illustrates what the user interface of the DBE Portal displays when we enter a search query. Please note that the query used uses the DBE query language. For example, if I want to search for restaurants in Nottingham, a potential query based on the BML models that I used and deployed as part of the ServiceManifests is:

Restaurants location=Nottingham

The results are:

The previous screenshot shows the basis of performing a search operation. First of all we need to create an instance of ServiceSearcher, which takes no arguments.

ServiceSearcher serviceSearcher = new ServiceSearcher()

After we obtain an instance of ServiceSearcher, we call the getServices method with one argument of type String.

Vector v = serviceSearcher.getServices(String s);

Where in our case s = "MyID4Searching##### Restaurant location=Nottingham"

The argument contains in reality two different parameters separated by the string “####”. The first parameter specifies a search ID that can be used to performed asynchronous search across several Semantic Registries. To keep things simple, we assume that we only search in one SR (the local one as configured in qfsdt.portal settings, not shown on this example).

The second parameter is the query itself, which in this case is:

"Restaurant location=Nottingham"

When the query returns we obtain a Vector in which each element is a String[] containing 4 elements: the SMID of the service, the rating according to our query, and two more related to the Service Name/Description and URL.

The example can be downloaded here:
Main.java

Tags: Digital Ecosystem SOA Semantic Search API

Swallow 0.2.12 Released

2006-10-18T11:07:00.000+01:00

Swallow 0.2.12 has been released, including many bug fixes and new features. For more info:
http://swallow.sourceforge.net/

For downloading it:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=138511&package_id=151956

DBE Recommender Visualisations (V.0000001)

2006-10-03T16:08:00.000+01:00

ButterflyRepresentation.pdf

I have been working/thinking towards a way to represent service recommendations in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) . The visualisation tries to be exploratory, as a way to experience the "service landscape" available given a user profile/user history and current business processes. Currently there is a growing interest on recommenders for online systems, whatever their nature. Think of Amazon and their "Customers that bought this....".

Within the DBE context, the role of the recommender is to tell you which services could be a good match given your preferences and your runtime history. However and not surprisingly, it turns out that doing Business Process matching in an ad-hoc basis is hard stuff [1] at the technical service description level. The lack of semantics do not help either [2].

Reading some of the literature regarding SOAs, I have discovered that someone [3] came with a list of what the features of SOAs:

- Services are discoverable and dynamically bound

- Services are self-contained and modular

- Services stress interoperability

- Services are loosely coupled

- Services have a network-addressable interface

- Services have coarse-grained interfaces

- Services are location-transparent

- Services are composable

- Service-oriented architecture supports self-healing

Saying all this is easier said that done, specially having something that will work across organisations (where is public UDDI now? apparently someone pulled the plug!) rather than just one place/one organisation.

The idea behind the visualisation is to let the user play and quickly interact with service landscapes while making visible implicitly / explicitly the different SOA properties of the services . That’s why it is Version 0.00001 and there are still lots of work to be done.

Also, the user interface should enable the user to discover new services that might be relevant for a need that the user does not know he/she has yet, serendipity style. By enabling exploring/serendipity, it is possible that users discover new services that might be useful to improve a business process or to create a new business opportunities.

The principal idea behind the graphics is that if an SME is displayed at the centre, two rings could represent the service landscape, from the current services (one ring) to other recommended services. By chance, this representation allows you to see the services and the SME icon on the middle as a buttefly (left wing/right wing) with a bit of imagination.

The data was generated from a simulation that used Collaborative Filtering [4] techniques using the Taste toolkit[5] from a dataset that approximates SME behaviour, and the interaction design and visuals are done with Prefuse[6].

See the PDF for details:
ButterflyRepresentation.pdf

References

[1] B. Mahleko, A.Wombacher, P.Fankhauser, “Process Annotated Service
Discovery Facilitated by an n-Gram Based Index”, in proceedings of
IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-
Service (EEE), 2005, pages 2–8.

[2] R. Krummenacher, M. Hepp, A. Polleres, C. Bussler and D. Fensel,
“WWW or What Is Wrong with Web Services”, in proceedings of the
2005 IEEE European Conf on Web Services, 2005.

[3] J.Borenstein and J. Fox, “Enterprise Semantics: Aligning Service-
Oriented Architecture with the Business”, WebServices Journal,vol. 5,
no.4, 2005, pages 30-34.

[4] J. L. Herlocker , J. A. Konstan, L. G. Terveen University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, John T. Riedl University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) a Volume 22 , Issue 1 (January 2004) Pages: 5 - 53

[5] Taste. Collaborative Filtering for Java. http://taste.sourceforge.net/

[6] Prefuse. Interactive Information Visualisation Toolkit. http://prefuse.org/

Tags: Visualization Collaborative Filtering Digital Ecosystem SOA Recommender

DBE at the West Midlands in Europe AGM

2006-09-29T11:07:00.000+01:00

We are present at the West Midlands in Europe Annual General Meeting, exhibiting the DBE an other EU related projects, at the Birmingham Council House. Blogging it as it happens....
Some pictures:
(Views of the stand)

There were more than 100 people attending the event:

A pic of the Birmingham Council House, where the event took place:

DBE Research Blog

2006-09-28T07:13:00.000+01:00

For those interested more on the science related activities of the DBE research, here you can find some of the papers published in conferences and journals related to the DBE.

The full link is:

http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/~g.briscoe/ICL/Blog/Blog.html

Creating a Dev Workflow Poster (Pre-alpha version!)

2006-09-26T12:04:00.000+01:00

Not finished yet, we are working towards some sort of poster/flyer that could explain briefly how a typical DBE workflow works from a developer’s perspective, from modelling the business semantics and the service, to implementing the service and then deploying/running the service

The idea behind this simple example is to create a very simple service for search/discovery of services of restaurants that implement an interface that allows the aggregation of their daily offers with a method such as getMenuOfTheDay() for any deployed ServiceManifest (SM) that belong to “Restaurants” and implement such interface. The example is visualised on BML4Networking.pdf, slides 11/12.

The current version is just a mock-up of what it might be, representing the semantics workflow of a very simple "Restaurant" service. At this point, the naming is arbitrary but you could imagine that proper ontologies could be use representing the Tourism/Catering sector.

Steps are (missing steps in italics)

1 - Define your ontology
2 - Define your BML model that will use the ontology
2.5 - Define your service implementation at the SSL level (BML/Semantic Description)
3 - Add data to your BML model
3.5 - (Create a Service manifest that uses BML model + BML Data)
3.7 - Developing the service (java/adapters/etc)
4 - Search and Discovery of service
4.5 - Executing Service

(Some of the steps might be optional) Feedback is welcome!

DBE Road Show in Ireland

2006-09-25T16:00:00.000+01:00

Better later than never, two weeks ago (13^th Sept.) the DBE Ireland Team held a workshop at the NUI Maynooth to introduce the DE/DBE concepts to the Kildare and Meath region (Dublin’s commuter belt).

Plenty of info about the workshop including all the presentations from the attendees can be found on the digital-ecosystem.org website:

http://www.digital-ecosystem.org/Members/aenglishx/roadshow

BML For Business Networking

2006-09-22T13:19:00.000+01:00

This is the presentation that we prepared for the SMEs part of the creative sector that participate on the DigitalCentral project networking activities at the New Technology Institute in Birmingham on Fri, 22th of September, 2006.

BML4Networking.pdf

Links:
http://digital-central.co.uk/
http://www.ntibirmingham.co.uk/

In a Road less world

2006-09-08T14:38:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time in a road less world, were people used only narrow pathways to move and cross regions and cities, a smart group of people decided to work together to create an innovative transport system that would have boosted the economy. They worked hard for almost three years to create a "Bus".

They made use of the best breed technologies of that time to create this conformable, silent, cutting edge technology BUS. The architecture of the bus was amazing, any piece of the bus could have been replaced while the bus was traveling, the fail safe and redundant subsystems could let the vehicle run even on a single tire. They fitted in a radar system to avoid other buses, the creator of the Bus also created an incredible engine what was, of course theoretical, able to push the Bus at a fantastic speed. There were conformable seats and a scalable system that would allow many buses to be chained together to improve the load capability of the bus.

A socio-economical research was conducted to investigate the impact of the buses in the regions and found out that it'd have increased the economy by 40%. Two simulators were developed to investigate even further how the network of interconnecting buses would have give birth to a scale free network of routes. An intelligence system was conceived to create the best routes automatically.

These smart guys also created a garage on a top of a hill where the bus was parked. The garage was filled with all the required high tech mechanical tools to maintain it. An assembly line ready to build thousand of buses -in a blue-print driven approach- was also built. This idealistic group of inventors strongly believed this invention was due to change the world and for this reason they decided to give the bus and the garage for free to all the citizens of the road less world, without even retaining any intellectual property. Anyone was welcome to enter and use the bus.

Almost at the end of the project the group decided to foster the adoption of the bus because strangely the habitants where not interested in taking care of the bus. The garage was rarely visited and the habitants could not understand the machinery as a whole and how to make good use of it. The group gave training sessions, started the bus and moved it back an forth in the garage to demonstrate that is could actually move and that it was very convenient and conformable.

The inventors opened several tenders in the local region in the attempt of attracting adopters. Some early adopters accepted the deal, and were paid for doing some maintenance: some was taking care of the engine, another of the muffler, the radar system, another the light bulbs; there was finally some activity in the garage! But the citizens, due to the absence of roads, could not understand how the entire community could ever take advantage of this incredible vehicle filled with such cutting edge technologies when a bicycle or a barrow was sufficient. Some of
them realized that they could make use of the engine for building and  ommercializing a grass mower, to harvest the field, some other decided to use the electrical system and light bulbs to sell a high tech Christmas tree decoration, the technology for the building the conformable seats were used for the nearby cinemas.

In such a yipe the inventors started a discussion about who was supposed to drive the bus. One group asserted they them self had to drive it, another said that this decision had to be taken by the community that was maintaining the bus. But the community was not interested in driving the bus essentially because they did not
understand how could that machine spin off the economy of the planet, they could only perceive the immediate possibility of adopting its inner technologies in their local business and hence they were interested only in the technologies used to built it.

Many years after, when the project funding was largely terminated, the garage laid abandoned in the road-less hill and the concept of the Bus disappeared in the mind of the inhabitants, but a set of new smaller garages appeared in the region: one was selling radar systems, another engines, another the seates for the cinemas, another....

2006-08-30T12:30:00.000+01:00

Soluta.net has organized an International Event in collaboration with the OMG®.

The web site has just been published: http://mdaforum.soluta.net

It is the first event in Italy on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) realized in collaboration with Object Management Group (OMGTM). The event, organized by Soluta.net, OMG Member and MDA Qualified Service Provider (QSP), aims at promoting the MDA approach through a tutorial, some speeches taken by international experts and an expo area.

MDA provides a non proprietary and open approach to challenge the business and technology changes that has been extensively used in the DBE project and it is one of its technical founding principles.

Registry & Scale free networks

2006-08-30T12:25:00.000+01:00

Registry as implemented in current SOA architectures does not scale up in EOA.
Services or Event registries are strategic elements for SOA. Even tough information and services are theoretically always active and available, if it is not known their network location, they get often fully lost.

Taking into consideration such as criticality of registry in SOA, OASIS in UDDI version 3 has introduced replication policies on cluster that allow an higher degree of tolerance toward damages. Currently UDDI version 3 supports both clustering and mirroring of a main node. Replications are complete and for such a reason they have to be implemented into the intranet so as to avoid any network constraint. The strategy is a complete replication for failover where each node is a mirror of the master.

In EOA we have an international-wide federation of services where it is strongly suggested not to set up the registry in a single node, even if implemented as a cluster. Who will assume the responsibility of maintaining 24hrs. x7 days a system that if crashes will cause impossibility to access to the whole ecosystem? By persisting with the intention of reinforcing and consolidating the single central registry the result would be a sort of Fort Knox where also the network of services like the supply of electric energy should be redundant, replicated and should come from different power stations1. How would it be possible to guarantee service continuity in case of natural calamity?

Typical disaster recovery solutions lack of scalability if applied throughout the whole national territory: N^2resource should be employed where N stands for the number of place of failover and procedures of human intervention for network reconfiguration should be planned. An hierarchical structured network cannot easily get managed and balanced by an administrator due to its numerous parameters which change very frequently.

The alternative solution proposed in the context of digital ecosystem registries is to exploit resources spread in the territory, getting an higher degree of tolerance against failure through a self-healing architecture (self-maintaining), replicated, redundant, with a scale free distribution rather than hierarchic, gaussian (random) distribution.

Ecosystem Oriented Architecture (EOA)

2006-08-30T12:24:00.000+01:00

SOA has been designed and envisioned for being applied inside an Enterprise as a means to bridge systems and to create a governance layer on top of existing platforms as either legacy or assets. Inside Enterprises there is administration ability of the SOA infrastructure, ability to handle the network and having control over IT resources and IP: everything is reasonably under control.

Between enterprise, in a B2B environment that implements a value chain, SOA still scale up even if with some differences related to a more extend functional model and some negotiation ability.

In a Digital Ecosystems (DES) however, this is not true any more – IPs may change, protocols are subject to be replaced without notice, UDDI needs to be shared among parties, UDDI becomes vital for indexing and discovering services, functional models need to change at a pace which is faster than any ability to maintains coherence and harmonization via a managed coordination process. DES need to support very loosely coupled communities which brings news challenges in SOA architecture, and dealing with this reality requires re-thinking the founding principles and technology of SOA.
EAO is the name for this novel approach to DES architectures. It is a conceptual framework, it represents a collection of best practices principles and patterns related to Ecosystem-aware decentralized computing and architectures.

DBE Bulletin Num.6 Jul 2006

2006-08-08T11:48:00.000+01:00

Our newsletter, The DBE Bulletin (Num. 6, July 2006) is available for download as a pdf:
DBE Bulleting Num. 6

Calendar Demo with Semantics

2006-08-05T08:19:00.000+01:00

Link to the Video

(Please use full screen playback or 1024x800 minimum)

The next (video) demo extends the previous SugarCRM&OpenLaszlo calendar integration and enhances it with simple semantics to create a search&discovery scenario.

During the demo, a calendar service made "searchable/findable" via the added semantics using BML and BML data.

The BML model has for example very simple attributes such as object (i.e. “Calendar”), action (i.e. “Get”) and name (i.e. my name), which uniquely identifies the service and owner of the calendar. The data associated to the model is entered on a separate editor (see video, BMLData Editor)

Once the calendar service and the semantics are deployed on the DBE, then the service can be discovered via the DBE Service Discovery Portal:

Then the different Calendar services available are ranked according to the search terms. The service integrates a Calendar service from SugarCRM, pulls the data via WebServices (WS) and refactors the data and displays it on a OpenLaszlo calendar. Potentially this scenario could be extended to integrate truly P2P calendars (currently is not!) and aggregation of different users calendars.

Link to the Video

OpenSource Tools/Services used for this demo:
http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net
http://swallow.sourceforge.net
http://www.openlaszlo.org
http://www.sugarcrm.com

The Zen of OpenSource

2006-08-02T08:18:00.000+01:00

source: Sun Microsystems

On this article, Simon Phipps from Sun microsystems presents "The Zen of OpenSource" or what is good about OpenSource, why it makes economical sense, some insights into the OpenSource Commons (is it the source code? is it the community?, is the the free as in speech? and many more ideas. Read more at:

http://www.sun.com/2006-0725/feature/index.jsp

We had the pleasure to attend one one of the Simon's presentation at LugRadioLive'06:

http://opensoa.blogspot.com/2006/07/dbe-at-lug-radio-live-2006.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smt99/195653172/in/photostream/

You can also catch Simon on this podcast from itconversations.com.

"The Zen of Free":
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail866.html

DBE at LUG Radio Live 2006

2006-07-25T13:30:00.000+01:00

Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to do a presentation and a simple stand/exhibit with some information, posters and demos at the OpenSource LUGRadioLive'06 event in Wolverhampton, UK.

With hundreds of participants, during the event we had the opportunity to present and discuss the concept of the DBE and the technology behind it with open source developers and open source users.

Image the stand layout.

You can find here the PDF of the presentation

You can also find the Flickr group here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=lugradiolive&s=rec
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=lugradiolive2006&s=rec

IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems: DEST 07

2006-06-08T12:41:00.000+01:00

The first inagural conference on Digital Ecosystems (DE) will take place in Cairns, Australia (where the tropical rain forest is!!) from the 21-23 Feb 2007. The conference will have 10 parallel tracks dealing with different aspects of the emerging DE field. Quoting from the Call for Papers:

"Digital Ecosystem (DE) is an emerging paradigm for economic and technological innovation. It consists of a self-organizing digital infrastructure, aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations (or agents) through supporting the cooperation, knowledge sharing, and development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary domain knowledge rich environments. DE captures the essence of the ecological community in nature, where biological organisms form a dynamic and interrelated complex ecosystem, in analogy with economic organisms (such as business entities) or digital organisms (such as software applications). Digital species, just like biological ones, ‘create and conserve resources that humans find valuable’.The DE paradigm is increasingly regarded as the main driver behind ‘business model innovation in the Digital Economy’. It transcends traditional rigorously defined collaborative environments, such as centralised (client-server) or distributed (peer-topeer) models into agents-based, loosely coupled, domain-specific and demand driven interactive communities which offer cost-effective digital services and value-creating activities that attract agents to participate and benefit from it.

DEs can be specifically developed for the Small and Medium Enterprise community, where species in the ecosystem include virtual enterprises, business portals, service brokers and organizational databases.

DE technologies provide transparent, open ICT support to the ecosystem’s intelligence and knowledge based development, moving away from isolated business to business cooperation toward systemic collaboration, competition, and synergy with partners, enabling virtual economic districts and enhancing their competitiveness over the global market.

The key strategic direction of IEEE-DEST 2007 conference is conveying DE vision and research results to enrich Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Today, SMEs compose over 90% of all world industry and 95% of them belong to the private sector. They are a major part of the global economy, especially in developing countries where their vitality, together with the innovation potential of DEs could lead to the establishment of profitable niche markets. Process digitalisation in the framework of digital ecosystems will foster new partnerships and collaborative research. An important part of the strategy of this IEEE-DEST Conference is to work together with SMEs toward the adoption of DE-based business models and technologies.

The 1st IEEE-DEST Conference will become the main international forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange information regarding advancements in the state of the art and practice of advanced models for designing and deploying interorganizational digital business processes involving networks of small and medium enterprises."

The DEADLINES are:

Deadline for Tutorial, Workshops and Special Session Proposal Due:

30 July 2006

Full Paper Submissions Due: 15 September 2006

Paper Acceptance Notifications: 15 November 2006

Final ‘Camera Ready’ Papers Due: 31 December 2006

Workshops: 20 February 2007

Conference: 21-23 February 2007

Tour: 24 February 2007

FADA 5.3.1 Released

2006-06-08T12:09:00.000+01:00

A new version of FADA (5.3.1), the P2P overlay for services directory that the DBE uses, has been released with several impromevents in terms of deployment, integration with the other DBE components (Swallow/DBEStudio) and documentation. For more information please see the change log:

http://fada.sourceforge.net/

http://fada.sourceforge.net/changelog-report.html

Create-Net Trentino Region DBE Workshop

2006-06-08T07:51:00.000+01:00

Create-Net, the research and innovation hub for the Trentino region in north Italy held the 5th of Jun 2006 a workshop regarding the DBE where the different social, political and technical aspects of the ideas behind the business ecosystems and digital business ecosystems were discussed.

The slides from the presentations* are available from the Create-Net Website here.

The full URL is:
http://www.createnet.it/create-net/cda/aree/index.php?event=242&section=33&area=7

* Some of the presentations are on italian language

BML TreeMaps

2006-05-25T20:30:00.000+01:00

The DBE is a collaborative system. As such, over time the way people use and create content within the DBE such as BML models can be represented in different ways as a aggregation of the collective action.

Treemaps is one of those techniques used to represent and visualise collaborative sytems. Invented by the Human Computer Interaction Lab at Univ. of Maryland, USA, treemaps help to visualise hierarchies as a series of flat nested boxes (boxes within boxes), allowing to represent the bigger picture and the small detail at the same time. Size and color can represent frecuency and variations over time of the different elements of the hierarchy.

Treemaps have been succesfully used in many areas, such as to help to visualise and understand USENET:

source: http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/treemap/

Treemaps could be an ideal technique to represent how the BML metamodel language has been used so far by the BML users. Based on a copy of the DBE Knowledge Base (KB) at a specific point in time, we have used the treemap technique to visualise its content. Over time, these pictures will probably change and evolve in different ways as the type and number of models increases.

The current BML treemap represents how more than 100 BML models are organised in terms of BusinessElements (Metamodel concept), Attribute Names and as a 2 dimensional hierarchy of Packages/BusinessElements Find out more about BML and treemaps on the following presentation:
BMLTreeMaps

The treemaps were produced using the opensource tool JTreeMap

WebCamera Semantic Search. A Trivial Example

2006-05-25T08:43:00.000+01:00

Using the previous WebCamera example as a service, the following video shows the usage of a very simple* BML model to search&discover&execute an already published service by specifying semantically some requirements. In this case, the service that is publised on the Semantic Registry simply points to the endpoint where the WebCamera service is deployed.

Link to the Video

The previous figure illustrates the BML model and the BML data which contains very simple attributes such as location or tag that can be later on utilised for semantic search and discovery.

* This simple example does not use ontologies or more complex models

What is the Semantic Web?

2006-05-25T07:30:00.000+01:00

Source: swoogle.umbc.edu

The DBE with tools such as the Semantic Discovery tool integrated on the DBEStudio borrows some of the concepts and ideas from what is called the Semantic Web.

Over at the BBC Tech site, there is an article which explains some of the principles behind the Semantic Web.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5013146.stm

CodeCamp in Zaragoza

2006-05-09T12:25:00.000+01:00

We had a very sucessful CodeCamp las week in Zaragoza (Spain) hosted by ITA. Zaragoza will be hosting the Expo2008 within the theme "Water and Sustainable Development".

During the CodeCamp we learnt about different DBE topics, specially installation requirements, BML, DBE Portal, and using OpenLaszlo as a UI for DBE services.

We had also some time to look around and visit some of the Zaragoza historical areas and buildings:

Palacio de Aljaferia: Patio de Santa Isabel (1)

Palacio de Aljaferia: Patio de Santa Isabel (2)

Palacio de Aljaferia: Public Room

Plaza del Pilar: Ayuntamiento and Basilica del Pilar

Getting Started

2006-05-09T12:04:00.000+01:00

Over at the Digital Ecosystems site, there is a new guide on how to get started with the some of the dbe tools, specially DBEStudio and Swallow

SugarCRM + DBE + OpenLaszlo

2006-05-01T13:21:00.000+01:00

An example of integration of the the functionality of different packages using the DBE as a P2P SOA. The purpose of the scenario is to show how the DBE can integrate different platforms by offering the functionality as a service (as in "software as a service") so that both platforms can access it.

The example shows the OpenLaszlo Calendar retrieving the information from the Calendar "Meetings" section in SugarCRM. DBE interops with SugarCRM via webservices, while OpenLaszlo calls the DBE service (via the P2P infrastructure).

Video
Presentation

DBE in Brazil

2006-04-21T14:01:00.000+01:00

Henri Bergius, a finish open source software developer and author of the open source Project Management app OpenPSA, has given recently a presentation introducing the DBE to the Brazilian open source community at the 7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre in Porto Alegre (Brazil). He shared his experiences as a software developer using the DBE and also the business opportunities that the DBE opens up to small software developers. Read more at:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/digital-business-ecosystem-in-fisl.html

CooperationCommons

2006-04-17T14:39:00.000+01:00

Interesting twebsite full of references related to collaboration/cooperating and groups as "smart entities". Full of ideas, theoretical and practical, of why SMEs can/should work as groups and collaborate!!

http://www.cooperationcommons.com

DBE (ExE) P2P WebCam Demo

2006-04-10T11:23:00.000+01:00

One of the earliest demonstrators on which I worked on , was to use FADA for creating and deploying a WebCamera service that linked two different legacy systems. That was almost one year ago. The image below shows how the demonstrator looked like and also one of the slides (ppt) that was used to illustrate the idea.

We have ported the WebCam demo to ExE and OpenLaszlo and you can try it live* here:
http://dbe.dnsalias.net:8080/lps-3.2/my-apps/ImageService.lzx

*Please bear in mind that light conditions and server availability

DBE (ExE) DateService with OpenLaszlo Interface

2006-04-10T10:04:00.000+01:00

We have produced a short example of how to integrate a simple service (DateService) with an OpenLaszlo Interface. You can try it live here:
http://dbe.dnsalias.net:8080/lps-3.2/my-apps/DateService.html

Also, instructions on how to test and deploying it are available here (pdf):
DBE & OpenLaszlo Example

Direct Links to Files:
Client Libraries: clientLibs.zip
Laszlo Files : DateService.zip
UCEDateService Eclipse Project: UCEDateServiceProject.zip
Deployment Files for Servent: UCEDateService.zip

BML Presentation

2006-03-23T13:05:00.000Z

What is Business Modelling Language (BML)? How do I use it? What are the Benefits?

These are some of the questions that we get most of the time from SMEs regarding the usage and role of the BML as implemented in the DBE.

In a nutshell and in practical terms, BML is one of the layers of semantics that you can add to your software or real world services in order to make them “findable”, that is searchable and discoverable within the DBE P2P network. However, it is important to note that BML also plays other roles [1]

We have prepared with the help of the DBE partners a short presentation giving some examples and the workflow of BML (version 1.0). Please download the presentation from the link below:
BML Editors Examples

[1] For more information about BML please see the Service Factory Deliverables

eClassOWL version 5.1 released

2006-03-20T15:15:00.000Z

One of the ways of achieving high levels of efficiency, process integration and business-to-business interoperatibility is by using standard tools, incluing standards related to knowledge representation and knowledge reusability.

eClassOWL is one of the projects that we have been following with great interest regarding knowledge representation and sharing on the B2B SOA space. eClassOWL is trying to create ontologies for products and services based on german eClass project and OWL and they have just relased version 5.1.

For more information, visit the eClassOWL site:
http://www.heppnetz.de/eclassowl.htm

DBE Studio 0.2.0 Released

2006-02-28T19:16:00.000Z

DBE Studio 0.2.0 has been released on the DBE Studio update site and as an archive file. All plugins have been upgraded and tested for Eclipse SDK 3.1.2, GEF 3.1.1 and EMF 2.1.2. Read more at: [https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=544839]

DBE Studio Examples 0.2.0 has been released as a new Eclipse feature and is now included on the DBE Studio update site. Users can now install or update the DBE Studio Examples feature from the Eclipse software updates mechanism. It has also been released as an archive file. This examples feature includes three example DBE projects (including a new 'PC Wholesaler' example) containing BML models, BML data files, SDL models, Service Manifest files, Java source files and UI implementations. A ‘Cheat Sheet’ tutorial for the PC wholesaler example has also been added to this plugin. Read more at: [https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=544840]

For download, install and update information please refer to our home page [http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net/web/install.html].

SOAs Podcasts

2006-02-28T08:06:00.000Z

A couple of Podcasts related to SOAs, presenting different views on SOAs.

Adopting SOA at Merrill Lynch, by Andy Brown from Merrill Lynch & Co.
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail970.html (Presentation)

SOA Build Best Practices, by Mark Orttung from Rearden Commerce
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail686.html

Microsoft, IBM and SAP to close UDDI Business Registry (UBR)

2006-01-11T21:36:00.001Z

Microsoft, IBM and SAP have made this announcement. Info available in their respective sites. The main message from these 3 has been the success of interoperability while its support to the real nature of B2B interactions has been questioned by Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at ZapThink. More details at http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/164624.htm

New DBE Studio 0.1.10 Released

2006-01-10T07:58:00.000Z

Install/Upgrade Procedures
Update site:
http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net/install
Archive Install:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143906

Changes:
Tool/Plugin: Perspectives

Current plugin version: 0.1.7

Description: Update perspective icons. Remove the creation

of a deployment.properties for a new DBE project.

Tool/Plugin: Help

Current plugin version: 0.1.4

Description: Added user guides for the Service Exporter

tool, test case generator wizard, sdl2java and ssl2sdl

compilers.

Tool/Plugin: Ontology Editor

Current plugin version: 0.1.3

Description: Fixed bugs: Fixed bugs: The bug items #1396898

submitted by David McKitterick (Intel) was fixed.

Tool/Plugin: BML Editor

Current plugin version: 0.1.9

Description: Fixed bugs: The bug item #1396893 reported by

David McKitterick (Intel) was fixed.

Tool/Plugin: SDL Editor

Current plugin version: 0.1.3

Description: Connection with OntologyViewer.

Tool/Plugin: KB-Toolkit

Current plugin version: 0.1.5

Description: The plugin's API was updated with some new

functions.

Tool/Plugin: Ontology Viewer

Current plugin version: 0.1.8

Description: Update the plugin to use the new version of the

kb-toolkit plugin.

Tool/Plugin: QF-SDT

Current plugin version: 0.1.11

Description: Added shortcut to Service Publishing

Perspective, remove duplicate of new DBE wiazrd category,

image manipulation and added improved error handling when

executing SMs.

Tool/Plugin: SDL2Java Compiler

Current plugin version: 0.1.11

Description: Added new compiler, WSDL2SDL. Removed wrong

generated comma. Removed some extra runtime dependencies

from plugin.xml. The SdlURI type is implemented like String.

Tool/Plugin: Service Exporter

Current plugin version: 0.1.8

Description: Removed support for old deployment.properties

file. Improved the usability of the wizard. Upgraded BPEL

service composition deployment.

Tool/Plugin: SSL2SDL Compiler

Current plugin version: 0.1.4

Description: Added about.html. The int type from SSL become

Integer in SDL. Added missing tag in SDL. Worked on SDL file

completion.

Tool/Plugin: Test Case Generator

Current plugin version: 0.1.0

Description: Added plugin project to cvs.

DBE Studio 0.1.8 Released

2005-12-06T16:41:00.000Z

DBE Studio 0.1.8 has been released.

Notes:
New Plugins added:
BML Data Editor
SSL2SDL Compiler

Changes:
Tool/Plugin: BML Editor
Current plugin version: 0.1.7
Description: Upgrade - Feature Request #1358857 (BML Editor - Working with files): Now, the BML Editor supports the import/export of the created models in files.

Tool/Plugin: QF-SDT
Current plugin version: 0.1.8
Description: No Comment

Tool/Plugin: Perspectives
Current plugin version: 0.1.4
Description: Re-added bml and bml-data directories. Added a 'DBE Service Publishing' perspective for SM and BML data tasks.

Tool/Plugin: SM Creator
Current plugin version: 0.1.8
Description: Minor code refactoring.

Tool/Plugin: KB Toolkit
Current plugin version: 0.1.3
Description: The plugin's API was updated with some new functions.

Tool/Plugin: Ontology Viewer
Current plugin version: 0.1.6
Description: Fixed bugs: The bug item #1369006, discovered by Leon Mak (UniS) was fixed. In particular the Ontology box (name) was made read-only.

Tool/Plugin: Service Exporter
Current plugin version: 0.1.5
Description: Implemented the generated of a deployment.xml file and the wizard extensions to populate the data.

Install/Upgrade Procedures

Update site: http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net/install
Archive Install: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143906

DBE Studio

2005-10-06T10:25:00.000+01:00

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) project has proudly announced the launch of their integrated development environment - DBE Studio. It is a major milestone for the project which comprises of a collection of development capabilities in the form of editors, service development tools and wizards. The DBE Studio has been built on the Eclipse platform and is expected to become an integral part of the software services development environment amongst the software developers.

Congratulations Team DBE and DBE Studio Partners....

The web site provides the necessary instructions to download and install the DBE studio. The installation instructions are also provided below:

Prerequisites
Eclipse 3.1 or higher
GEF 3.1 or higher
EMF 2.1 or higher
Swallow

Installation Instructions
Configure your HTTP proxy settings within eclipse if necessary:
Select “Window” -> “Preferences...” -> “Install/Update”.
Click the “Enable HTTP proxy connection” check box.
Enter your proxy host address and port.
Select “Help" -> “Software Updates” -> “Find and install...”.
Select the “Search for new features to install” radio box and click “Next”.
Click “New Remote Site…” and supply the following parameters:
Name: DBE Studio
URL: http://dbestudio.sourceforge.net/install/
Check the "DBE Studio" box, and click "Next".
Check the "DBE Studio" box, and click "Next".
Read and accept the feature license and click "Next".
Select an installation location, click "Finish"
Ignore the warnings about the feature not being digitally signed, click "Install All".
Click "yes" to restart the workbench

Global Computing Semimar at SICS

2005-10-02T19:21:00.000+01:00

SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science is holding a seminar where different experts from the fields of Peer-2-Peer computing, Grid computing and SOA will share their views how these three pieces of technology are coming together. From the announcement:

The vision of service-oriented computing is embraced in the fields of Grid computing, Peer-to-Peer computing and Service Oriented Architectures. Until now, each research community has focused on different aspects, but we argue that these research fields have complementary strengths and will develop in a common direction, eventually eliminating the distinctions between them. This new environment will combine elements of resource management and coordination from Grid, inter-operability from Service Oriented Architectures, and self-organization and scalability aspects from Peer-to-Peer overlay networks.

More info available at SICS:
http://www.sics.se/research/article.php?newsid=508

CodeCamp: Execution Environment and Business Modelling Langauage

2005-09-30T10:35:00.000+01:00

We had organised the DBE CodeCamp yesterday. The focus was the Execution Environment (ExE) and Business Modelling Langauage (BML). We helped the Software Developers to implement the ExE in their laptops and facilitated the discovery and consumption of a DBE 'Date Service' through a local Wifi and wired network. Conversion of an existing WSDL using WSDL2Java was also demonstrated and a service was consumed through this conversion. Eclipse was briefly introduced to the participants.

The concept of Business Modelling was discussed in great detail explaining the current disadvantages in the information content presented through WSDL and the need for complex information to manage B2B transactions. The BML structure, its alignment to Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and the individual packages were described. Three basic industry models - Manufacturer, Retailer and Broker Business Models were presented using a BML template.

Meteor-S

2005-09-27T12:29:00.000+01:00

The Meteor-S project from University of Georgia is focusing on extending the capabilities of Web Services to address the issues of dynamism and scalability. The research areas such as Peer-2-Peer (P2P), Semantics, Ontologies, Domain Models, etc. have some interesting correlations to the DBE project.

The diagram below presents the working components of Meteor-S

Meteor-S main contacts are : Prof. Amit Sheth, Prof. John Miller
The coordinator of the project is: Kunal Verma
Industry collaboration: IBM TJ Watson
The project is partially contributed by: IBM Eclipse Grant 2004, IBM Faculty Award to Dr. Sheth 2004

e-Business: The Way Forward

2005-09-22T11:47:00.000+01:00

(source: europa.eu.int)

We have been invited (Nagaraj will be speaking) as part of the DBE project to the "e-Business:The Way Forward" conference, organised by the European Commission's Enterprise & Industry DG.

The conferece will be held the 5th and 6th Dec 2005 in Camdbridge, UK.

The full URL of the conference is:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/enterprise/ict/conferences/cambridge.htm

From the website:

WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND

The Conference brings together policy-makers, academics and stakeholders from across the European e-business community.
An unrivalled opportunity to interact, discuss ideas and build relationships.
A varied programme addressing the critical issues in this dynamic field.
A choice of sessions to gain in-depth knowledge of the topics of most interest to you.
A chance to help establish priorities for policy actions on e-business related issues at both national and European level.
Keynotes by Richard Ellis, Chair, EEDA; Soumitra Dutta, Dean of Executive Education, INSEAD; David White, Director for Innovation Policy, DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission.

KEY ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED

taking stock of public policy initiatives promoting the take-up of e-business practices by European enterprises, particularly SMEs;
the status of e-business uptake by European enterprises, notably at the sectoral level;
recent developments in the area of e-skills;
progress in removing cross-border legal barriers for electronic business, including B2B markets;
ongoing work in the areas of standardisation and the interoperability of e-business solutions;
initial experiences of the "digital ecosystem" approach for activating networks of local SMEs;
the way forward for e-business policy development.

DBE Node Upgrade

2005-09-19T12:06:00.000+01:00

We have upgraded our DBE node (DBE ExE) to version 0.1.5 (from 0.1.4).

The DBE ExE can downloaded at:

http://swallow.sourceforge.net/

See the changelog for this release.
http://swallow.sourceforge.net/distribution/changes-report.html

Bioteam

2005-09-14T15:35:00.000+01:00

The Bumble Bee blog is very interesting and make reference to a lot of activities being done by the DBE project. For instance, the author makes a reference to the concept of competitive environments created by business networks and the formation of business ecosystems led by key players in the industry. The blog has links to a lot of great content that link the aspects of business with nature. The DBE project uses similar views to explore business complexities. Uses these for understanding key terms such as predation, symbiosis, evolution...and for sense making of these issues in the business world in order to help companies grow.

New Google Blog Search Service

2005-09-14T12:11:00.000+01:00

Google has released a new search service for blogs, BlogSearch.

We've tried to search for this blog and it comes right there on the first page!!. While this is not that important, it is nice to see that our blog is indexed as relevant to the "Business Ecosystems" search term.

Also, we can see there also the blogs from our SME Drivers such as Nemein.

Disclaimer: Blogger is own by Google.

From WebService to DBE Service

2005-09-10T17:13:00.000+01:00

Files: UCEDateExampleWithWS.zip

The learning objective of this tutorial is to show how a WebService can be ported quickly to the DBE ExE. To illustrate such a process, we will use UCEDateExample from the first tutorial, creating a WebService with identical functionality (returning of a java.util.Date object) and then porting it back to the DBE while the actual implementation of the service is a WebService. In this case, the DBE is used as a Service Bus while the the physical service still lives on its original server.

While this tutorial is fairly long, this is due to the inclusion of some basics about the creation of the WebService and installing/configuring the WebService Platform. If you want to skip these steps and use our existing WebService, please jump directly to section "Generating the Stub from WSDL" after you install Axis.

In a typical scenario, a WebService is consumed via a client, which could be a simple command-line based application (see the architectural diagram below) or a more sophisticated one.

After the tutorial, our architecture could resemble the previous diagram, with the consumption of our WebService via the standard WebService client or as a DBE Service.

The tutorial has the following sections:

Requirements
Installing Tomcat and Axis
Deploying the WebService
Testing the WSDL
Testing the WebService
Generating the Stub from WSDL
Porting to the DBE
Deployment
Consuming the Service
Conclusions

Requirements
Besides the requirements indicated in the previous tutorials (JDK, Execution Environment 1.4, etc), you will need:

Apache Tomcat (optional but recommended if you want to test this tutorial using your machine). (Tested with version 5.5.9)
Apache Axis. (Java version, tested with version 1.2.1)

Installing Tomcat (optional) and Axis
Describing Tomcat or Axis and detailing the installation process are beyond the scope of this document. Please refer to the Jakarta Tomcat or Apache Axis websites for more information.

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/
http://wiki.apache.org/ws/FrontPage/Axis/AxisGeneral

You will need to install Tomcat first and then Axis (Java version). Both are fairly simple to install by just following the provided instructions. Once you have unzipped the Axis distribution, copy the “axis” directory to your webapps directory in Tomcat. The Axis website provides information about what to do and how to test if the installation is correct

Deploying the WebService
Tomcat and Axis makes the implementation/configuration and deployment of WebServices very easy and for the purposes of this tutorial we just need to create a java class defining the interface, its implementation and deploy it manually.

Similar to the previous UCEDateExample, our implementation returns a java.utilDate object when it is invoked.

DateService.java:
import java.util.Date;
public class DateService {
public Date getDate()
{
return new Date();
}
}

To deploy it, you can just rename DateService.java to DateService.jws and copy it onto the axis Directory of your webapps.

In my case, I installed Tomcat under

C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\

And Axis under
C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\webapps\axis

With this configuration, we can just copy the DataService.jws to ...\webapps\axis
and Tomcat and Axis take care of the rest (compiling the java class, generating WSDL, etc).

Testing the WSDL
You need to make sure that our WebService has been deployed correctly. With my configuration, you can test this by using a web browser and navigating to:

http://dbe.dnsalias.net:8080/axis/DateService.jws

If you installed and configured Tomcat and Axis on your machine, you need to change the host name for your hostname (i.e. localhost)

By default, Tomcat runs on port 8080. If you click on the link “Click to see the WSDL”, you should obtain the WSDL of our WebService.

Testing the WebService
At this stage you require Axis. You will need axis in your classpath in order to test the WebService. The UCEDateExampleWithWS.zip contains an example of how to consume the WebService. You need to unzip the .zip file to a suitable location. In my case, I have unzipped the file to my K:\ drive.

Before you can test the WebService, you will need to tell the scripts where Axis has been installed.

In the .bat file runTestService.bat, change the axispath variable to reflect the path where you have installed Axis. (In this case, I am using the 8.3 short names convention of windows).

set axispath=

in my case, I have this value:
set axispath=k:/vxb/coding/java/axis-1~1

Once you have updated your Axis path, you can simple execute runTestService.bat and observe the output:

The previous image illustrates the ouput of the WebService, simply outputting the date of the machine where the WebService is deployed. The .zip file also contains a .bat script to compile the TestService.java class (compileTestService.bat).

At this stage, our simple WebService is deployed and running correctly.

Generating the Stubs from WSDL
In general Stubs classes are classes that allow you to instantiate local Java (or in another language) objects that act as proxies to remote objects or components, facilitating interoperability and the implementation of distributed systems.

Axis comes with an utility, WSDL2java, that allows the automatic generation of the necessary Java stubs to call our WebService as if it was local. You can find out more information about this tool on the Axis Website
http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/ant/axis-wsdl2java.html

To automatically generate the Stub, the .zip file contains a .bat script called WSDL2Java.bat. Before executing this command, please also update the axis path as done previously with the runTestService.bat

If you open the WSDL2Java.bat file, it contains the following command line:

java org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java http://dbe.dnsalias.net:8080/axis/DateService.jws?wsdl -o . –p org.dbe.demos.uce.dateservice.ws

The WSDL2Java utility takes many more arguments. For this tutorial, we have specified:

- http://dbe.dnsalias.net:8080/axis/DateService.jws?wsdl: The location of our service and the full URL of the WSDL.
- -o .: the output will be saved under the current directory
- -p org.dbe.demos.uce.dateservice.ws: A package with that name will be created
- -v: Verbose output
- -t: Generate test cases

After the command is run, a new Java package is created containing the Stub and the necessary classes to consume our WebService. With the –t option, WSDL2Java will also generate some potential test cases contained in the DateServiceServiceTestCase.java file.

To create the previous TestService.java class, I have simply copied and pasted (and slightly modified) the code from the generated test case to the TestService.java class in the main method, and added the generated package in my imports section of the Java class.

DateServiceServiceTestCase.java (Generated Stub)
TestService.java

Also, when copying/pasting the test case to the TestService.java main method, we need to make sure to obtain a Date object rather than a Calendar one. Due to the WSDL specification, WSDL2Java has generated a Calendar object as the return type of your WebService.

In your client class, you need to change the following:

// Test operation
java.util.Calendar value = null;
value = binding.getDate();
// TBD - validate results

To:

// Test operation
java.util.Calendar value = null;
value = binding.getDate();
Date date = value.getTime()
// TBD - validate results

If you have installed Tomcat and Axis on your machine, you have to change the URL of the WSDL2Java command line to the url of the machine where the WebService is running, (such as localhost)

Porting to the DBE
At this stage, the porting to the DBE is very simple. You just need to copy the code from the test case (as it was modified in TestService.java) to your adapter. In this case, you modify the UCEDateServiceImpl.java getDate() method

from:

/**
* Returns the current date. Implementation of the example
* date service.
*
* @return current date
*/
public Date getDate() {
return new Date();
}

to:
/**
* Returns the current date. Implementation of the example
* date service using the webservice.
*
* @return current date
*/
public Date getDate() {
DateServiceSoapBindingStub binding = null;;
try
{
binding = (DateServiceSoapBindingStub)new Da
Locator().getDateService();

}
catch (javax.xml.rpc.ServiceException ex)
{
ex.printStackTrace();
return null;
}

// Time out after a minute

binding.setTimeout(60000);
// Test operation
java.util.Calendar value = null;
try
{
value = binding.getDate();
return value.getTime();
}
catch (java.rmi.RemoteException ex)
{
ex.printStackTrace();
return null;
}
}
As with the TestService.java class, you need to include the generated package with the Stub path in your import statements.

This section illustrates that porting from a standard WebService to a DBE service could be fairly simple. We have just simply copied and modified slightly the code automatically generated by the WSDL2java utility to our Adapter.

Deployment
Our deployment structure is:

UCEDateService

---------------.\UCEDateService\deployment.props

---------------.\UCEDateService\classes\UCEDateService.class

---------------.\UCEDateService\classes\UCEDateServiceImpl.class

----------------.\UCEDateService\lib\MyWebServices.jar

The deployment of our new service requires to pack the Stub classes into one file (MyWebService.jar). We need also to indicate in the deployment.props the classpath of MyWebService.jar

deployment.props:
applicationName=Simple UCEDateService with WS
adapter=UCEDateServiceImpl
proxy=UCEDateService
smid=UCEDateService
classpath=/:/lib/MyWebService.jar

The .bat script makeDeploymentFile.bat creates automatically the deployment structure andpackes it up on the deployThis.dar

To deploy the service, just open the deploy.html file and upload deployThis.dar.

Note: Before deployment it is required also to update the axis.jar in the servENT distribution to the version that you have used to generate the Stubs. From your Axis installation, copy the axis.jar onto the your-servENT\common directory (this assumes that you are doing the deployment on your local machine).

Consuming the Service
To consume the service, you simply follow the instructions of the first tutorial, by executing runClient.bat. In this case your DBE client has not changed and it is not aware that now that the service is being executed as a WebService and not as part of the Adapter.

Conclusions
This tutorial has illustrated how to port a simple WebService to the DBE ExE. With Axis WSD2java we have automated some of the tasks required to port the WebService to the DBE ExE.

What Time Is IT? Date GUI DBE Service

2005-08-16T16:26:00.000+01:00

Files: UCEDateGUIExample.zip

In the last tutorial we run a simple DBE service using the ExE. The tutorial provided the basis for deploying and consuming the service, and also it provided instructions on how to install and configure an ExE DBE node.

Based on the previous tutorial, this one will implement the service with Graphical User Interface (GUI). This tutorial is based on the one produced by our Regional Catalyst partners ITA in Aragon (Spain). This tutorial focuses on getting the service quickly deployed and consumed.

The tutorial has 4 parts:

Requirements
Deploying the Service
Running/Testing the Service
Conclusions

Requirements
If you haven’t installed the servENT distribution yet, please follow the details in the previous tutorial to install and configure the servENT. We assume that you are using servENT version 1.4. In this example the service is self-contained and all the code necessary to run the service is part of the service itself, including the graphical user interface.

Deploying the Service
Download the UCEDateGUIExample.zip file and unzip it to a suitable directory. As with the previous tutorial, once the servENT is started, we can deploy our service by using the deploy.html file within that directory. Open the deploy.html file and upload the deployThis.dar file and press “go”. If everything went OK you should see a “Service Registered” message/page, and browsing to the services pages of the FADA node should display the service smid (http://localhost:2002/services)

Running/Testing the Service
In this case, we can run/test the service in two different ways, as a service embedded in a (Java) Applet or as a standalone DBE service.To test the service as an Applet, you will need to type this URL on your browser:
http://_servent_ip_:_servent_port_/CLIENT/show?entries=_entry_
where:
_servent_ip_ is the host where the servENT is running, typically localhost
_servent_port_ is the port where servENT is running, typically 2728 (default)
_entry_ is the name of the service (service smid as described in servent.props)

In our case, our URL should look like: http://localhost:2728/CLIENT/show?entries=UCEDateServiceGUI

When you load the URL, an Applet should open and run the service. Running the service as an Applet requires that you have your browser properly configured to support Java Applets.

To run the service as a standalone java class, copy the file “client.bat” (included in UCEDateGUIExample.zip ) under your servENT bin directory and execute the command (within that directory)

\bin\Client.bat UCEDateServiceGUI

More or less immediately, you should see a window like this.

If you click on the “get date” button, you should obtain a new window with a dialog box showing the date. In this case, our service contains both the user interface and the service.

Conclusions
The previous tutorial demonstrated how to deploy and consume a simple service. On this tutorial we have replicated the functionality of the previous service and included a GUI that also gets deployed and consumed together with the real service. In both cases, the service consumer (client) had no knowledge of the protocol, or the real service location*.

For more information, look at the source code included on this example and also at the servENT users guide, available at the SourceForge site.

http://swallow.sourceforge.net/distribution/docs/user_guide.html

* For simplicity, we have used only localhost

What Time Is IT? A DBE Service

2005-08-12T14:08:00.000+01:00

Files: UCEDateExample.zip

This is a very short tutorial of how deploy and run a simple service based onto the DBE Execution Environment (ExE). When the service is called, it returns the date of the system in which the service is running.

While the service is nothing to get excited about, it demonstrates in simple terms the steps to deploy and consume a DBE service. The tutorial is based on some of the DBE training materials used during a DBE Technology Workshop held in Helsinki (Findland).

The tutorial has 6 parts:

Requirements
Installing and configuring servENT
Running servENT
Deploying the Service
Running the Service
Conclusions

Requirements

I will assume initially that we are using a MS Windows based system (XP Pro, 2000, Server, etc) and that you have also installed on the system initially the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or the java SDK.

First you need to install the latest version of the servENT (currently version 1.4). The servENT is a hybrid client/server. The servENT site provides a short description of what the servENT is:

“A peer2peer application container that isolates the programmer from the peer2peer coding complexity. Applications are coded as a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) object without any single acknowledge of distributed programming”

In simpler terms, the servENT allows developers to create distributed applications as if they were local applications. servENT is both a client and a server, making the design of Services Oriented Architectures and digital ecosystems based on service aggregation simpler.

You can download the version 1.4 of the servENT here(*):

http://gaudi.techideas.info/dist/

(*) Version 1.5 of the servent has been released. This tutorial assumes that you have version 1.4.

Installing and configuring servENT
To install the servENT, double click on the jar file or run it from the command line:

java –jar servent-0.1.4.jar

After running the command, a window appears prompting you to accept the GNU Lesser GPL Licence and the installer will ask you where to install servENT. For simplicity, lets assume that we install the servENT on C:\Program files\servent (The default directory of the installer, see the previous picture).

Once the servent is installed, you will need to edit and change a couple of properties in the servent.props file. This file is located under C:\Program Files\servent.

Open the file and first of all, make sure that the property “rootPath” has the format (with forward slash)

rootPath=C:/Program Files/servent

Also, uncomment the property "fada.autostart" so that it reads

…..

#fada.leaseTime=6000

#fada.lookuptime=10000

fada.autostart=true

……

Also, change the password to something different and make a note. The property is called “adminPassword”

……

adminPassword=Your password here

….

We will need this password when deploying a new service. Save the servent.props file.

Running servENT
We are almost there. Now we need to run servENT. Under the c:\Program Files\servent\bin, double click on the run.bat. You should see the servent running spitting out lots of debug/output messages. The last message should read.

“FADA on ready completed”

If you get errors or servENT does not work, make sure that you have modified correctly the servent.props file

The servENT is actually made of two components servENT and FADA. You can read more about the architecture on http://swallow.sourceforge.net/ and http://fada.techideas.info/

Once the servENT is running, you can point your browser to http://localhost:2002/ and you should see the node management interface:

Deploying a Service
Now we need to deploy the service. Download the UCEDateExample.zip and unzip it to your local hard disk. In my case I unzipped the file in my F:\ drive. Under that directory there is a file called deploy.html. this file will upload a service to the local servENT, which is assumed that is running on your local machine (localhost).

Our Date service is already created and packed on a .dar file (Deployment ARchive) called "deployThis.dar"

Open the deploy.html, click on the “Browse” Button and select (open) the "deployThis.dar" file. Click on "go!". The system should prompt you for the password that you entered earlier. If everything went OK you should see a “Service Registered” message/page.

Browse to http://localhost:2002/services, and you should see our service registered:

Now is time to run our service. There is a .bat file called runClient.bat, if you run that command, from a console (not by double clicking) you should get an output like this:
conclusions

Conclusions

This sort tutorial has shown how to deploy and consume a DBE service. The .zip archive also contains instructions and scripts for Windows to compile and create the .dar file (see included readme.txt).

For simplicity, it has been assumed that everything is run under the same machine. However, it is possible to install a servENT node on a different machine in your local area network and start exploring the possibilities of running Services in the P2P network rather than running (Web)Services in a typical Client/Server architecture. If you do that, the FADA node management interface has an option to use multicast broadcast for the nodes to find each other (under the your servent/fada directory, the file is called "configure.bat)".

Open Source Business Opportunities

2005-08-11T09:54:00.000+01:00

A special report in Infoworld provides a list of interesting business opportunities. These include ERP, CRM, EPOS, VOIP, RFID, etc. These commercial opportunities look ideal to be exploited/tested through the DBE project. DBE enables the open source applications to be offered as services for usage by multiple industry segments.

Designing for Participation

2005-08-08T11:46:00.000+01:00

On this PodCast (and the presentation), Tim O'Reilly presents current case of successful Business2Consumers (B2C) internet sites that rely on heavy services aggregation and user participation.

The PodCast and the presentation highlight how we are moving from software packages to software services, from standalone applications to applications as aggregated software services, from the desktop application stack to the internet application stack and where sharing your data and your services aggregated software services adds value to your data and to your business.

SOA Tools

2005-08-05T07:22:00.000+01:00

An article describing the current momentum that SOA and the MDA philosophy is gaining amongst tool vendors, specially developing add-ons to Eclipse in order to support the SOA/MDA development approach.

Business Benefits for SOA Adoption

2005-08-04T10:58:00.000+01:00

It is interesting to try and understand the business drivers for SOA adoption. It is clear that these will be very different based on the size of the organisation, the industry sector, the value networks and the current level of IT adoption. Three areas have been looked based on the capabilities of SOA. These are:

Reusability
Service composition, orchestration and choreography
Loose coupling

A paper from webMethods uses the above mentioned capabilities of SOA to discover the business drivers for SOA adoption (http://www1.webmethods.com/PDF/The_Business_Case_for_SOA.pdf).

The arguments presented are highly relevant from a large firm perspective particularly for those with a high level of IT adoption. The challenge still remains for small and medium enterprises (SME) who mostly lag in IT adoption and this has been a concern from economic perspectives. The digital divide is significant and pundits predict that SOA is an answer to bridge the gap. But how? The above three capabilities of SOA are still useful for discovering the business drivers for SMEs. But what else needs to be understood before we embark on identifying the real business drivers? These are likely to be:

Supply side and demand side capabilities and features
Current barriers to IT adoption - Technology and non-technology issues
Service needs and priorities

There is also the issue of availability of a public SOA for such a usage. Though the DBE Project is involved in creating such a facility it is going to take some time before it is ready to support any commercial service implementations.

Interesting blog on SOA in third world.

View of Business Service Flow

2005-08-02T22:40:00.000+01:00

Creating DBE services from existing applications

2005-08-02T00:32:00.000+01:00

Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures and Digital Business Ecosystems are becoming key concepts in the Software Development World. Software developers are keen to know more about these new developments and are also interested knowing how to get on board with their existing applications.

The key characteristics of software services developed for the new paradigm are loose coupling, reusability and open standards. These characteristics are important and lead a new focus in software development towards development of new software services. However for existing applications to be migrated to the DBE the requirement is to develop a service adapter to eanble access. The adapter is a simple Java programme. Information for creating web services from existing applications is available from this site - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-legacy/. The requirement for the DBE is similar.

Welcome to Digital Business Ecosystem

2005-07-30T04:07:00.000+01:00

Digital Business Ecosystem Project is one of the largest open source projects funded by European Union. The main objective is to develop an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to enable Small & Medium Software Developers (SME) to offer innovative software services, developed rapidly and at low costs. The architecture will enable the search & discovery and consumption of both software and real world services.

An article at this location is interesting as it provides a view of web services using a real world services lens (http://www.cognizant.com/wizards/Thpapers/FutureofWebServices.pdf).

The key elements of DBE architecture are:

Service Factory - DBE Studio comprising of Business Modelling Language (BML) Authoring Tool and Wizard, BML Editor
Execution Environment - Semantic Registry and ServENT
Evolutionary Environment - Service Recommender and Fitness Landscape
Service Proxy - Technical architecture based on JINI

The pilot DBE architecture is being implemented in three regions of Europe: Aragon, Spain, Tampere, Finland and West Midlands, United Kingdom.