Google shows phone prototype to vendors

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.

A true DBE community

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

In a Road less world

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....

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

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)

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.

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

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

DBE Studio

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

CodeCamp: Execution Environment and Business Modelling Langauage

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.