New cool tools that I am using: DabbleBoard & Balsamiq

Tug | Aug 7, 2008 01:30 -0600
When working on software design, UI Mockups are quite important and Patrice, colleague of mine at eXo has pointed me to a very cool tool to use when you have to quickly do a mockup, and work with the dev team in an iterative fashion: This tool is "Balsamiq Mockup". Here an example of mockup realized with Balsamiq:
Also if you read more about the tool, you can see that it has native integration

Who’s the best web host?

Peter O'Brien | Aug 6, 2008 01:40 -0600
Sometime ago a friend asked me the exact same question: who's the best web host? At the time I didn't have an answer. It's been that long since I've organised the hosting of a domain, content, and so on. What I do remember, is that web hosting companies are definitely not all the same. So, how do you find out who's the best web host?

Recently I discovered a site for web hosting reviews that has ratings from customers on most, if not all, of the major US based web hosting companies. Reflecting the fact that one size does not fit all they have categories for Unix, Windows, hosting on a budget, and so on. The customer reviews are also well categorised with ratings for User Friendliness, Quality, Price, Space, Reliability & Uptime, Traffic, Customer Support and Technical Support. This gives you a better picture on the characteristics of each provider. Allowing you to choose who's the best web host for you. Check it out.

Solzhenitsyn remembered

Greg Pavlik | Aug 5, 2008 12:30 -0600
I read Solzhenitsyn relatively late, much later than I should have. For me, his work will always serve as a warning about how readily humans can be trapped in a cycle of cruelty and exploitation: both as exploited and exploiters. I read dozens on essays remembering Solzhenitsyn over the last few days; I thought this piece from der Speigel captured the Western perspective quite well: he was never really understood by those who received him in exile, that he was sometimes thoroughly wrong headed, and that he was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the last century.

Getting the basics done

Steve Jones | Aug 5, 2008 10:50 -0600
Now before the team starts ramping up you need to get it clear what the project is aiming for. You've done the vision and you know your stakeholders which is great. But you don't really know what the project is. This is where your service architecture comes in. The purpose at this stage is normally just to do the Level 0 which will define the different groupings and areas for the project.

WESOA 08 Workshop (second CFP)

Greg Pavlik | Aug 4, 2008 20:10 -0600
S E C O N D C A L L F O R P A P E R S

4th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
"SERVICE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN" (WESOA'08)

In conjunction with the 6th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2008) http://www.icsoc.org/

Sydney, Australia, December 1st, 2008

WESOA Workshop Website http://www.wesoa.org/

Abstract Submission Due: Oct. 1st, 2008


OBJECTIVES
==========

In large-scale software projects that increasingly adopt
service-oriented software architecture and technologies, availability
of sound systems engineering principles, -methodology and -tools for
service-oriented applications is mission-critical for project success.
However, engineering service-oriented applications poses specific
requirements that differ from traditional software engineering and
service systems engineering (SSE) is not yet established.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering
principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software
development lifecycle of service-oriented applications.

The WESOA series of workshops addresses challenges of service systems
engineering that arise from unique characteristics of service-oriented
applications. Service-oriented applications closely resemble the
organisation principles of their application domains that are often
process-driven networks. They are compositions of service system
components that are provided by autonomous stakeholders based on
unique assets and capabilities. Therefore, service-oriented
applications often have a social dimension and can be regarded as
constituents of social service communities. It is the challenge of
service systems engineering to not only cope with these specific
circumstances but to capitalise on them with radically new approaches.
The WESOA series addresses these challenges and particularly
concentrates on the aspects of service-oriented analysis and design
that provide principles methodology and tool support to capture the
characteristic requirements of networked service communities and
transform them into reusable high-quality service system designs that
underpin and drive the holistic service-oriented development
lifecycle.

WESOA'08 continues a successful series of former ICSOC
workshops. During the past three editions, WESOA has demonstrated its
relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants.
Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers
that regularly satisfied requirements of Springer and led to a special
issue of IJCSSE.

TOPICS
======

WESOA'08 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address challenges of service-oriented systems
engineering, analysis and design in general or in the context of
specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not
limited to the following:

* Service systems development lifecycle methodologies
* Service-oriented reference models and modelling frameworks
* Service-oriented analysis and design patterns
* Models, languages and methods for service-oriented domain analysis
* Analysis and design for service-based organisations, social networks
and communities
* Requirements-engineering for service systems
* Service-oriented business processes modelling
* Engineering methods for design of reusable and composable services
* Service-oriented analysis and design for grid-computing, e-Science
and cloud computing
* Architectural styles and standards for service systems
* Contract and policy design for service systems
* Design of service systems choreography and orchestration
* Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
* Validation and verification of service systems
* Tools support for analysis and design of service systems
* Model-driven SOA and service systems development
* Case studies and best practices of service-oriented analysis, design
and development

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research papers. Papers should be written in English and must not
exceed 12 pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the
WESOA conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and
circulated to participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings
will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the ICSOC conference to be found on their website
http://www.icsoc.org/.

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

* Abstract Submission Due: October 1, 2008
* Paper Submission Due: October 6, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: November 3, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: November 24, 2008
* Workshop Date: December 1, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

* Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
* Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
* Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
* Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
* Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
* Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, ES
* Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
* Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, GB
* George Feuerlicht, Sydney University of Technology, AU
* Stefan Fischer, University of Luebeck, DE
* Howard Foster, Imperial College London, GB
* Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
* Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
* Bernd Krämer, Fernuniversität Hagen, DE
* Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
* Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, US
* Tiziana Margaria-Steffen, University of Potsdam , DE
* E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
* Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
* Harald Meyer, HPI Potsdam, DE
* Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
* Josef Noll, Telenor R&D, NO
* Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot, University of Extremadura, ES
* Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, IT
* Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
* Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
* Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, DE
* Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
* Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, AT
* Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
* Walid Gaaloul, DERI Galway, IE
* Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU

OWSM 10.1.3.4 Patchset released

Vikas Jain | Aug 4, 2008 12:10 -0600
OWSM 10.1.3.4 Patchset (as part of SOA Suite patchset) has been released.
  • Download 10.1.3.4 Patchset
  • Documentation (incl. release notes and updated OWSM admin and deployment guides)
In summary, this patchset for OWSM includes
  1. Horizontal migration/SDLC (Test -> Stage -> Prod) tool
  2. Cloning tool
  3. AXIS 1.4 agent
  4. Command line tool for purging old policy versions
  5. Critical bug fixes

The lost (collaxa) BPEL-tutorials: 105.AsyncCompositeLoanBroker

Dietrich | Aug 3, 2008 14:30 -0600
Here the next BPEL tutorial. If you are starting now, please set up your environment first (take a look on the previous tutorials).
The AsyncCompositeLoanBroker will show you, how to call an asynchronous webservice/BPEL within a BPEL.

  1. Open the LoanBroker.jpr in your JDeveloper. Then open the BPEL:

  2. The LoanService is used with an Invoke and a Receive. This has to be done everytime the wsdl you use has the structure (asynchronous):
    <portType name="LoanService">
    <operation name="initiate">
    <input message="tns:LoanServiceRequestMessage"/>
    </operation>
    </portType>
    <portType name="LoanServiceCallback">
    <operation name="onResult">
    <input message="tns:LoanServiceResultMessage"/>
    </operation>
    </portType>

    and not like this (synchronous)
    <portType name="StockQuoteService">
    <operation name="process">
    <input message="tns:StockQuoteServiceRequest"/>
    <output message="tns:StockQuoteServiceResponse"/>
    </operation>
    </portType>

    For more information read the WSDL-specification...
  3. To get the tutorial running, you have to modify all build.properties in ../../utils/AsyncLoanService and in the LoanBroker project (http.port, admin.password, ...) .
  4. Do a right click on the build.xml and choose "Run Ant Target" -> deploy
    This target will deploy the LoanService and the LoanBroker.
  5. To start the BPEL open the BPELConsole -> Dashboard and click on LoanBroker. Put some parameters in the form and click invoke.

  6. In opposite to an invoke of synchronous BPEL, you will not get the response. The BPELConsole shows the following:

  7. Click on the audit and there you can see the result of the instance.
    This audit screen is very nice for debugging or retracing workflow instances.
The advantage of asynchronous BPELs is, that you do not have to care about timeouts, but this comes with the cost, that the BPEL PM has to dehydrate the instance into the database (which is a little bit slower...)

Search Engine Optimisation

Peter O'Brien | Aug 1, 2008 09:30 -0600
As mentioned in the first birthday article, 1 Year Old Today! I use Google Analytics to get an idea of visitor trends, and what articles people are reading the most. Another piece if insight is how people are finding the articles through search engines. It's interesting to see what people are looking for, and how that changes over time. Here are the top search keywords used each month for people finding SOA Station.
  • July - 'mind the gap oracle'
  • June - 'trailing block elements must have an id attribute'
  • May - 'trailing block elements must have an id attribute'
  • April - 'iban check'
  • March - 'oracle bpel custom functions'
  • February - 'extension functions for xsl in bpel'
  • January - 'soa diagram'
Of course, this is only showing you what people that found SOA Station had been searching for. What such information gives is a picture of how search engines represent your website and the content on it. This is often quite different from how you, the publisher, sees it. The styling, context and structure of the site gets lost in search engine algorithms. Many people use the search engines as their portal to the internet so Search Engine Optimisation becomes very important when trying to make your web site stand out from all the others.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO is not advertising, but to get it done well often involves specialists with in-depth knowledge of search engine algorithms.

One such specialist is Sean O'Brien ( no relation ) founder of SEO Expert, a search engine optimisation company that provides consultation, but also tailored optimisation services such as getting inbound links, listed in directories and making optimisation changes to your site. This means that these SEO Experts can be engaged on a once off or on going basis depending on your on budget and capabilities. Their site has further information on this, but only a little information on their clients or techniques. This is understandable, to a certain degree, however, having some figures on page rank improvements achieved, and a high level description of actions taken would give better justification for using SEO.

Bringing in an external, specialist, company to boost your sites ranking in search engines does make a good deal of sense. While it is not the same as advertising, you are looking for the same results. That is, increased brand awareness, and sales.

Of course, once you've spent your advertising budget, it's gone. Applying SEO and using SEO techniques on your site does have longer lasting effects.

Who are your stakeholders?

Steve Jones | Jul 30, 2008 05:40 -0600
Okay next up on the project is the stateholder groups. I've split these into three groups Sponsors and BlockersEnablersInformed or EnabledThe first group are those people who if you don't get them properly engaged and deliver what they want they the project will fail, or be seen to have failed, these tend to be the key high-level people who will ultimately judge the success of the solution.