Eric D. Schabell: November 2012

Thursday, November 29, 2012

DevoxxUK 2013 (CFP) the newest member of the Devoxx family

I missed Devoxx in Belgium this year, so wanted to try and make the newest member of the Devoxx family in the UK. I have submitted a few sessions:

Wickedly easy Web based BPM with JBoss
In this session we will take a deep dive into the JBoss BPM Web-based tooling  (JBoss BRMS based Process Designer, Asset Manager, Business Central). We will go over a number of live demos which show how these tools can be utilized to increase the agility and dynamic nature of BPM efforts as well as provide subject-matter experts and technical experts a greater role in modelling, managing, and executing business processes.

OpenShift State of the Union
There are plenty of clouds and platform-as-a-services to choose from, but where to start? Join us for an action-packed hour of power where we'll show you how to deploy an application written in the language of your choice - Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, with the framework of your choice - EE6, CDI, Seam, Spring or Rails to the OpenShift PaaS in just minutes. All without having to rewrite your app to get it to work as the cloud provider thinks it should work. We will focus on examples that highlight what OpenShift has to offer, how to get started, & provide example projects that you can access now. Bring your laptop & follow along as we help you get started with Aerogears, Drools Planner, BRMS, Switchyard & much more. Real world projects put on display for you with code you can access live during this session. If you want to learn how the OpenShift PaaS & investing an hour of your time can change everything you thought you knew about developing apps in the cloud, this session is for you!

Can Open Source Power your Intelligent Integrated Enterprise?
Enterprises are dealing with exploding levels of business events and associated data. So how do you stay competitive and meet customer expectations in the midst of this growth? By leveraging the Apache ecosystem to connect your IT infrastructure to respond to changing market conditions in real time. By increasing agility with Apache, you will engage your markets and win customer mind share. This session will show you how you can achieve this vision with integration projects; Karaf, Camel, Switchyard, ActiveMQ, Drools, jBPM and much more. You will learn what an intelligent, integrated enterprise is, how to leverage open projects to build yours, understand the value derived and be given a tour of example real life scenarios that implement an an intelligent, integrated enterprise.

Hope to see you there! ;)

JBoss BRMS Best Practices - tips for your BPM Process Interaction Layer




I have posted some articles in the past on migration strategies, taken closer looks at process layers and provided some best practices for jBPM, both touching on very specific parts of your BPM strategies. I wanted to revisit the topic of best practices but then on an Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise level where we talk about getting control over your business processes with JBoss BRMS.

Introduction
To start with we need to take a closer look at the landscape and then peel back the layers like an onion for a closer look at how we can provide BPM projects that scale well. Figure 1 shows that there are several component layers where we will want to focus our attention:


Figure 1: Enterprise BPM landscape.
The process initialization layer was covered in part I of this series, where I presented some best practices around you, your customer and how processes are started.

The process implementation layer I covered previously in part II of this series, where we talked about some of the aspects of the Stateful Knowledge Session and how to optimise your projects.

The console, reporting and BAM dashboard components are the extended tooling used in projects to provide business value or information that can be used to influence business decisions. Best practices in this area will be covered at a later time.


Finally, the process interaction layer is where you processes will connect to all manner of legacy systems, back office systems, service layers, rules systems even third party systems and services. Best practices in this area will be covered in this article.

Process Interaction Layer

There is much to be gained by a good strategy for accessing business logic, back-end systems, back-office systems, user interfaces, other applications, third-party services or whatever your business processes need to use to get their jobs done. Many enterprises are isolating these interactions with a service layer within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which provides for flexibility and scales nicely across all the various workloads that may be encountered. Taking a look at the BPM layer here we want to mention just a few of these backend systems as an example of how to optimize your process projects in your enterprise.

Human tasks
The JBoss BRMS BPM architecture includes a separate Human Task (HT) server that runs as a service that implements the WS-HT specification. Being pluggable there is nothing to prevent you from hosting another server in your enterprise by exposing the WS-HT task life-cycle in a service. This should then use a synchronous invocation model which vastly simplifies the standard product implementation that leverages a HornetQ messaging system by default.

Reporting
A second service that you can implement to provide great reporting scalability we call a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) service. This service you would use to centralize the BAM events and use it to push these events to JMS queues which are both reliable and fast. A separate machine can then be used to host these JMS BAM queues, processing the messages without putting load on the BPM engine itself, write to a separate BAM database, optimise with batch writing and any clients that consume the BAM information will again not be putting any load on the BPM engine itself.


Conclusion
This article briefly walks through the high level BPM architecture and lays out the various layers of interaction. The interaction layer is examined to provide some insights into best practices within this layer. There are several services that you can create to centralize your activities around human task and reporting. By centralising your human task interaction you can provide a standard and scalable solution to your enterprise. With the BAM service you are able to off load the work to a separate entity in your architecture, guaranteeing both delivery of these events and consistent performance with regards to reporting activities from your processes. There is still more to take a look at in future articles, in the Process Interaction Layer, in the Process Repository, in the Tooling and in the reporting & BAM layers.

Chinese translation available by Christina Lin.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

JBoss BRMS Best Practices - tips for your BPM Process Implementation Layer



I have posted some articles in the past on migration strategies, taken closer looks at process layers and provided some best practices for jBPM, both touching on very specific parts of your BPM strategies. I wanted to revisit the topic of best practices but then on an Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise level where we talk about getting control over your business processes with JBoss BRMS.

Introduction
To start with we need to take a closer look at the landscape and then peel back the layers like an onion for a closer look at how we can provide BPM projects that scale well. Figure 1 shows that there are several component layers where we will want to focus our attention:


Figure 1: Enterprise BPM landscape.
The process initialization layer was covered in part I of this series, where I presented some best practices around you, your customer and how processes are started.

The process implementation layer which will be covered here is where the processes are being maintained, with help from the process repository, tooling, business users and developers that design them. Here you will also find the various implementation details, such as domain specific extensions to cover specific node types within our projects.

The console, reporting and BAM dashboard components are the extended tooling used in projects to provide business value or information that can be used to influence business decisions. Best practices in this area will be covered at a later time.


Finally, the process interaction layer is where you processes will connect to all manner of legacy systems, back office systems, service layers, rules systems even third party systems and services. Best practices in this area will be covered in a later article.

Process Implementation Layer

This layer focuses on your business process designs, your implementations of custom actions in your processes and extensions to your ways of working with your processes. The adoption of the standard BPMN2 for process design and execution has taken a lot of the troubles out of this layer of your BPM architecture. Process engines are forced to adhere and support the BPMN2 standard which means you are limited in what can do during the designing of your processes.

Knowledge sessions
There is within the JBoss BRMS BPM component one thing of interest for building highly scalable process architectures. This is the concept of a Knowledge Session (KS), specifically a Stateful Knowledge Session (SKS). This is created to hold you process information, both data and an instance of your process specification. 

When running rules based applications it is normal procedure to run a single KS (note, not stateful!) with all your rules and data leveraging this single KS. With a SKS and processes, we want to leverage a single SKS per process instance. We can bundle this functionality into a single service to allow for concurrency and to facilitate our process instance life-cycle management. Within this service you can also embed eventual synchronous or asynchronous Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) event producers as desired.

Conclusion
This article briefly walks through the high level BPM architecture and lays out the various layers of interaction. The implementation layer is examined to provide some insights into best practices within this layer. The main focus is the SKS where we suggest how to not only use, but manage process instance life-cycles within a single service. On top of this it is suggested that this is a good entry point to offload your BAM events. There is still more to take a look at in future articles, in the Process Interaction Layer, in the Process Repository, in the Tooling and in the reporting & BAM layers.

Chinese translation available by Christina Lin.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Video: Advanced JBoss & Java in the Cloud demos

I took some time to video a screencast of my session at the Red Hat Developer Day in London in early November. The session was recorded but I forgot to record my screen for the demo part of my session.

Here you will find two short videos of the demo portion of my session, first covering OpenShift while working with the command line tooling (rhc) and second showing what you can do with the OpenShift management console.






I hope you enjoy them! :-)

UPDATE: re-published on DZone Cloud zone.

Monday, November 12, 2012

ApacheCon NA 2013 - Advanced Apache in the Cloud with OpenShift


I have submitted a talk to the upcoming ApacheCon NA 2013, located in Portland, Oregon. It runs from Feb 26 - 28, 2013 but also includes events and workshops leading up to the actual conference dates.

Since the introduction of OpenShift, the Red Hat PaaS, it has been a great environment to develop your Java projects. Not only web applications but also core Apache projects can leverage the Cloud. I wanted to include an  overview of some of the Apache projects that can be run on OpenShift.

Advanced Apache in the Cloud with OpenShift

Join us for an action-packed hour of power! Bring your laptop & follow along as we help you get started with various Apache projects in the Cloud. Why would you need local resources when you can leverage the Red Hat PaaS known as OpenShift?

Real world Apache projects put on display with code you can access live during this session. Want to learn about how OpenShift changes everything you thought you knew about Apache development in the cloud? This session is for you!

Hope to see you there!

ApacheCon NA 2013 - Can Apache Power Your Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise?

I have submitted a talk to the upcoming ApacheCon NA 2013, located in Portland, Oregon. It runs from Feb 26 - 28, 2013 but also includes events and workshops leading up to the actual conference dates.

Since JBoss Integration & BPM products have been expanding with the acquisition of FuseSource, I wanted to expand the awareness of our Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise story to include the coming integration of Apache projects.

Can Apache Power Your Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise?
Enterprises are dealing with exploding levels of business events and associated data. So how do you stay competitive and meet customer expectations in the midst of this growth? By leveraging the Apache ecosystem to connect your IT infrastructure to respond to changing market conditions in real time. By increasing agility with Apache, you will engage your markets and win customer mind share.

Apache leveraged for an integrated, flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure
The intelligent, integrated enterprise relies on:
  • Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and data services to connect siloed information.
  • A business rules management system (BRMS) to automate processes, control decision-making, and eliminate manual touch points. 
  • Advanced messaging integration to extend its reach to mobile and field devices.
  • Leveraging cloud infrastructure to adapt to changing resource needs.
The result? Less risk, better leverage of existing data assets, and happier customers.  

This session will show you how you can achieve this vision with Apache projects and how these are supported in the JBoss Enterprise Middleware integration products. You will learn what an intelligent, integrated enterprise is, how to leverage open Apache projects to build yours, understand the value derived and be given a tour of example real life scenarios that implement an an intelligent, integrated enterprise.

Hope to see you there!

Friday, November 9, 2012

OSC 2012 Amsterdam - Demystifying the path to a JBoss Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise

On December 14, I will be speaking at the Open Source Conference 2012 in Amsterdam.

This has grown into one of the premier events in EMEA for enthusiasts, customers and partners of Red Hat to gather and discuss topics such as JBoss enterprise middleware, enterprise open source, big data, cloud computing social media and mobile technologies.

It is being hosted at the Beurs van Berlage (Amsterdam Stock Market) and you can register at the OSC 2012 site. My session will be on the Intelligent Integrated Enterprise:

Demystifying the path to a JBoss Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise

Enterprises are dealing with exploding levels of business events and associated data. So how do you stay competitive and meet customer expectations in the midst of this growth? By connecting your IT infrastructure to respond to changing market conditions in real time. Without increasing agility and automation, you risk alienating customers and losing business due to poor service.

An integrated, flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure

The intelligent, integrated enterprise relies on:
  • Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and data services to connect siloed information.
  • A business rules management system (BRMS) to automate processes, control decision-making, and eliminate manual touch points. 
  • Advanced messaging to extend its reach to mobile and field devices.
  • Leveraging cloud infrastructure to adapt to changing resource needs.
The result? Less risk, better leverage of existing data assets, and happier customers.  This session will show you how you can achieve this vision with JBoss Enterprise Middleware integration products. You will learn what an intelligent, integrated enterprise is, how to build yours, understand the value derived and be given a tour of example real life scenarios that implement an an intelligent, integrated enterprise.

See you there?

UPDATE: This day was a huge success with over 1000 participants. Session went great, lots of discussion afterwards and interest in JBoss BRMS / BPM products. Slides here for your viewing pleasure.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

JAX 2013: JBoss BPMS sneak peak, the future is now for your business processes

I have submitted this session to the JAX 2013 conference in Mainz, Germany through the call for papers. The conference is scheduled for April 22-26, 2013.


JBoss BPMS sneak peak, the future is now for your business processes
A Business Process Management System offers you the capabilities to better manage & streamline your business processes. A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years with the introduction of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic & adaptive processes, integration with business rules & event processing. We will show you how JBoss jBPM tackles these challenges.

JAX 2013: Building highly scalable process & rule-driven applications

I have submitted this session to the JAX 2013 conference in Mainz, Germany through the call for papers. The conference is scheduled for April 22-26, 2013.


Building highly scalable process & rule-driven applications
In this session we will discuss best practices for constructing both BRMS and BPMS applications that support large numbers of processes and rules operating on big data. We'll illustrate common use cases, provide practical tips and you’ll learn how to confidently scale out your rule applications to meet demanding enterprise needs and based on JBoss open source technologies.

JAX 2013: OpenShift - Advanced Java & JBoss in the Cloud

I have submitted this session to the JAX 2013 conference in Mainz, Germany through the call for papers. The conference is scheduled for April 22-26, 2013.

OpenShift - Advanced Java & JBoss in the Cloud
Join us for an action-packed hour of power! Bring your laptop & follow along as we help you get started with various JBoss components such as AeroGear, Drools Planner, Switchyard ESB, JBoss BRMS, & many more. Real world examples put on display with code you can access live during this session. Want to learn about how OpenShift changes everything you thought you knew about development in the cloud?

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

JBugNL kicks off in December with an JBoss OpenShift Primer

I was approached last week by the new organisers of the Netherlands JBoss User Group (JBugNL) to provide a session on something awesome. Well that is easy, with JBoss and OpenShift you can not miss.

I will be highlighting some of the content of my soon to be released OpenShift Primer e-book so hurry up and RSVP below before we run out of space for you.

OpenShift Primer - JBoss development in the Cloud
Join us for an action-packed hour of power! Bring your laptop and follow along as we help you get started with various JBoss components such as AeroGear, Drools Planner, Switchyard ESB, JBoss Business Rules Management System, and many more. Real world working examples put on display for you with code you can access live during this session. 

Want to learn about how Red Hat OpenShift can change everything you thought you knew about developing Java apps in the cloud? This session is for you!

Location: 
Xebia offices
Utrechtseweg 49
Hilversum, Netherlands

Time: 12 Dec 2012, 1800 - 2100 hrs

Sign up via meetup.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Red Hat Developer Day London 2012 - Advanced Java & JBoss in the Cloud summary

It was a fun day in London at the Red Hat Developers Day 2012 where I met up with others talking all things JBoss and OpenShift in some form or another. I arrived a bit later in the afternoon due to my travel schedule, but just in time to chat with Pete Muir before he went on stage for his talk.

He covered a large portion of the JBoss Way and highlighted OpenShift usage from his beloved ForgeTools integration with JBoss Developers Studio.

After his talk I went on with an overview of the OpenShift Primer story I like to tell. Then I dove deeper into the various JBoss projects and products that we have running right now in OpenShift. It was both a talk and a demo so I ended the session with web based, CLI and a bit of IDE magic around creation, deploying, setup and destruction of the various JBoss projects that you can find online in my Github repositories.

I also took time to highlight my upcoming book release on OpenShift, see cover posted here. It will be an e-book appearing soon to outlets near and far via developerpress.com.