Eric D. Schabell: April 2013

Monday, April 29, 2013

Red Hat JBoss BRMS - a shopping cart example in the Cool Store Demo

Red Hat Cool Store
It is time for another awesome JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) Cool Store Demo, this time brought to you by Jason Milliron, one of our JBoss Solution Architects.

He put together an example web application based on the popular framework Vaadin which is an example of an online shopping cart. This web application demonstrates interaction between a web front end and a decision table and rules package. This allows the business logic to become externalized from your deployed application and can then be modified as needed at runtime. This application leverages the rules to calculate the shipping costs based on your rules in the table below.

Shipping pricing table
It is pretty simple really, you can adjust how much the ranges are and what the shipping for the shopping cart total order will be by tweaking this table, for example:

  • the price from Tier 1 based on value totaling between $26 - $50 is $5.99
  • you can fill your cart with under $25 of materials to validate
  • adjust it to $6.99 (as shown in yellow)
  • save and commit changes
  • build your coolstore package
  • clear the shopping cart application
  • re-order the same materials and validate the charge to shipping is now $6.99

I have released version 1.0 which will get you started in a very short amount of time. See the provided documentation and Readme file in the project. You will also find a complete BRMS rules package with unit test scenarios. This is a complete project.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Three part video series covering the functionality in this demo project is available now, get started with Part I - Installation.

Red Hat JBoss BRMS - Customer Evaluation Demo updated to JBoss EAP 6.1.0.Beta

Customer Evaluation
With the latest release of JBoss EAP 6.1.0.Beta, it was time to overhaul my existing demo projects and here you will find the results. Previously I had updated this project to JBoss EAP 6.0.

From now on the Beta releases of our products will be available for free in the community projects, so with JBoss Application Server project being the first to do this it was time for my projects to integrate these upcoming releases.

More new goodness
The demos have also been updated to provide Windows platform installation scripts, the latest BPM web process designer patches, and the projects are now fully Manvenized. All the documentation has been updated to reflect the changes and you will notice the readme files have been expanded to include your quickstart information right from the start of your experience with the projects.

Getting the project
The project is available on Github at https://github.com/eschabell/brms-customer-evaluation-demo/tree/v1.8. You can retrieve this with a simple 'git clone git://github.com/eschabell/brms-customer-evaluation-demo.git' and 'git checkout v1.8', after which you can follow the step-by-step guide found in the Quick Start Guide. This is provided in both ODT and PDF formats. It is all kicked off by the init.sh script you will find in the project, which is quite verbose and points you to the various steps you might need to take should you have chosen to not to read the provided Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

Red Hat JBoss BRMS - Rewards Demo updated to JBoss EAP 6.1.0.Beta

Rewards

With the latest release of JBoss EAP 6.1.0.Beta, it was time to overhaul my existing demo projects and here you will find the results. Previously I had updated this project to JBoss EAP 6.0.

From now on the Beta releases of our products will be available for free in the community projects, so with JBoss Application Server project being the first to do this it was time for my projects to integrate these upcoming releases.

More new goodness
The demos have also been updated to provide Windows platform installation scripts, the latest BPM web process designer patches, and the projects are now fully Manvenized. All the documentation has been updated to reflect the changes and you will notice the readme files have been expanded to include your quickstart information right from the start of your experience with the projects.

Getting the project
The project is available on Github at https://github.com/eschabell/brms-rewards-demo/tree/v1.7. You can retrieve this with a simple 'git clone git://github.com/eschabell/brms-rewards-demo.git' and 'git checkout v1.7', after which you can follow the step-by-step guide found in the Quick Start Guide. This is provided in both ODT and PDF formats. It is all kicked off by the init.sh script you will find in the project, which is quite verbose and points you to the various steps you might need to take should you have chosen to not to read the provided Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

Friday, April 12, 2013

The future of JBoss SOA Platform, Switchyard training

Last week I was in the area for the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 so I thought I would drop in on Keith Babo and the SwitchYard training being held in Washington, DC.

Keith is a rock star at leading the SwitchYard efforts, but he is now a confirmed educator. He put together a very hands on and incredibly informative two days of workshop style training on his project. This project will become the backbone of the upcoming JBoss SOA Platform v6 so it was fantastic to get hands on with the experts.

Below a short impression, but I would suggest you get your hands on this technology as soon as you can, it is really amazing stuff!

JBoss BRMS (BPM) at Gartner BPM conference in Washington, DC

I was fortunate enough to participate this year in the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 in DC. It was my first time at a Gartner event and I was looking forward to the high level business activities and session that would be part of the event.

What I did not expect was that if you are not an end customer then you do not get to attend a lot of the events. Though I was sporting an 'Attendee' pass, the sessions required pre-registration which ended up in my being rejected for admittance. Bummer as there were some really interesting sessions.

Outside of that, it was hosted at the DC Gaylord Resort and it is an awesome place to have to be for a conference. I was lucky to meet up with colleagues from our North America field teams (thanks to Mark Yourcheck for a great few days at our stand).

Below is an impression of our days at the conference.

JBoss BRMS demos - now available for installation on Windows

This last week I have been busy, with some help from my friends, to update the existing JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) demos with some interesting fixes. Think of this a giving the demos a fresh coat of paint to make them new and shiny again.

It came about as I was preparing for a couple of webinars we have running this week. I wanted to fix a few inconsistencies and leverage a few new features that are coming down the road for our customers. I also had contacted a friend in the USA who was willing to sort out the Windows installation script, a much requested feature when I am on the road showing off with these demos.

The demos that have been patched and released are listed here to provide a starting point for you:



The first was to pull in a new web process designer version that contains bug fixes that will very shortly be made available to the customer base in a patch roll-out. The fix I was looking for has been pushed to these versions:

The most exciting fix was to enable Windows users to be able to install these demos in a fully automated fashion like the Unix based users do with an init script. On my last trip I bumped into a colleague who offered to provide these scripts. Pass your thanks to Andrew Block for his great work to enable Windows users on these demos and it was released in these versions:

Finally, don't forget to enjoy the webinars that were run highlighting these demos.

Enjoy! ;)

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Want to hide your osX (macbook) desktop icons

This is just a quick hint as to how to hide desktop icons (all of them) in a temporary fashion.

I create a lot of video demos that make it a pain when I have my personal icons to documents, folders, and other content I don't really want to have posted all over the Internet.

Here is how to do it:

Hide Desktop Icons

Launch Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
Kill the Finder so that it relaunches:
killall Finder
Files are now discretely hidden in home folder’s “Desktop” directory. To reverse, open Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
Kill the Finder so that it relaunches and they are back.

If you want to automate these into a single click of your mouse button, just put this into a file, make it executable, create an alias, and drop the alias file onto your task bar. One for icons on and one for icons off: #!/bin/bash

# 1. copy this code to file iconson.command
# 2. make executable with 'chmod +x iconson.command
# 3. make alias file and drop onto menu bar
#
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

killall Finder


#!/bin/bash

# 1. copy this code to file iconsoff.command
# 2. make executable with 'chmod +x iconson.command
# 3. make alias file and drop onto menu bar
#
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

killall Finder

Now you can clean your desk for screencasts and video capturing and put it all back when you are done by clicking on the files!

Monday, April 8, 2013

JBoss Developer Studio 6 - how to setup SOA Tools (BRMS example)

Step 2: SOA Tools Update Site 
I have been getting questions about getting started with JBoss Developers Studio (JBDS) version 6 and the latest greatest Business Rules Management System (BRMS) tooling. For posterity, here is how I do it:
  1. Get the latest JBDS 6 from your local Customer Support Portal (CSP) or get your evaluation copy.
  2. You are missing the BRMS tooling, so add the JBoss SOA Tools update site via "Help -> Install New Software..." http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/integration/juno/integration-stack/aggregate/
  3. Step 3: JBoss BRMS tooling
  4. Select "BRMS Tooling"
After install you are ready to rock with all the new tooling supporting Rules, Events and Processes (jBPM).

Other options

In the past we have outlined the use of JBoss BPM and rules tooling for other versions of JBDS: