My JUDCon 2011 in London was cloudy with a bit of migration

Great location JUDCon 2011 London

 Well, where do I start? That is the first thought that enters my head when I look back at two days of JUDCon in London! I will share with you my direct experiences and hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed hanging out with all the JBoss Rock Stars.

I flew in late on Sunday evening, as I had a morning meeting that kept me away from the morning sessions where there was a session focused on jBPM5 by Kris Verlaenen. There was also an OpenShift / Cloud track running parallel on my track so that meant I missed all of that.

Once I got to JUDCon it was well streamlined and I held my session on Launching into the Future with the jBPM Migration Project. I asked if there were jBPM3 users and over 1/2 raised their hands. I understand why there are there, so I go around the room asking the others why they are there. Most are also interested in moving existing jBPM3 projects to jBPM5 but did not raise their hands initially, sneaky! I also noted that there were a few Red Hat support engineers that will have to help support jBPM and were keen to see what we had done. Kudos to them for self education!

I kept the session more conversational and person with lots of interaction along the way. I walked through the history leading up to now for the project and demo'ed both the conversion in Eclipse, in an OpenShift webapp we have deployed and in the latest jBPM web designer deployed in OpenShift. I also included HOWTO slides so that everyone can put these tools together themselves in minutes.

Launching into the Future with jBPM Migration Project

By the way, the lunches, snacks and dinner were top rate. Plenty of food and everyone enjoyed the beers and pizza going into the evening Lightning Talks / Hackfest as you can see in the pictures.

The JBoss Asylum team put on a live show for us by recording the podcast as the first Lightning Talk. This was really quite good as the beer and pizza had already been flowing. You will notice lots of laughs in the background once they release this episode!

Lightning Talks were crowded

Finally we got down to business with both Max Andersen and myself targeting OpenShift in our talks. I hit the general note, inviting our first official Booth Babe to the stage (a lady who agreed to help out and got a great free shirt). I invited everyone who wanted to try it out to drop by our table at the front and we would help them install their apps into the cloud. I put a bit of Halloween tint on the initial slide, got some good cheers from that one. Again, it might have just been the beer? Jeremy Brown got up and demo'ed a pretty neat use of the 5x free OpenShift Express instances by showing how to use continuous builds with Jenkins to push to new instances for each feature branch a team would create on a development project.

Max Andersen then gave a talk on the JBossTools integration of OpenShift, including a demo of the upcoming release. This is a great step for the Java developers out there that don't want to have to use Ruby based CLI tooling from the shell. Well done!

Lets Get Started with Openshift

We then proceeded to have a bit of a hackfest, working on OpenShift and jBPM Migration Project as we chatted with customers, developers and other fellow JBoss'ians. The next day was spent in the morning watching a few of the JBoss related sessions such as jClouds and configuration management for JBoss AS7, but I had a plane to catch so was on the way home before it all ended.

It was again a really great time, I hope that you will make one of the next JUDCon's in 2012 as you really will get the chance to dunk yourself into the world of JBoss like no there conference can offer. See you there!

jBPM Web Designer integrates jBPM Migration Tooling in the OpenShift Cloud

New migration feature

Last week the jBPM Web Designer screen-casted the release of a new version (well, a beta anyway) that includes some pretty neat features. The one we here in the jBPM Migration Project team are most proud of is that they have exposed the jBPM Migration Tooling!

paste in jpdl3.2 + gpd files

We thought it would be nice to provide a playground in the OpenShift Cloud for you the public to give it a try. Here are a few screenshots showing the designer, the import pop-up with a jBPM3.2 process definition and the corresponding gpd file containing positioning information and finally the migrtated BPMN2 process definition.

Here are the example jPDL and GPD sources so you can directly cut&paste them into the migration pop-up to test it:


jPDL3.2 process definition source

 
  
 

 
  
   A human task.
  
  
   
    A test task.
   
   
  
  
 

 

GPD location information source

You can't save the process, but you can view the source in various forms with the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Give the BPMN2 tab a try!

View source tabs

I will be presenting this and more on the current status of the jBPM Migration Project in London next week at JUDCon. The session is entitled, Launching into the future with jBPM Migration Project.

See you there? ;-)

London JBug - JBoss jBPM Night (slides)

I gave the talk entitled, JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes tonight for about 30 attendees. It was pretty interactive with the audience showing a real interest in the new jBPM5 tooling, flexible processes and migration tooling.

Thanks again to all who turned up and the pizza was great afterwards!

Here are the slides:

JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell.

A few pictures were taken while I was talking:

London JBUG - 17 Oct 2011

From Code to Cloud - PHP on Red Hat's OpenShift (Slides)

As posted previously, I spoke at the International PHP Conference and Web Technology Conference in Mainz, Germany today. Here are the slides from the session, which included the audience participating directly in deploying Zend, Cake and Symfony frameworks into the OpenShift Express solution!

From Code to Cloud - PHP on Red Hat's OpenShift

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell.

OpenShift Express - how to get started with Symfony PHP framework

I pulled together an installation howto for Symfony PHP Framework on OpenShift Express, you can follow the Readme file to push this into your very own OpenShift Express instance!

# Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/
#
# Create a php-5.3 application.
#
$ rhc-create-app -a symfonyphp -t php-5.3

# Add this upstream openshift-symfony repo
#
$ cd symfonyphp
$ git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/eschabell/openshift-symfony.git
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

# Then push the repo upstream
#
git push

That's it, you can now checkout your application at http://sympfonyphp-$your_domain.rhcloud.com, isn't that easy!

NOTES:

GIT_ROOT/.openshift/action_hooks/build: This has a few lines to ensure that the cache dir exists and is writable for the web server.

Security: Nothing has been done to secure this installation.

jBPM Migration Tooling available in the OpenShift Cloud!

After our latest evening of coding on the jBPM Migration project we were able to fix quite a few bugs and pushed a web based jBPM Migration application into the cloud that enables everyone to play with the migration tooling right now!

I admit, it is in a crude form, but I am a fan of release early (if not often due to real life!). We will be massaging this to spiffy it up a bit, but the idea is there. You can upload your jBPM 3.2 process definition file (processdefinition.xml) and on the results page you will find a copy of your jPDL and below that the resulting BPMN2 XML. This is not formatted, but you can paste it into your IDE for formatting, viewing in the diverse jBPM5 editor tools and verify your process is migrated.

Even better, you can replicate this setup by following our Readme in the jBPM Migration Upload project. The basic steps to setup an OpenShift JBoss AS 7 instance and deploy the jBPM Migration Tool is as follows:

jBPM Migration Tooling on OpenShift Express
Installing the jBPM Migration tool on OpenShift was never easier! This git repository helps you get up and running quickly with the jBPM Migration Tooling.

# Running on OpenShift.
# Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/
#
# Create a jbossas-7.0 application
#
$ rhc-create-app -l $username -a jbpmmigration -t jbossas-7.0

# Add this upstream openshift-jbpmmigration repo.
#
$ cd jbpmmigration
$ git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/eschabell/openshift-jbpmmigration.git
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
    
# Then push the repo upstream.
#
$ git push

That's it, you can now checkout your application at: http://jbpmmigration-$your_domain.rhcloud.com/jbpmmigration_upload-0.1

Usage notes: You can submit a jBPM jPDL 3.2 process definition as an xml file upload, the resulting page will show you first your submitted file (if all goes well) and the resulting BPMN2 process definition. This can be cut and paste into your IDE for formatting and testing against the jBPM5 editor(s).

I will be discussing this tooling at JUDCon in London and the London JBUG, drop by and we can chat about it. For now, get busy and start testing your process definitions before migration to jBPM5! ;-)

OpenShift Express - how to get started with ZendFramework

I was looking to upgrade a rough draft article in the Express forums and place it into a structured git repo howto form so I put the following together. You can follow the Readme file to push this into your very own OpenShift Express instance!

# Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/
#
# Create a php-5.3 application.
#
$ rhc-create-app -l $username -a zendphp -t php-5.3

# Add this upstream zendphp repo.
#
$ cd zendphp
$ git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/eschabell/openshift-zendframework.git
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
# note that the git pull above can be used later to pull updates to zendphp

# Then push the repo upstream.
#
$ git push

That's it, you can now checkout your application at: http://zendphp-$your_domain.rhcloud.com, easy isn't it! ;-)

Fedora 15 - Chrome 14.x won't start for you?

I was having this problem after and update and first ran it from the console to find out what the problem was:

# running google-chrome from the command line.
#
$ google-chrome

/opt/google/chrome/chrome: error while loading shared libraries: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

# seems this is due to some permission errors, so you can run chrome 
# without the sandbox...
#
$ google-chrome --no-sandbox

# ...or you can fix the permission problem by turning it off.
#
$ sudo setenforce 0

Hope this helps you get back into your Chrome experience! ;-)