Tuesday, May 31, 2011

SoftwareAG ProcessWorld 2011 Day1

I see conferences like ProcessWorld as a class-room training. You can get a lot of (high level) info from the whole software stack in just 2 days. Unfortunatly, like training, there are less interresting parts that you have to sit through. But you as a blog reader, can dive right into the good stuff:

- Process roundtrip
I saw some process roundtripping, but I still have to make it to the boot of Process Transformation to see if it goes round all the way. The integration with ARIS seems nice, when you change the model in Designer, you can notify the analyst to verify the changes.

-Mobile Technolgy
I had a interesting discussion with someone from Matismo, the company bought by SAG to complement their stack with mobile-apps. Apparantly they can generate not only mobile apps for the major platforms (Android, IPhone iOS, Blackberry), they can also generate Flash and HTML5. We won't see see anything from it in the near near future, simply because the aquisition is that recent.
For me personaly I don't see the purpose for the app, I would choose to create a mobile webApp. Most of the gui's from SAG are web-based, so that would be more consistent. However the guys from Apple didn't like Flash, so their you might have a problem (BPM, Mashup)... maybe will have to wait until HTML5 is the defacto standard.

-TerraCotta/Cloud
Terracotta will leverage the abilty to scale easily. This will be the backbone of their cloud offerings, however I don't have any specifics on that (yet). When talking whith the guy at the Terracotta boot, he was all praise for the technology. So I asked him why we didn't see the technology everywhere. Apparently it is used in a lot of code and it is even used on IS's. So if anyone has experience with it, I'm interested to hear about it.

-Deployment 8.2
They are working hard on changing the deployment cycle. With version 8.2 you now have the option of deploying from builds. Builds can be created from scripts (ant), which gets the assets from a VCS, file-system or other location. The assets itself are defined through ADL's (asset discription language). This way they can keep dependencies between different assets: ex. a process uses several services.
So you have a setup where the developer checks in its code, and the script runs nightly/weekly/... builds of the latest version and puts them into a repository, most of the cases a filesystem (not yet in centrasite as this will be for a future release). That repo than acts as a source for deployer.

-Complex Event Processing
This looks very interresting, they have the engine that runs in the same osgi container as the IS. They are not the same process, you could theoretically run the engine seperatly, but most of the time you would need the IS for connection to other systems. The engine itself is JMS in/ JMS out, it works with broker documents as events. These are processed by rules which are defined in SQL. You can then monitor events through Aris Mashup (which looks like a nice and powerfull tool - unfortunally on flash).

Hopefully the next day will be as interresting as the first.
Auf wiedersehen.

Author: Stefan De Wandeleir

2 comments:

  1. You can't see the need for a mobile app? Really? Do you have a smart phone? How many apps do you have on it? I imagine that you have more than one...the browser. You most likely have an app for mail, a browser, maybe twitter, etc. You do this for many reasons; speed, functionality, end device uniqueness. Just try once to use the microsoft exchange web on your mobile device and you will know exactly why you have to have an app. The same is true with most other apps as well. For example, with an iphone or ipad you get very cool and functional UI widgets that you could not use with a web app. Also, if you have a GPS you would need an app to use it. Each device manufacturer is trying to constantly push the boundaries of technology and with native apps you can take advantage of these.

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  2. I do see advatages of web-apps in general, but not direct for softwareAg. As they mentioned that the main purpose for them is monitoring, I don't see their need for such a nifty piece of software ( I must say, the software looks easy and powerfull).
    There might be cases where you have mobile apps interacting with processes and thereby utilizing specific things like GPS, I don't think that those apps are part of middleware.
    Anyway, they made the acquisition, I'm sure they'll come up with some nice use cases, and I'll be glad I can use this great technology...

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