A new quite cool release of wise-core, my JBoss.org project.

At the moment here you have a cross post of Wise’s blog:

http://jbosswise.blogspot.com/2009/08/wise-11-released.html

I’m participating in this poll as candidate for New features contribution.

As you probably remember I’ve contributed in DNA, JBossWS (sometime in the past), and JBossESB integrating Wise into ESB 4.4.  Moreover Wise is now a JBoss.org project: I’ve donated it some months ago and I’m leading the project there, and we have already released 0.9 and 1.0 versions.

If you like my efforts and would support me, and/or you are using Wise (within JBossESB or not) may I kindly ask  your vote there (you need a JBoss.org account, but it’s quite easy to register one):

http://www.jboss.org/community/poll.jspa?poll=1003

More infos from JBoss.og homepage:

Voting will end on January 30th 2009 and winners will be announced at the JBoss Virtual Experience, a web-based JBoss technology conference which will be held February 11th 2009. There is no charge for admission, but please advance register if you’d like to attend.
Terms and conditions are here. Please join us in giving these community members the recognition they deserve.

As said in this post, a lot of the strength spurring on an open source developer is narcissism. Help mine to grow up

Another cross post from wise’s blog.

It’s a funny post, containing a code_swarm (a COOOOOOLand funny project!!) video and some little update on how things are going on for the project.

http://jbosswise.blogspot.com/2009/01/wises-codeswarm.html

I’m becoming a terrible blogger…I promise I’ll post something interesting very soon. At the moment here you have a cross post of Wise’s blog:

http://jbosswise.blogspot.com/2009/01/wise-10-released.html

I’ve just posted on Wise’s blog the 1.0 roadmap.

It’s the usual cross post for my older readers

Find the original post here.

Just a cross post to announce the first release of Wise as JBoss.org project.

As my reader have learn by my last post I (and Alessio) have just donated Wise (and LMS) to JBoss.org.

But what does it mean? And more important why?

What does it mean?

Wise has been since the beginning released on LGPL license. Of course donating our code to JBoss.org we haven’t changed nothing about license. Wise still be an open source project and neither is changed, you still have code, you still have a business friendly open source license.

Code donation just change the Intellectual Property owners, switching from us to JBoss, divison of Red Hat. So it seems we are leaving all what we have on this project, but we are doing that for some good reasons.

And what does it mean for the project? More or less nothing. We are not donating and leaving project, but we will be active members (more precisely I’m going to lead the project). The good news are two new contributors from JBoss world are lending a hand with the code.

Why?

The real question is why have I decided to donate? Well, I’ve used “we” until now because Alessio and me have generally agreed on this donation. I’m switching to first singular person because Alessio kindly give me last word on the donation both because his position could condition him and because all last code written to transform wise from a general web client to zero code web service client easily integrable in a lot of server side application comes by me.

Reasons are essentially 4:

• Wise is essentially an hacking against jbossws and jax-ws tools. Quite frankly I believe a pure hacking could be good for a personal use project, which more or less have been for years Wise. But when Wise have gotten a lot of interest integrating with the (cool) jbossesb project my point of view has changed. The question is: is possible to maintain wise and add features without having a strict join with jbossws and/or jbossesb with which is strictly dependent/integrated? And are there any better way to get it joined than make Wise a JBoss.org project? More users have been using Wise, and I have gotten some good feedback, but I think they need a serious approach of the project ensuring them Wise will not break (or at lest it will have great chance to don’t) it compatibility and interoperability which are the main reasons a lot of users is coming to us.
• Becoming a JBoss.org project Wise would probably have a larger and greater community. It should mean more and better feedbacks and contribution (already verified since we have gotten 2 new contributors). More feedbacks and contribution mean better software and it’s all what I care.
• I believe JBoss open source model is good. I think what they call professional open source is great. Maybe not all will agree with me, but it’s my own thoughts. It’s not planned at the moment, but I wouldn’t have any problem if one day Wise would be included in a JBoss product and someone will pay for support. Moreover I think it would be great, and for sure I wouldn’t have sufficient time to provide a professional support to them. I think open source is great, but home made product haven’t a real future, they need some kind of support, some company behind. I hope JBoss could be the company behind Wise.
• Last but not least because I’m honoured of JBoss’s interest on my project. A lot of the strength spurring on an open source developer is narcissism And I can ensure you sometimes it’s really needed with a little daughter and a lovely wife (with a great sense of humour) saying “ok, you don’t smoke, but you write code”

Have I taken a mistake? I don’t believe so. Anyway Wise is not going to an end, but to a bright new beginning: we have a lot of ideas, both increasing wise current capability and adding totally new features making it much more useful both in its traditional world (web services client/test) and in some new way I’m currently exploring and I’ll post about very soon. Stay tuned, and please join us and our building community contributing on our public forums, reporting bugs or writing some code. BTW Wise now have its own blog even if I’ll continue to cross post here for a while for wise’s older fans .

Moreover we are not discontinuing this blog where we will continue to post our experiences and point of views not necesseraly related to Wise (BTW the two most read posts aren’t about Wise, but subversion branching and a new approach to unit tests).

Stay tuned.

Just a cross post to annonce something we are very proude to announce.

I’ll post soon about reasons who convinced me to donate our code.

As I wrote in some previous posts me and my fine team are working from a while to a project using JBossESB Wise action in a real world enterprise application. We are using it for the ETL (Extract Transfor Load) phase for a big DWH (Data Ware House) with an incremental loading of data.

In a nutshell we trace logical changes on an OLTP database (it’s a financial DB where all changes can be associated logically to a single company or at least to a network of company related for various reasons). Then we use JBossESB (and in particular SQLGateway) to periodically treat modified companies and extracting and enriching information to be loaded on the DWH instance. Where wise have its place? Well a lot of information and business rule to extract or enrich data have been implemented as webservices in last 3/4 years. So it’s pretty natural to reuse them to implement this last application.

Ok, it’s the bird eye view of the problem and the solution. On the rest of the post I’ll go in more formal details, starting with requirement and environment description

Requirement and environment description

The main requirement have been to collect a set of data regarding a large set of company (about 5 million) in a DWH for a marketing analysis. This data comes from different systems: 3 different OLTP relational database, and legacy host based system, an external provider. The good news is that both host system and external provider are accessible using webservices. Moreover OLTP databases have some webservices extracting data applying complex business rules; they doesn’t cover all requirements, but these DBs are completely under control of our development team, and dedicated jdbc and/or EJB3 access could be developed for new goals.

The final users would update it’s DWH with daily frequency. The large amount of data made impossible to extract transform and load the whole data every night. We have decided to keep track of changes on the main OLTP DB, and reload completely companies changed (some thousands a day).

Of course this approach isn’t totally new, incremental ETL are pretty common in DWH world, and all vendors have its own proprietary solution. While these proprietary system have its place and its plus, isn’t IMHO sufficient flexible to support an heterogeneous environment as one described. I thought it’s better to track with proprietary triggers logical significative changes (not a lot in fact) and adopt a SOA solution for ETL. It would be better in terms of flexibility and would permit us to reuse much more easily a lot of already written services containig complex business rules.

So the solution adopted have been based on JBossESB ant its composed by these macro steps:

1. A set of triggers on 2 of 3 named OLTP DB collect changes and write a unique identifier of the company in a dedicated table
2. A SQLGateway consume this table (the frequency of wake up and filters of the query are designed to avoid excessive and and not useful double treatment of companies due to double linked changes)
3. Any company is processed by a set of action chains. This actions could be locally defined actions reading relational database or Wise based web services invocations. A content based router policy route messages from an action chain to the next one.
4. Finally data extracted and transformed are written on the DWH.

Point 3 is of course the core of the system. The SQLGateway create a message containing a pojo object called Company and any successive action trasform or enrich this object with data collected and business rules applied. Wise’s based action calls webservices and use smooks to transform and enrich input object with ws returned values. Using CBR and continuous enrichment of the same object we get at last action (writeOnDWH) an object with all data needed t be written on the DWH.

Focus on Wise

A lot of actions are simply webservices calls implemented with a zero-code approach using Wise. We had just to write jboss-esb.xml fragment for webservice call and smooks config files to get a lot of business rules reused. It have been really GREAT!

I need to add some patch to current integration in ESB to obtain the max response from wise, but results have been really impressive: we had something like 90K company processed in an hour. What does it mean in finer details? Well from wise point of view about 300K web services calls in an hour!
Well also performance and numbers of ESB have been impressive: we are running on a single Linux64 machine (AMD64 double dual core) with 10 jms-listener processing 10 different chains  (200 concurrent 3ad for any jms-listener) for a total of 1.7M (wise and not) of actions called in an hour.

Isn’t it impressive numbers?

There is a list of patches I applied to wise/esb integration to support my requirement. All the code are committed on my workspace (maeste) in ESB svn:

	JBESB-2019	wise should pass to smooks response mapper also input data to permit continuos enrichement of message
	JBESB-2020	wise have a bug for which it may download too many wsdls and store them in a temporary dir
	JBESB-2021	add configurability for location where wise store smooks reports for its transformation
	JBESB-2022	wise doesn’t clean its internal smooks cache
	JBESB-2023	Wise is failed to consume a wsdl which contains two schema element with same name and different namespace .
	JBESB-2036	wise’s sample have problem because targetPackage not specified in properties files
	JBESB-2037	Avoid excessive reflective inspection of wise classes for better performance

I can’t go in more detail of the implementation or put here configs files because I cna’t reveal any business details of the application. I’ll try in next future to arrange an example totally equivalent in technology content, but without any link to real business content. If you are interested let me know, but be patients…it’s not a joke and I’m very very busy these days.

Thanks to my team (special thanks to Paolo and Luca)  and all contributors of Wise and ESB to make it possible

PS: what about huge split and route qs included in ESB 4.4. Well they cover different problems, even if not far each other. The main difference is that here we haven’t a huge message to split and route, but a lot of little message to enrich and then route (content based) to next enrichment phases.

After a long time we decide to update Wise and LMS web site (www.javalinuxlabs.org)

For some time we had on this site (in page specific for wise) this paragraph:

All informations you can find about wise in this web site are legacy.

This site refer only to wise as web application to call web service, but wise is changing a lot in these days, becoming a general library o implement a generic, zero-code webservice invocation
Also this site will change a lot in few days.

We are working with a new and enthusiast team to evolve wise: have a look to this two post of my blog to understand where are we going and of course STAY TUNED.

http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/?p=26

http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/?p=43

Well now it’s time to update that site! It isn’t either finished or perfect, it will be updated a lot in next weeks with a lot of addition as docs, samples, and hopefully a binary realease of wise-core.

Stay tuned

BTW we realize the website with drupal. Nice toy!