Today, Active Endpoints announced that ActiveVOS was used to develop and deploy an important learning and training application for Toyota Motor Europe. You can read the details in the PDF attached to this post.
In this audio podocast, Guerman Smirnov, systems development manager at Australian telecom AAPT, describes how his company has used ActiveVOS to extend complex internal DSL service assurance capabilities to AAPT’s resellers and partners. In doing so, AAPT has reaped the benefits of moving to the 100% standards-based BPEL capabilities included in ActiveVOS and has reduced the internal resources necessary to provide good customer service.
As always, thank you for listening and we look forward to your feedback.
VOSibilities podcast #15 for SOA, BPEL, BPMN, BPMS and CEP users: AAPT Orchestrates Service Assurance with ActiveVOS [12:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (96)
I am very pleased to be able to post the first public screenshot of the Designer in our upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 product. Click on the thumbnail above to see the image full size.
Those of you who knew us for ActiveBPEL, the world’s leading Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, will be delighted to discover that BPEL remains at the core of ActiveVOS 6.0. All of our BPEL execution engine’s virtues — a superior visual design environment, rigorous adherence to the BPEL 2.0 specification, process versioning, the world’s first implementation of BPEL4People, remote testing and debugging, dynamic switching of endpoints on failure, clustering and failover — remain as you’ve known them. And there are some truly magical new enhancements, like support for POJO’s that turns old Java applications into web services with a few clicks of a mouse. Clearly, on the BPEL engine feature list, what few competitive lights there were in the rear view mirror grow far dimmer in ActiveVOS 6.0. (Message to Oracle BPEL Process Manager users: it’s about time to get to a real implementation of BPEL 2.0, don’t you think?)
But ActiveVOS is no longer just a BPEL engine. We are, truly, a VOS or visual orchestration system. BPEL is, in part, how we accomplish services-based applications. But it’s no longer what ActiveVOS is. Consider this partial list of new capabilities that will be included in ActiveVOS 6.0 and you’ll see why nothing else — not “open source” arrivistes like Inalio or the stack oligarchy of SAP, IBM and Oracle can compete.
With these and other new features, we believe that the age of the visual orchestration system has begun. Now, when developers are considering how to do services-based applications, the choice couldn’t be more clear. You can do what the stack oligarchy wants: buy a bunch of indigestible piece parts and engineer the equivalent of a VOS in your shop before you can even hope to begin writing applications. Or, you can use the all-in-one, standards-based capabilities of ActiveVOS 6.0 and get done better and faster.
ActiveVOS 6.0 will be generally available in a few weeks.
We’re not surprised that our message to Java developers created quite a stir (Sandy’s comments, Alan Zeichick’s post, Dana Blanekhorn’s post, Adrian Bridgewater’s comments and Josh Fruhlinger’s post).
I knew it would, and there was significant soul-searching inside the company about releasing it and sending it to so many developers. I’d be the last to deny we’re promoting ActiveVOS and our company. (That is my job.) But being jingoistic was the last thing we were thinking. I was patterning the idea after something I did in a previous life in which we reported on the incidence of spam, something we were in position to know because we aggregated stats from spam filters. People loved it.
At Active Endpoints, we “know” something about the relative state of adoption of modern app dev technology in the Java community based on our geographic aggregate data that individual Java developers wouldn’t have access to unless we told them. And it’s an interesting data point because it does say something about relative economic advantage that economies with vastly larger GDP — and therefore an increased need to be agile– aren’t demonstrating the same alacrity of adoption that emerging economies are.
Do you think that the open-source SOA companies who claim “millions” of downloads in efforts to promote themselves as viable businesses in North America would have shared this with the community? I doubt it. It took a measure of courage to speak up.
I’d argue we’re being more honest by sharing what we’ve learned in the marketplace than most. And I’d hoped this would signal to the Java community what working with us would be like: we’re dedicated to what we do and we’ll always try to be open and direct. If we’ve scared a couple of people into wanting to move application development forward in their companies, we have arguably done those companies a service, whether or not they use ActiveVOS.
I think you can tell a lot about a company that will share its market knowledge with you and which wants to create constructive discussion about the impact of its technology on the businesses it seeks to serve.
This wasn’t a “buy American” screed. This was, instead, exactly what we called it: a wake-up call to the Java community to look past obstacles and move to the next level of services-based development.
Copied below is the text of an email we sent today to more than 30,000 developers in the US. We are in a unique position to see what the rate of adoption of modern development tools is. And what we’ve seen is so strong a trend, we simply had to go public with what we’ve learned. As always, we welcome any comments or feedback, either here on our blog or via email to editor@activevos.com.
Attention US developers: Active Endpoints has a wake-up call for you
Dear Developer,
We are emailing you because we are concerned about you. We’ve learned something about the state of middleware technology in the US, its impact on outsourcing and US business competitiveness that we felt strongly we should share with you.
Since early March, we have been offering downloads of our new ActiveVOS visual orchestration system at www.activevos.com. With ActiveVOS, you can automate, control, adapt and manage your services-based applications in ways you never dreamed were possible. And, you do it in a 100%-standards based environment, at breakthrough pricing.
As you might imagine, we watch our download statistics very carefully…sometime hourly. We expected to have downloads from all over the world, but the shocking truth is that a majority of our downloads are coming from outside the US, especially from India and China. A conversation I had with a marketing director at a major open-source ESB provider confirmed that company is seeing fully half of its downloads from India and China.
At first, we couldn’t believe it. And we were surprised, because the US market for app dev products is several orders of magnitude larger than in these developing markets. Then, we started asking ourselves questions like “Why is this so pronounced a trend?” And “what do these developers, business analysts and companies know that US enterprises don’t?”
The answers are clear. US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems…too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors…too comfortable with their status quo. Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues - and without the temptation to use those issues as an excuse for stasis - adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly.
Is it any wonder, then, that US developers are increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of change, the threat to their jobs, and the technical and political paralysis created by so-called enterprise architectures?
Clearly, we hope you will be the agent for change in your company and download ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com. We hope you will take advantage of our education center to update your skills. We hope you will join the hundreds of developers who have watched the replay of webinar we hosted called “BPEL for Java Developers.” (You can find it on our blog at www.vosibilities.com or in our podcast feed in the iTunes Store; search for “VOSibilities.”)
But mostly, we hope you will carefully consider the fact that the status quo in application development in your company is a very dangerous proposition. No matter how daunting change may seem, it’s better than the alternative: a world in which your company and you personally have been eclipsed by external competitors.
Thank you.
Alex Neihaus
VP Marketing
Active Endpoints, Inc.
editor@activevos.com
We are very pleased to present a replay of a webinar that we presented jointly with the JBoss division of Red Hat entitled How to Achieve Your SOA Vision in the Real World.
Presenting along with me are Pierre Fricke of JBoss and Mike Moniz of Active Endpoints. The webinar details our companies’ joint vision and technology for how developers, managers, enterprise architects and business analysts can move beyond the debates, the complexity and the high costs that have torpedoed implementation of services-based applications for far too long.
And, Active Endpoints is very proud to show publicly for the first time the upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 (slated to to generally available in August, 2008) which completely resets the standard for what an integrated, all-in-one development and deployment system can achieve. Be sure to check out Mike’s amazing demo. And I also recommend you stick around for the lively panel Q&A at the end of the webinar.
You may have also noticed that when we have a video podcast, I try to post both a higher resolution .avi and an iPod-formatted .m4v. The .avi is approximately 150MB; the .m4v is approximately 80MB.
There are three ways to watch the webinar replay. In ascending order of resolution they are: playing the .m4v file from the website, which results in a 320×240 image. If you download the .m4v file, it will play in iTunes or QuickTime at 640×480. Finally, if you download the .avi, the resolution is 775×582. The .avi file is DivX encoded, so most everyone should be able to view it.
As always, we’d love to know what you think of the webinar. Please email me comments at editor@activevos.com or post a comment here.
VOSibilities podcast #14: Webinar replay - Real World SOA [64:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (547)
VOSibilities podcast #14: Webinar replay - Real World SOA [64:34m]: Download (214)
For the last several weeks, there’s been a lot of blog discussion about a Burton Group report on SOA “success” or the apparent lack of it.
An interesting thread of commentary has broken out about the role of CIOs in the success or failure of next-generation application development in business. David Linthicum suggests that CIOs are “…very different animals from company to company.” And Scott Wilson thinks CIOs are in a “delicate position” when it comes to adopting new technologies, balancing needs to progress versus reliable service delivery.
For us, it’s simpler: it’s much more dangerous — bordering on suicidal — to let the fear of change become the rationale for continued stasis. That’s why Burton reports that companies get better results with newly hired CIOs. The new guy has a honeymoon period in which he or she can do the unthinkable. (Marketing execs in software companies are almost as perishable as CIOs. We are often brought in to “fix” the previous guy’s reluctance to change.)
But at the end of the day, a change in leadership doesn’t change the underlying reality that the whole IT organization — from the developer in his cube to the CIO — just isn’t scared enough.
Sure, they’re a little bit scared: “If we have to change, we run a risk.” But it’s the wrong thing they’re afraid of…the wrong fear.
What’s a fossil? Something that stood still long enough to get buried, then wedged into rock to be cooked by pressure over time until it disappears. That’s what developers, analysts, business owners and CIOs are doing: letting the small fear of change become comfortable enough to crowd out the large, more important fear of being fossilized.
And that’s a whole lot scarier. For the business…for individuals.
If this sounds like a wake-up call to developers to lose more sleep at night over why they keep finding reasons not to move to services-based apps, it is. If you think we are saying that enterprise architects should be put on a multi-step program to recovery from PowerPoint architectures, we are. If you think we are suggesting the CIO is more damned if he doesn’t implement today’s visual orchestration systems, you’ve got it.
Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.
Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).
I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.
Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.
Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.
Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything — else out there.
Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.
I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.
Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.
That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.
We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.
[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]
VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (65)Mark Hall of Computerworld previews ActiveVOS 6.0 and points out one of its major benefits: collaboration among developers, end users and business analysts.
Yeah, baby! Ain’t nuthin’ like a good blog war-o-words. And a juicy one has just broken out between two influential voices: Nick Malik and Bruce Silver. And I suspect we haven’t seen the last of it. (At least I hope we haven’t. July is a slow month; we could use some American Gladiators-style trash talkin’ right about now.)
Apparently, Nick found the top dead center of the button you shouldn’t push in Bruce’s mind: he says BPM is never going to live up to expectations that non-developers will create applications.
In reply, Bruce — slappin’ Nick right upside the head – replies that Nick has to “prove” his assertion by showing that someone — anyone — in the “BPM community” has made a claim that modeling leads directly to completed applications.
While I hope the histrionics continue, this is really nothing more than two purists trying to keep their rivers from converging. (I gotta admit that I find these near-screaming matches to be more educational than so-called “polite debate” for the very simple reason that they strip out the fluff in favor of direct frontal attacks everyone can understand.)
We all know from long, bitter experience that the “third rail” in the Microsoft world (touch it and die) is developers. MSFT will do what it takes to keep developers tied to the Windows API. Anything that could loosen that death-grip is a danger, and that includes end users working in standards-based tools that could care less about the underlying OS.
And from what I’ve read about the “BPM community” there’s a fair bit of wishful thinking there, too. Bruce is probably correct that no responsible entity has claimed what he believes Nick is claiming. Yet, you don’t have to say the “E” (execution) word outright to lead people to the conclusion that your BPMS does it directly from pretty pictures. Go ahead, spend five minutes on Lombardi’s site and tell me you don’t see it there.
What do we care? Well, let me be the first to pre-announce our upcoming ActiveVOS release, scheduled for mid-August, in which we actually converge the rivers. We will have the most complete BPMN modeling capabilities and, of course, we have the world’s best and most complete BPEL deployment, execution and management system.
ActiveVOS will make it possible for business users to come very, very close to execution via BPMN. And we believe that developers will take that non-executable model and “finish” it in a 100%-standards-based environment that frees them and their businesses from .NetJail.
Forgive me the nested platitude, but the issue boils down to that old saw that says, “Get the right tool for the job.” Developers need modern, standards-based languages that execute on the metal; business analysts need modern, standards-based ways to describe what systems have to accomplish. Being doctrinaire about which is the “correct” way to serve business and IT is beside the point.
So, while it’s fun to see the purists bloody each other, we intend to deliver an implementable, cost-effective and complete way to achieve what neither side really seems to want. And that, dear readers, is what a visual orchestration system is all about.
In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ CEO, Mark Taber, about our company’s vision for how we intend to “democratize” complex event processing (CEP) and stream processing so that everyone can benefit from these technologies in their applications.
Mark describes the concepts and then talks about why we believe these technologies should be part of every visual orchestration system — and previews what we’ll be delivering in ActiveVOS in our upcoming release in August, 2008.
As always, we appreciate your support of our podcast, as demonstrated by the large number of people who are downloading and subscribing to this content, and we welcome all feedback. Just email us at editor@vosibilities.com.
VOSibilities podcast # 12: Complex event processing and visual orchestration systems [14:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (95)I am very pleased to be able to post another fascinating talk from our own Kim Pease. This time, Kim makes clear a topic that we have repeatedly heard is on the minds of developers and managers alike: application security in a messaging environment. Kim pays special attention to all the WS-Security options and explains, among other things, why some authentication and encryption options are recommended in the WS-Security standards.
Normal application security is, ’scuse the ugly metaphor, a hairy ball of wax. But when you add in the additional requirements necessary to deal with a messaging-driven, services-based application environment, the complexity can overwhelm you. WS-I…SAML…WS-I…it can all become mush. Or, as least it seems this way until Kim clearly describes each part of the standard and then delivers a demonstration of the most important OASIS specifications in a demo.
Due to the depth of this topic, this podcast episode runs about 18 minutes. There are two versions posted here. The .avi format is encoded at 1024×768 and uses a standard DivX codec. The .m4v is formatted for the iPod at 640×480. The .m4v will play on the blog at half size (320×480), though it plays at full size on iTunes and on the iPod.
Based on the very good response to Kim’s last talk, I expect many of you will find it well worth the bandwidth to download either or both versions for reference at your leisure.
VOSibilities podcast #11: Kim Pease on using WS-Security in services-based applications [19:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (285) VOSibilities podcast #11: Kim Pease on using WS-Security in services-based applications [19:48m]: Download (64)
Last week, David Linthicum’s SOA podcast continued a theme he’s been on lately, a discussion of BPEL’s “fallings” [sic]. I think he meant failings…but in any event, he mentions several times in the podcast that a post he’d previously written on this topic had generated quite a discussion (it did) and feedback from unnamed “BPEL vendors” (that’d be us; I can’t imagine why he didn’t name us. (-: )
Anyway, today after I heard the podcast, I asked Chris Keller, our founder and vp of development and one of the most knowledgeable people on BPEL in the world for his feedback. Chris has not only written the BPEL engine that’s at the core of our visual orchestration system (a VOS is a whole lot more than a BPEL engine), he’s active on the OASIS committees that are furthering the standards.
Chris gave me a lot of food for thought, and being in a playful mood, I thought it might be fun to that feedback into a Q&A. Sorta like a game show, with Mr. Linthicum as the contestant. The prize, for correct answers, is a free ActiveVOS license. Let’s see how Mr. Linthicum does…
Question 1: In the podcast, David says that a major problem with BPEL is that it’s synchronous.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out… Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 2: David says BPEL has a few programmer-level issues including limitations around request/reply exchanges in a heterogeneous architecture.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 3: David says BPEL has issues with failure recovery, exception handling and multi-programming model support.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 4: David says BPEL is not very good at adding a human as part of the process and as SOA moves forward, he’s finding that composites and workflows are more applicable than simple service binding and extending.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
We hope that you’ve enjoyed our little episode of The BPEL Game Show. And sorry, David, but you didn’t win our prize. However, anytime you’d like to be brought up-to-date on why BPEL is at the heart of SOA development, we’re happy to update you so you can win the next time.
We are pleased to present a recording of a joint webinar we presented on June 12, 2008 with XAware entitled How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications.
Despite the imposing title, I think you will find the content — especially the lively Q&A at the end of the webinar — very interesting.
VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (446) VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Download (142)
