In order to get a promo code, you have to Tweet something like:

Have a look to http://wp.me/pcSx0-nn to get a free copy of QuickHubApp @github OS X client (cc @chamerling)

or something more creative which contains ‘QuickHubApp’, ‘http://quickhubapp.com’, and ‘@chamerling’.

To receive the promo code, you also have to comment this article with the reference to your tweet. Put your email address in the form so I can mail you the code directly within the next days. First ten comments will get a free version.

You are right, I need to smile more, be less tired and have a demo of the BPM editor working on low resolution displays… BTW, the demo of the DSB Monitoring & Management console used to deploy and monitor BPEL process works.

Looking back...

I did lot of things last year and to be honest I am quite tired right now, but who is not? Here are several new 2011 things:

• The Montpellier Java User Group has been launched. We did 4 sessions mostly around Google technologies: GAE, GWT and Android. We also talked about Maven and did a session on user experience. Even if I do not have enough time to allocate to the JUG, I met really nice techies who also code during nights like me.
• Some resolutions are usually to lose weight, do sport, etc. Not for me. I already do enough sport so I chose to learn something new each year. I am a Java developer since more than 8 years and I wanted to do something new in 2011. So I started to develop Cocoa stuff during nights and finally I released QuickHubApp, an OS X menulet (and more) to ease the GitHub user life.
  But Java is still here and I managed to develop things using the Play! framework. According to the wordpress.com statistics, this is a topic which always drive hundreds of readers per article to my blog.
• On the professional point of view, I now work full time on the FP7-Play research project. The goal is to create an event marketplace using many high level technologies and bringing the Petals Distributed Service Bus to the event level. Finally there is no real Cloud stuff inside, which is really sad for me.
• I still believe that Open source is really important for all the Petals products and so I gave another talk at the OW2 annual conference about SOA, Cloud and BPM.
• I also (twitter) met some cool guys, you should follow @k33g_org. Philippe we will probably not meet this year in Lyon, but maybe you should come to Montpellier and give a talk at the JUG?

So what are this year resolutions and coming things? There are many:

• Learn more new things. I think that this year will be a Ruby or a Scala one (or both).
• We have some new things to release at the JUG level: What do you think about some mobiles apps and a better and richer web site?
• QuickHubApp will continue to grow. I have so many ideas for it!
• I also have new OS X app under development, more details soon.
• This item is confidential for now, it will probably be announced within the next weeks but it will cause a real big change!

All of this previous topics will be driven by non technical nor professional constraints. This year will be the year I buy a house and we also move from three to four. ‘Pink’ Release is planned for May:

To be released in May 2012

WTF, my server is dead again!?

This app is a simple heartbeat manager looking at remote HTTP services and notifying you by email when something becomes unreachable. It uses the background Job feature of the Play framework and just does HTTP GETs on the specified list. That’s all, that’s simple, but that’s can be useful sometimes…

The code is located at https://github.com/chamerling/heartbeat-manager

So, I discussed with GitHub guys through their support channel (Here I want to say that I am really impressed on how fast and professional is the GitHub support team!). Of course, they also told me that they will never use QuickHub if OAuth is not provided. After discussions with the guys, I started to implement a workaround to provide OAuth support in QuickHub by using the OAuth Web flow and adding some stuff to QuickHub.

Let’s see how we can do that in a generic way so that you can use it in your app if needed since every serious Internet service also provide OAuth support… Note that I will not give many details about OAuth itself but I will use some terms, so have a look to OAuth documentation for more details.

Register a Web application

The first step is to register your application to the developer portal. Here you need to provide some information such as the app name and its callback URL. Even if we are developing a desktop app and not a Web one, we need to be able to provide this HTTP based callback URL. We will see in the next section what is inside this application. By registering our application, the service will generate and give us some keys to be used in the next steps, mostly to recognize us when calling the service.

Create a Web application

We need a Web application to handle callback calls from the service we want to use OAuth. This application will only be used at authorization time and just have to be able to receive the service call, get the code sent by the service, then call the service again with the code and our application keys (there is a secret one to be used here). As a result, the service will send you back your OAuth token to be used in all the future service calls. This token is used to authenticate your service calls, no more password stuff inside! Here is a quick sequence diagram showing all the exchanges between actors…

On the QuickHub side, I chose to create this Web application by using the Play Framework I already mentioned several times in this blog. I used the Heroku paas to provide the Web application publicly.

As showed in this Gist (https://gist.github.com/1466592), the callback method is really simple (as usual with Play!): just get the code and call GitHub with it and your application keys. When all lis done, just display a result page with a specific URL. Here it starts with ‘quickhubapp://oauth?’. Let’s see what it means in the next section…

Add custom URL handlers to your desktop app

Once the desktop application is authorized, our Web application redirects the user to a Web page which embeds a button targeting an URL starting by ‘quickhubapp://oauth?’. Here you already understand that by clicking on such a link must drive you to something special. The cocoa framework allows developers to register specific URL handlers for their applications. So we need to register QuickHub handlers so that OS X knows that every link  with the quickhubapp scheme must me routed to QuickHub. This is as easy as showed in this Gist https://gist.github.com/1466628.

This code snippet just tells QuickHub to invoke the getUrl method when it receives a quickhubapp event. Up to the getUrl method to handle things. In QuickHub, I just extract the OAuth token in order to persist it locally for future use.

Done!

So now we are able to use OAuth Web flows for desktop applications. In the best of the worlds, every service provider may provide a real desktop flow to be used without the need to create this additional web application. In the real world, it is not the case but as you see it can be bypassed quite easily.

I will provide more technical details on the second section ‘Create a Web application’ with real sample and code in the next weeks.

1. The DSB Manager Web application is used to manage the Distributed Service Bus. It uses the DSB Web service API to interact with node instances running somewhere…
2. The DSB Manager is used to bind business services to the DSB (let’s forget JBI, the user does not care about it…). DSB services are also exposed. Every DSB node provides the same business API with the help of the distributed endpoint registry it uses.
3. The DSB Manager uses the DSB BPEL API to deploy BPEL processes to the DSB. Up to the DSB to use the right internal endpoint when the process is executed. Services can be hosted on any node, it is the role of the DSB to route messages to the right endpoint on the right node. The BPEL process is exposed as Web service and can be invoked by any Web service client. Here I just use SOAPUI client.
4. We can monitor what happens when invoking a service! For now the DSB Manager uses Web service notification to subscribe to some monitoring topic hosted on the DSB node. When a message is exchanged between the client and the services involved in the process execution, notification are automatically published to the DSB Manager which has just subscribed. The monitoring uses Web sockets for live display in the browser…
5. Last thing is just a test to show more monitoring data when many calls are exchanged between consumers and providers.

Related articles

• Back From OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)
• Some Play Framework, Service Bus, WS Notification and Web Sockets… (chamerling.org)
• Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)

We have more than 500 connectors!

Wow! Great, let’s have a look to that! What is a connector? In the Petals ESB context connectors are the bindings represented in the upper part of this well-known image

Petals ESB

So, we have almost 8 connectors. Looks that we are poor… So let’s look in details what is a Talend connector: http://www.talendforge.org/components/.

Can you see that? A Talend component is almost an operation in a service, or let’s say that it is an input/output from a data source. So a service is not as generic as a Petals service but it is a specialized service i.e. we can also have tons of ‘components’ for Petals ESB, it just means that we have to provide configuration artifacts for all the services that we find: Salesforce, Amazon EC2, S3, all the databases in the world, etc, … Oh no, wait! Don’t you see the Talend component on the bottom of the figure just above? Yes we have a Talend connector so we have 500+ components in Petals ESB

No really, Talend guys really do an incredible work and their recent press releases are really impressive. Congrats!

My son is an open source fan

So let’s go back on my talk, where I planned to show things working… Unfortunately, I was not able to show anything due to some low resolution problems and this was really a shame; next time I will prepare a video in case of something like that happens. I am going to record these videos this week to show that we have interesting things under development : We can create business processes with Petals BPM and deploy them on the service bus in order to execute and monitor the process itself in a distributed way.

While waiting these videos, here are the slides of my talk. There are sort of ‘zen’ slides so the talk I gave was really important to understand all… So come and see me next time, or just send me comments.

For the other parts of the conference, as usual, there were really interesting presentations and discussions around OW2, open source and Cloud. One fun thing which I learnt was that OW2-Jonas is used in MS Azure Cloud solution as support of J2EE apps (can I also inform that Microsoft was a big sponsor of OW2Con? Yes, really, they gave money for an open source conference, that’s fun). Well, there were so many interesting things and I can not list all here. But open source is really something companies should have a look if they do not did it already, they will be surprised to see how active and professional is the community behind it.

Related articles

• Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)

(No this is not the vodafone/SFR icon, it is the Quickhub one… Must really find a designer, last time it looked like a FB icon).

Since I am currently working on my talk at #OW2Con 2011 (coming later this week) dealing with BPM, Services and the Cloud, I wanted to host some Web services on several places. I never had time to test Heroku but I just took this precious time today. After looking some examples, I created a Maven project template (no I do not have time to create an archetype, maybe there is one somewhere) which uses Jetty and Apache CXF to expose JAXWS annotated classes as Web services. So now, using heroku to freely expose your services is easy as:

1.  Sign up to heroku
2. Download the heroku client for your platform
3. Clone/Fork the repository at https://github.com/chamerling/heroku-cxf-jaxws
4. Add your own services
5. Login to heroku ‘heroku auth:login‘
6. Create the app on heroku ‘heroku create -s cedar‘
7. Push your services to heroku ‘git push heroku master‘. There is a git hook somewhere which just automatically compile and start your application after you pushed it.
8. Open your CXF services summary page ‘heroku open’