#java, #soa, #cloud, #opensource #quikhubapp
The videos of all the OW2Con2011 have been published to the OW2 Youtube channel. My talk about Petals BPM and The Cloud is also available.
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.
Publié dans Conference
One more time, one more tiny (and maybe useful in some cases…) application with Play!.
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
Publié dans Java
I started to develop QuickHub some weeks ago by focusing on features and without taking into account security issues such as this critical information which are login and password credentials… As mentioned in the GitHub developer pages, I started to use Basic Auth for all the requests QuickHub does to get retrieve data from GitHub. I started to think about moving to OAuth when a user said me that he bought QuickHub but that he did not use it because of Basic Auth. He was afraid that I can rob its credentials and so have a look to its repositories and more. I totally understand this argument and so I started to think that it limits QuickHub adoption by developers and that I should do something.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Publié dans QuickHub, WebService
Last week at OW2Con, Talend CTO talked about their data and service integration solution. This sentence impressed me (almost this one, not sure it was so short):
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!
Publié dans PEtALS
I was in Paris last week for the OW2 annual conference and I gave a talk called “Petals BPM and the Cloud” during the Open Cloud Summit Session (wow what a name!). This talk was about showing that we have things running and ready to be published in the Cloud. As I said during my talk, difficulty is not to provide the SaaS layer, pushing a Web app to the Cloud is not so hard (and not so interesting). The interesting part is about building the PaaS layer. In the current case, the PaaS will provide “Integration as a Service”, or how we can use Petals Service Bus, to provide ways to integrate, orchestrate, manage and monitoring business services.
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.
Publié dans Cloud, Conference, PEtALS, SOA
… or less! Heroku is defined as a “Cloud application platform”. I just want to redefine it to “Awesome Cloud application Platform”. So, this awesome platform provides a way to host and scale your application in the Cloud really easily with 3 or 4 commands…
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:
I am a big fan of Twitter and last week devoxx live tweet wall (http://wall.devoxx.com/) just made me want to create an open source live tweet wall. So last saturday night, I took some time to code it using the now well known Play! framework, some Web sockets and Twitter4J which supports the Twitter Stream API. This streaming API is really nice and provide a way to be notified almost instantly according to what you decided to listen to. After less than one hour (most of the time was consumed to read to Twitter4J documentation), the result is really fun. In the video below, I configured the wall to catch all the tweets containing ‘Apple’ and ‘Microsoft’ terms (I am not a MS supporter, but OMG, there are lot of tweets about it… probably only jokes and bugs…), and tweets are displayed in live on the wall (no I am not moving anything, the page is populated through a Web socket)
The resulting prototype is quite simple but works, and since I am not a front-end developer at all, it uses Twitter Bootstrap as CSS… The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/chamerling/play-twall and is not perfect at all but just works: Twitter configuration is available in the Play! application.conf file and the Twitter connection is created in the Bootstrap…
Looks like I should start creation sort of “Coding a nice thing in one hour” collection…
Publié dans Java
Some weeks ago I was looking for an OS X GitHub client. Not a client like the official GitHub client which is one of the best OS X app I ever see and which mainly deals with raw git stuff, but one which can allow me to access to my repositories, organizations, issues and gists. My different researchs returned nothing really exiting… Since I was looking for something new to develop, I started to create a simple application which focuses on my needs.
I started to share my idea and after some nights to code it, I sent the first prototype to some twitter geeks to get their feedback. The feedback I had was really exiting (thanks @k33g_org and @aheritier, you excited me a lot!), and most of the beta testers said me that I should submit the application to the Mac App Store and make it a paid application.
So, here we are! QuickHub has been finally validated by Apple and I have chosen to try to sell it at the lowest possible price ($0.99).
The first version of QuickHub stands in the OS X status bar and allows you to directly access to :
- Your Repositories
- Your Organizations/repositories
- Your Issues
- Your Gists
It also notifies you using Growl when something changes on the previously mentioned items. For now clicking a menu item opens in your browser. It is quite simple but it was really the first idea to provide something which can quickly allows you to access your GitHub stuff.
While Apple reviewed QuickHub, I started to add some features to it. The 1.1 version will allows you to do more things (hopefully), and especially to create gists directly from QuickHub, preview some artifacts and have more better user experience with some better interface… I hope to publish it in the next days.
For now, any feedback is appreciated. You can comment here, on my personal twitter @chamerling or on the official QuickHub one @quickhubapp. Share it with your friends/co workers/followers and let’s see what happens. You can directly access to the Mac App store or have a look to the QuickHub Web site.
Christophe
Publié dans QuickHub
Last week was the first annual review meeting of the Play project I work on since one year. I am involved at several levels in this project: from the architecture point of view, to the software integration and quality ones. On my side, my goal is to provide the efficient software infrastructure for events actors, or how to build an Event Driven Architecture based on Petals Distributed Service Bus. There are others points which have to be developed, especially all the platform governance stuff and Service Level Agreement for events, what we call Event Level Agreement.
We showed several things to the European Commission reviewers and we were also able to show an early prototype (this one was originally planned to be show at mid project ie in 6 months…). I made a video capture of the demo, which really needs to be explained…
So do we need such machinery to do things like that? No, if you want to do some other simple mashup portal. There are several components which are under active development: Storage and processing. Yes we store all events in the Play platform. This storage will be huge, but it is one of the project goal: Providing efficient and elastic storage in some P2P way. The need for this storage comes with the other important aspect of the project: Complex Event Processing. We will soon be able to create complex rules on top of events and be able to generate notifications based on past and real time notifications because we have efficient storage and real time stuff inside the platform. I am not an expert of this domain, so I can not give more details about that point but capabilities are huge! For example, we can express something like “Hey Play, can you send me a SMS me when there is my favorite punk rock band playing just around and I am not on a business trip and X and !Y or Z”. All of this intelligence coming from the processing of various sources I push since months in the platform coming from Twitter, FB, last.fm and other data providers.
Now let’s take some time to work on my OW2Con talk. The session name is pretty cool : Open Cloud Summit Session.
Publié dans Play
J’ai rejoint EBM Websourcing il y a tout juste 5 ans, le 16 octobre 2006. Je profite de la date anniversaire pour faire un très petit retour sur ces 5 années passées chez EBM.
Il s’en est passé des choses depuis mon arrivée, tellement que je ne peux pas tout citer… 5 ans que je travaille sur Petals ESB à divers niveaux. Je suis passé par beaucoup d’étapes: développement, mise en place des outils, tentative de gestion de l’équipe, architecture, support, POCs, conseil, poseur de rustines, procréateur …
5 ans après, je développe toujours. J’ai bientôt 33 ans, je ne suis pas chef et j’en suis très content: Je gère mon projet recherche dans lequel je hacke Petals ESB tout les jours pour fournir Petals DSB; je m’amuse à faire du Cloud; je participe à l’aventure open source à travers le consortium OW2; je rencontre des gens passionnés par ce qu’ils font régulièrement; je code!
Bref, bon anniversaire à moi. Pour les collègues Toulousains, la prochaine fois que je viens c’est bien sur apéro.
Publié dans PetalsLink
