Trends in BPM 2011: Embrace Complexity
Yesterday, I presented at the Trends in BPM 2011 Conference. I argued that the order of activities, although important at runtime, is not very suitable as a specification paradigm for business processes, as it does not deal well with the typical complexity we deal with today. I presented an alternative, rule oriented approach to specifying flexible business processes.
True Agility
Together with Marc Lankhorst of Novay, I published in the Automatiseringgids on how to reach true agility by combining a number of techniques:
Companies need to operate quickly and flexibly. IT services must support this. But how?
We should not look for another hype, say Marc Lankhorst and Jeroen van Grondelle, but sensibly combine a number of things. An IT landscape has become easier to set up using various standard platforms. And business knowledge is better described models of products and services.
PoEM 2010: Challenges in Enterprise Modeling
Yesterday, I delivered the industry keynote at PoEM 2010 at Delft University of Technology. I tried to give the audience a look from our clients perspective on enterprise modeling. What the challenges are they face, and how enterprise modeling can help them. But most of all, how choosing the languages we use for modeling is crucial for succes.
Afterwards, we had a great discussion on industry involvement in the academics and ways to benefit the most from each others expertise. The people at PoEM are trying out new ways to increase the level of interaction at their event, which could lead to fruitful crossovers between participants, academic and industry alike. I am looking forward to seeing these ideas materialize into PoEM 2011!
Compensating 3 Tons of CO2
Having travelled a lot this autumn, I decided to compensate for all the CO2 emitted while flying to Sicily, Madrid and Lisbon. Having read a number of opinions on the effectiveness of the different compensation schemes, based on planting trees, or reducing emissions on the other side of the world and then compensating that here, I was happy to learn about co2market.eu.
The emission permits you purchase here are bought of the european emission trading system. Every permit bought means a ton of CO2 is taken of the european CO2 budget.
Maybe, there are things to be said about this system as well, but never the less: Permits NL-1-1-3008692396-1-1, NL-1-1-3008692397-1-1 and NL-1-1-3008692398-1-1 were taken of the market in my name and won’t be spent by anyone else 
EKAW 2010
Two weeks after visiting the CNL Community, my colleagues Ronald Heller and Freek van Teeseling and I visited the 17th edition of the EKAW Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
Ronald and I presented our work on pattern sentences to the knowledge representation community. We got some good responses and interesting questions.
It was good to see that EKAW is developing a serious focus on proving that the technologies developed in this field can scale up to actual use. This year, an in-use paper category was introduced and I think this might develop into an important platform research needed to scale up some of the technologies to enterprise scale. If the number of contributions will rise, and the right reviewing criteria are developed, this could be a great contribution to the conferences offering.
On friday, we presented a full tutorial on our products and how they implement some of the EKAW ideas in practice today. Reactions were great. People really enjoyed seeing ideas from their field of expertise being put to use. Also, the ease with which we created actual ontology driven applications that morning drew some enthusiastic responses.
The paper we presented appeared in volume 6317 of Springer’s LNAI series. A preprint can be downloaded here.
It’s Only Natural
Recently I was interviewed for the Master’s magazine of my old University.
2nd Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages
Yesterday, Ronald Heller and I presented our work on the use of Natural Language on the Second Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages on Marettimo Island, Italy.
The slides are here.
The paper we presented appeared in volume 622 of the CEUR workshop proceedings series.
Business Users and Formal Modeling
The last few years I have been working on a business user friendly representation of formal models based on pattern sentences. The goal is to better involve business users in the modeling process, either by having them review models or by enabling them to actively capture business rules using these pattern sentences.
Our paper on these results was accepted for the EKAW conference in October in Lisbon.
This paper will appear in the conference proceedings in Springers LNCS series.
Download preprint here
5th Dutch Eclipse DemoCamp
Yesterday, the guys at Industrial TSI organized the fifth Dutch Eclipse DemoCamp.
Marcel and I presented an Eclipse version of our Beyond OSGi Software Architecture presentation, focussing on its relation to “typical Eclipse usage” of OSGi, based on plugins and extension points.
It was a great meeting. Good presentations and some time left for meeting other dutch Eclipse users. See Maarten Meijer’s blog for an impression.
OSGi in the Cloud
Running an OSGi container in a public cloud service, such as GoGrid.com, is the ultimate proof of the Scale Invariance promised in our Beyond Software Architecture presentation. Reason enough for Marcel Offermans and myself to give it a try and deploy our software on EC2.
Our goal is to us a standard EC2 image and run Java and an OSGi framework on it, through the use of PAXRunner. We will install software bundles onto the instance later, by a provisioning mechanism.
Subscribing
Go through the standard subscription process at aws.amazon.com and create an EC2 account. When completed, do three things.
- Add SSH port 22 to the default security group;
- Create a Private/Public Keypair;
- Download your Private Key, as you’ll need it to connect to your images
Choosing an AMI
At this stage, we are using a standard Ubuntu 9.04 AMI, provided by alestic.com (AMI ID: ami-ccf615a5).
Launch an instance and connect to it using SSH:
local> ssh -i EC2.pem root@ec2-a-b-c-d.amazonaws.com |
Enable multiverse repositories by editing /etc/apt/sources.list. Add these four lines at the end (for EC2′s US-EAST cloud).
deb http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main multiverse deb-src http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main multiverse deb http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main multiverse deb-src http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main multiverse |
Update the APT database:
ec2> sudo apt-get update |
Install java
Install Sun’s Java 6 JDK using APT:
ec2> sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk |
Run an OSGi Framework using Pax Runner
A great way of installing and running an OSGi framework is using PAX Runner. PAX Runner transparently downloads and runs for you all major OSGi implementations.
Download and unarchive PAX Runner.
ec2> curl http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/ops4j/pax/runner/pax-runner-assembly/1.3.0/pax-runner-assembly-1.3.0-jdk15.tar.gz > pax-runner-assembly-1.3.0-jdk15.tar.gz ec2> tar xzf pax-runner-assembly-1.3.0-jdk15.tar.gz |
Installing and starting an OSGi Framework can be done by running PAX Runners shell script. By adding the URL of a bundle as a parameter, this bundle will be downloaded and started.
ec2> ./pax-runner-1.3.0/bin/pax-run.sh http://www.vangrondelle.com/code/hellocloud_1.0.0.jar __________ __________ \______ \_____ ___ ___ \______ \__ __ ____ ____ ___________ | ___/\__ \ \ \/ / | _/ | \/ \ / \_/ __ \_ __ \ | | / __ \_> < | | \ | / | \ | \ ___/| | \/ |____| (____ /__/\_ \ |____|_ /____/|___| /___| /\___ >__| \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ Pax Runner (1.3.0) from OPS4J - http://www.ops4j.org ---------------------------------------------------- -> Using config [classpath:META-INF/runner.properties] -> Using only arguments from command line -> Scan bundles from [http://www.vangrondelle.com/code/hellocloud_1.0.0.jar] -> Scan bundles from [scan-bundle:http://www.vangrondelle.com/code/hellocloud_1.0.0.jar] -> Provision bundle [http://www.vangrondelle.com/code/hellocloud_1.0.0.jar, at default start level, bundle will be started, bundle will be loaded from the cache] -> Preparing framework [Felix 2.0.1] -> Downloading bundles... -> http://www.vangrondelle.com/code/hellocloud_1.0.0.jar : 1078 bytes @ [ 359kBps ] -> Using execution environment [J2SE-1.6] -> Runner has successfully finished his job! Welcome to Felix ================ Hello Cloud! -> |
As you see, Felix is installed by default. Different OSGi implementations can be run by adding the --platform equinox|knopflerfish flag. Even the version to be installed can be specified.
Turning all this into a bootstrap script
For easy launching, you could add all this into a bootstrap script that turns a default Ubuntu image into an OSGi server with a single command.
Turning the Java installation into a silent install requires some additional scripting.
You can now install and run a bundle using the following command.
ec2> curl www.vangrondelle.com/code/bootstrap.sh | sh |
This script needs some enhancements: Multiverse repositories are added everytime its run for now. Script might detect EC2 Zone and add appropriate repositories.