Angel “Java” Lopez on Blog

These week, the Redmond giant announced its new creation, Live Mesh (a tech preview):

https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx

Thanks to Arvindra Sehmi post:

 http://blogs.msdn.com/asehmi/archive/2008/04/24/introducing-live-mesh.aspx

we now have a list of comments about this new Microsoft baby. Thise new redmonian inception is not easy to describe briefly, but it deserves to take a shot. It is an incursion from Microsoft into Web 2.0 and its own creation, Software plus Service world.

(for bloggers, note the use of links with screenshots, great idea Arvindra!)

This video explains the high level architecture (thanks to Matias Woloski for this link)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=399577

In that list of articles, I found a good introduction by the ineffable Mary Jo Foley

Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh

Read the point one:

1. The definition. As has become the norm with so many of its Software + Services products and strategies, Microsoft isn’t the best at coming up with a succinct Live Mesh definition. The closest I found (in a Live Mesh reviewer’s guide) was this: “Live Mesh is a ’software-plus-services’ platform and experience from Microsoft that enables PCs and other devices to ‘come alive’ by making them aware of each other through the Internet, enabling individuals and organizations to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices.” If I were in charge of defining Live Mesh, I think I’d go with “a Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration.”

Here, I detect the reborn of some ideas envisioned by Bill Joy for Jini, a technology that was born too early:

The Jini Technology Vision

Jini technology redefines the concept of a client. Instead of a fixed set of “local” devices, Jini technology supplies the Java client with a federation of remote “plug and play” devices in a dynamic configuration (the Jini Federation) that is personalized for each client. With Jini technology, the network truly becomes the client computer!

All this new move from MS could be the visible result of some of Ray Ozzie’s ideas, expressed years ago in his noteworthy memo:

The Internet Services Disruption

I guess Microsoft is moving more and more to the Internet (remember its Yahoo affaire). That’s a company that embraced the Andy Grove’s motto: only the paranoid survive. There are betting on RIA, Silverlight, web 2.0, rich client… Any number on roulette is covered, even the double zero…

One note: it’s amusing that, after all this effort, Microsoft still reveals its new tools only to US residents. Google, instead, pushed its innovations as beta or whatever, but for all the world at once. Hey, toc, toc, McFly…. some MS VP reading here?

Angel “EverMeshed” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

I’ve received an email, from Floyd Marinescu, announcing this “mega” conference. They’ll cover all-about-software-development: agile, DSLs, SOA, SaaS, Cloud computing (I guess grid computing related), .NET, Java, Ruby, Rich Client, Scrum, XP, F#, REST…. It will be the DisneyWorld of all software developers!

Here’s the announce:

You are receiving this email because you opted-in to receive notifications related to QCon London, from the QCon London website. QCon London is taking place in just 8 weeks, March 12-14 and the conference editorial is nearing final. Since our last update in December, a number of important changes have been made to the conference:

• Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Salesforce.com now presenting in the Cloud Computing Track
• MySpace.com, eBay, Magus confirmed in the Architectures you’ve always wondered about Track
• XP founder Kent Beck, and Analysis Patterns & Refactoring Author Martin Fowler keynoting
• Banking Architectures Track adds sessions from Merrill, Betfair, Credit Suisse
• GoF Patterns Author & Eclipse Architect Erich Gamma presenting
• and much more…

QCon is an enterprise software development conference for team leads, architects, and project managers covering Architecture & Design, Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile methodologies and other timely topics such as DSLs, cloud computing, and bank/finance architectures. Last year’s QCon London had almost 500 registrants, and was covered very heavily in blog space see QCon London blogger coverage & key take aways).  

The track themes for QCon London & track hosts are as follows:
Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About -  Hosted by Redmonk’s James Governor
The last 2 QCon’s featured: Amazon, Linked-In, Yahoo!, eBay, Second Life, and Orbitz architecture case studies
Domain Specific Languages in Practice - Hosted by ThoughtWorks’ Neal Ford
Takes DSLs to the next level by practical applications and tools that are useful today.
Effective Design
Translate a set of abstract ideas into working and functional software in an effective way.
Architectures in Agile - Hosted by POSA author Kevlin Henney
How to integrate the trade-offs related to aspects such as performance, security, scalability and modifiability into an agile process
Banking: Complex high volume/low latency architectures  - Hosted by John Davies & Alexis Richardson
The latest innovations as well as time-proven best practices that architects of banking & finance systems need to know.
The Cloud as the New Middleware Platform - Hosted by EAI Patterns Author Gregor Hohpe
Is the internet becoming the computer?
Implementing Scrum and XP- Hosted by Patterns Almanac author Linda Rising
Leading practitioners will present and explain how Scrum and XP are implemented in the most effective way.
Java Emerging Technologies - Hosted by Java Concurrency Author/spec lead Brian Goetz
The previous QCon covered: JRuby, Grails, Server-side OSGi, DSL development, Batch Processing
.NET in the Enterprise - Hosted by Matt Deacon
.NET has brought Microsoft’s platforms into many business-critical applications, back-office, and server-side solutions.
Programming Languages of Tomorrow
Erlang, F#,, Intentional and Scala. How can we best leverage them in our next software project?
SOA, REST and the Web - Hosted by InfoQ’s Lead SOA Editor Stefan Tilkov
REST & SOA, Internet Scale Integration, REST & WS Myths
Browser & Emerging Rich Client Technologies - Hosted by InfoQ lead RIA/Java editor Scott Delap
Silverlight vs. JavaFX/Consumer JRE vs. Adobe Flex/AIR vs. Google’s Ajax RIA stack
The Rise of Ruby
Learn how to best take advantage of what Ruby has to offer
The first two QCon were well received, below are some comments from bloggers who attended our most recent QCon:

• David Forbes - Exhilirated after gorging on brain candy this week, I have a moment to reflect on what just happened. QCon was the right place to be. I can’t imagine where else I would have rather been. If I had the week to do again, I would probably march right down to the Westin…again.
• Denis Bregeon - I was very happy with it. Most of the talks tickled my imagination and that is the primary thing I was looking for. Many others gave me details on more technical subjects that I wanted to learn about.
• Srini Penchikala - I was at the QCon conference in San Francisco last week. It was a great experience to be there. I learned a lot not only from the presentation speakers and panelists but also from the attendees who came from different countries (England, Syria, Australia to name a few) and companies.
• Alex Olaru - Great conference: excellent speakers, very relevant topics, just enough product pushing without it becoming annoying. All in all a conference I would highly recommend to any architect or project manager.
• Ola Bini - Last week I attended QCon San Francisco, a conference organized by InfoQ and Trifork (the company behind JAOO). It must admit that I was very positively surprised. I had expected it to be good, but I was blown away by the quality of most presentations.
• Martin van Vliet - All in all, this was a good conference and more than enough reason to look forward to the next QCon, next year in London.
• Pete Lacey - A wonderful conference made better by being able to meet many people face to face for the first time…

See also past QCon/JAOO talks available online on InfoQ:

• Martin Fowler on Domain Specific Languages
• Operational Manageability by Dan Pritchett, eBay
• DSLs in Ruby with Obie Fernandez
• Jeff Sutherland on the origins of Scrum
• Rod Johnson: Are we there yet?
• Ivar Jacobson on UML, AOP, Methodologies
• Panel: Who will develop Software in 10 years?
• WPF: The future of Windows
• Event Patterns

Registration for the 3 day conference is 1180£ until Feb 22nd, and 1220£ after March 11th. The conference will be held at the Queen Elizabeth II Center, like last year.  Join us at QCon London!

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

 During the last year, I participated of the making of LitwareHR, a SaaS reference implementation of Microsoft. I was working in a team, at Southworks. At the end of the project, a video was made to show, in a funny way, some of the ideas of the project.

Now, you can see the video at

MSN Video - The making of LitwareHR

The “stars” are Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong, from Microsoft.

 I have a minimal intervention, but you know: no small script for a great actor..

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/

There is a post written by Jack Vaughan:

.NET Blog View: Microsoft launches guidance for Software as a Service

It’s interesting that Vaughan writes about the ASP concept: Application Service Provider. And points towards Google, SalesForces, and Windows Live apps. For me, these are interesting times. After the Internet Bubble, few companies have reached an income level that make them profitable. SalesForce is an exception: an after-bubble survivor, its model shows the maturity of the concept, and the reality of the results.

IBM, Microsoft, Google, and more, are after the Long Tail of SaaS. In my opinion, such big companies doesn’t have the focus to run a SaaS effort, oriented to the every day apps that more business need to run. The game is open to the new, focused companies, that concentrates all its forces on the SaaS arena.

And you, what kind of SaaS application are you thinking about?

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

Fred Chong, from Microsoft, has a very informative post about the software situation in Chine, the great country that play an important role in software market (and world history). China is coming, the giant is awaking….

These are interesting times

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

A new sample application was released from Microsoft, implementing Software as a Service ideas, patterns and concepts. You can download from

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saas/sampleApp

A description from Microsoft:

LitwareHR is a fictitious HR application providing recruitment management software delivered as a service. The most important aspect of this application is not what the application does, but how it does it. Using the latest Microsoft technologies such as .NET Framework 3.0 and SQL Server 2005, LitwareHR implements single-instance multi-tenancy patterns. These patterns, previously described in our whitepapers, are available in the MSDN SaaS Architecture Center.

There are source code, documentation, and webcast.

A community site dedicated to this project was published at

http://www.codeplex.com/litwareHR

Bonus material, “behind the scenes”, “deleted scenes” at

http://www.skyscrapr.net/architects-in-action.aspx

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

Today, I’ve been busy writting a new open source sample application, using ASP.NET 2.0 and MS SQL Server 200x. As usual, I began writing down the model of the application and generating the code using my AjGenesis code generation engine. I love that project! It frees me from repetive and cumbersome tasks, as tedious web page creation, or long stored procedures code.

Now, I have a system with:

- Tenants
- Applications
- Users
- Roles

Each user belongs to a Tenant. There is the “main” Tenant, one that provides the AjSaaS application. You can define new applications, and create new tenants (enterprise that uses applications). A tenant can use many applications, and an application can be used by many tenants.

Each tenant has a collection of users. Each application has a collection of roles. A user can plays many roles (in differents applications, if his/her tenant has adquired many services).

This is my first day of work. I’m now working on implementing membership and role providers based on the above schema (using the provider features of ASP.NET 2.0).

After that feature, the next steps are:

 - Implement one or two sample application to put under the system (I’m planning to implement some entities with CRUD functionality).

- Implement user-defined entities as in

Building an End User Defined Data Model - Part 1
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/050324.htm
Building an End User Defined Data Model - Part 2
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/050414.htm

using some ideas published at

Multi-Tenant Data Architecture
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx

The final idea is to extend the system up to level 0,1,2 of the maturity model at

SaaS Simple Maturity Model
http://blogs.msdn.com/gianpaolo/archive/2006/03/06/544354.aspx

Some business rules would be implemented with customizable Workflow Foundation workflows, or something similar usign AjBasic as a Saas Code Language (a la SalesForce, they included a controlled programming language to extend their systems).

I’m in my sabbatic week. When I finished with this week, I’ll publish the first version of code, with open source license.

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

One of the problems to resolve in a Software as a Service, is customization. Another related problem, is extensibility and integration with enterprese in-house application.

Although the customization can be obtained via parametrization, and ad-hoc metadata configuration, your needs can easily scalate to an special level that requires more features.

A way to extend and implement such customizations, is using programming. But instead of using a traditional programming language, a SaaS application can use a controled, and specialized language, totally oriented to the domain or line of business of such application.

Notably, Salesforce.com adopted such approach, with the Apex programming language:

The language runs on the server. According to Salesforce page:

The key technology of Apex is a new programming language that allows developers to do something entirely new and powerful to run business logic on salesforce.com servers. With the release of this language, Apex developers will be able to use the same tools that salesforce.com’s own development team uses to build our own apps, including our flagship CRM products.

You can add code to events on buttons, links inside Salesforce’s web pages. This is an interesting solution, that deserves study and experimentation. I’d want to incorpore such feature in an extensible SaaS application. Don’t you?

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

That’s the opinion from Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft’s evangelist on SaaS. He wrote an interesting post, making an analogy between SaaS and biology. It’s fun, too:

The key points are:

- There are many “species” of SaaS applications
- The habitat dictates which species survive

I’m still thinking about the relevance of such analogy, but it’s interesting. I don’t know how to describe an habitat, yet. 

You can read the complete post at:

Saas and Biology

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en

Microsoft has a revamped web site about Software as a Service:

http://www.microsoft.com/saas

There information about Microsoft SaaS Platform, technical resources, promotion for ISV and hosters, and more. For me, as developer, the more interesting link is

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saas/

the website at Microsoft Developers Network, about SaaS Architecture. Specially, the video about Remend solution:

At Work: Remend SaaS Video Case Study

and

An Enterprise Perspective for SaaS

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en