Joining Alfresco

Starting from January 2010 I have joined Alfresco Software as Senior Solutions Engineer in Italy.

Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum® and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects®. Its investors include the leading investment firms Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund and SAP Ventures.

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost.

I will be the technical lead for Alfresco's operations in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland.

The Italian Alfresco's team is made of me and Alberto Fidanza, Country Manager. Alberto has over 20 years of strong experience managing sales, marketing, operations channel and technical teams for multinational leading ICT companies up to Country Manager’s position. He is the former CA country manager for Italy.

The local team is supported by Gabriele Columbro, Field Consultant, EMEA Professional Services at Alfresco. Gab provides technical and architectural professional services for Alfresco Partners and Customers in EMEA, acting as technical reference for EMEA and especially for the Italian and Spanish communities.

Spring 3.0 GA

Spring 3.0 is now GA. Spring has already fully demonstrated to be a successful alternative to EJB development. JEE 6 has learnt from Spring and simplified a lot enterprise Java development, becoming much more lightweight and usable. It shows that some good degree of competition can improve the market, but I hope Spring will keep following its own philosophy instead of trying too much to compete with JEE. the risk I see is that Spring could become too wide and difficult to understand.
Spring has demonstrated that the open community can produce better products than vendors' committees, so keep doing the good job of simplifying enterprise development.

Netbeans 6.8 Final

Netbeans 6.8 final has been released. The main target of this version is to support JEE 6 and Glassfish v3, which also went eventually final.

DZone has published a reference card for developers.

Competitive Strategies

If you want to learn and discuss about competitive strategy, my friend Marco has started a very interesting blog on the subject. As an expert manager and consultant, Marco collects is thoughts and discuss books and articles about strategic management. Sometime we need to stop, exit from day by day activities and think out of the box to evaluate whether we are following a strategic path or just following short-term tactics.

Somebody once wrote: Strategy without tactic is a dream. Tactic without strategy is a nightmare.

Groovy for quick text clean-up

Having some XML files to clean-up and transform, I was looking for a script-based solution, so that I don't have to go through the Java edit-build-run cycle. Usually I would think to Python, but it's a long time since I have touched it and then I wanted to try some Groovy.

The file I have to transform is an automatically generated XML, like this:

       <_pdl></_pdl>

       <_tkn></_tkn>

       <_out></_out>

       <_tds></_tds>

       <_evt></_evt>

       <_lfn></_lfn>

       <tc></tc>

       <fc></fc>

       <dkey-protected></DKEY-PROTECTED>

       ....

I want to strip things out to get only the start elements, like this:

<_pdl>
<_tkn>
<_out>
<_tds>
<_evt>
<_lfn>
<tc>
<fc>
<dkey-protected>
....

A quick and dirty Groovy solution can be something like:

def file = "C:\\Users\\mauri\\Desktop\\mapping.txt"

StringBuffer dest = new StringBuffer();

new File(file).eachLine{ line -> 
        line = line.trim()
        if (line.equals("")) {
        } else if (line.indexOf("/") > -1) {
            dest.append(line.substring(0, line.indexOf("/")-1))
            dest.append("\n")
        } else {
            dest.append(line)
            dest.append("\n")
        }
    }

print dest.toString()

Probably there are much better ways to do that in Groovy (I'm a rookie here), but I can recycle most of my Java skills and well known Java syntax, which saves me a lot of time. Especially, even if I have to learn new interesting things like closures, I can re-use years of knowledge about the Java API, which from my point of view makes Groovy a winning tool in the JVM world.

NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta

NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta is available for download. This release is especially targeted on providing support for the new JEE 6 specifications, which represent a major evolution of the JEE platform toward simplicity:

Java Enterprise Edition 6 support in NetBeans:

• Web Projects with Java EE 6 and Java EE 6 Web profiles, EJBs in web applications
• EJB 3.1 support, EJB project file wizard also supports Singleton session type
• RESTful web services (JAX-RS 1.1), GlassFish Metro 2.0 web services (JAX-WS 2.2), JAXB 2.2
• Java Persistence JPA 2.0, deployment, debugging and profiling with GlassFish v3 application server

The delay of Oracle - Sun deal

In FT.com I read: Oracle braced for EU objection on Sun deal

"Brussels’ concerns centre on Oracle’s assumption of MySQL, an open source software company that Sun acquired in 2008. Opponents of the deal claim MySQL could become a serious competitor to Oracle’s own core business in the long term."

Maybe Oracle is not too worried about the delay: what if in the meanwhile Oracle tries to push Sun customers to Oracle database and middle-ware? Money lost today can be recovered tomorrow... The apparent lack of urgency from Oracle, despite their complaints about "Sun loosing 100$ millions a month" could be a signal they just want to let the Sun's ship sinking?

At present some of the new open-source software technologies Sun is developing are very smart, lightweight and cheap, especially cheaper than Oracle's. Just try yourself to install and setup the Oracle SOA suite and then try the same experience with Glassfish ESB. Why should Oracle let live a potentially disruptive competitor to its present product line? Well, if only Sun were aware of its own middle-ware technologies and, especially, actually able to sell them...

Sun top management unfortunately has done a great job disrupting, wasting and disbanding all the SeeBeyond technical and commercial knowledge in the SOA / EAI field, with a series of totally bad organizational and operational decisions. Especially, they disbanded the Professional Services teams they have inherited from SeeBeyond, leaving the field almost totally naked and unable to provide high level consultancy services. Exactly that same SeeBeyond team that before was able to compete and deliver against all the software giants, despite the fact that, to be honest, ICAN 5 was initially a terribly broken and unstable product. Here we are now, easy to predict when I left Sun in 2007: "I told you, guys".

I admit the EU's objection about MySQL is not without foundations, but while political games are running, thousands of Sun employees, partners and customer are facing hard times.


"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
-- George S. Patton