Dynamic Data Models

A recent article on Infoq: Beyond SOA: A New Enterprise Architecture Framework for Dynamic Business Applications gives an interesting point of view about development of Enterprise Applications both from an architecture and a methodology perspective. Article's conclusions are:

"the evolution of flat, stateless, static, client-server web-based solutions have contributed to the disconnect between IT architecture and the real-world of hierarchical, stateful, dynamic, distributed business. We also discussed how traditional engineering approaches do not support the development of adaptive systems capable of supporting the dynamics of business."

A fundamental issue with present enterprise SOA is about the abuse of static data models. As the author explained, relational databases are for static data relationship, but only some parts of the enterprise ecosystem can be considered as being ruled by static relationships. For a more technical example, XML was supposed to be here to overcome relational limitations, as it should provide more robust data representations. In fact, an XML document is robust because by definition you could add elements without breaking the semantic of the document itself, but this is hardly true if then the XML document is parsed into static object wrappers, as most of the "modern" tools provide. As a consequence, proliferation of strict XML schema validation totally eliminates XML intrinsic flexibility and robustness. A more dynamic approach in the manipulation and representation of data flowing in the enterprise should be the focus of next generation softwares. Dynamic data manipulation will provide much better flexibility than static DOM object wrappers that are so common today.

Unfortunately present software tools are still focused on what the author calls static engineering frameworks which are good, even indispensable, to build bridges or airplanes, but very bad to create software useful to represent the dynamic and fuzzy business behavior. The well celebrated web-centric architectural model is good for information representation and retrieval, but when that model is used as a framework to capture and model business real life enterprise applications, then its static nature miserably fails the target.

Basically, a picture of a dog is not a dog, but looks like the software industry still has not fully understood this evidence.

Eric Lerognon's JCAPS 6 to SAP ECC 5.0 notes

This note, sent by my former colleague Eric Lerognon of Sun France, demonstrates how to connect from JCAPS 6 to SAP ECC 5.0.

Merci beaucoup Eric!

Will Java CAPS 6 be based on Netbeans 6.1 ?

Rumors are that the next generation of Java CAPS will be based on a new Netbeans version. No more fights with the eDesigner, eventually. ICAN 5.0 and JCAPS 5.1 IDEs were based on a very old Netbeans (v 3.5) heavily customized by SeeBeyond, called the eDesigner. Additionally jcaps 6 JEE runtime is going to be Glassfish, the Sun open-source application server (at present jcaps runs over old SJAS 8.0).
For seasoned jcaps developers, used to workaround some eDesigner's weird behaviors, it will be a huge improvement, as Netbeans 6 represents probably the most advanced Java IDE in the market (and yes, I mean even better than Eclipse). Glassfish then is one of the best JEE 5 and EJB 3 implementation available, this means Java CAPS 6 is evolving to a complete and powerful Java enterprise application development environment, not limited to EAI only. That shows a strong Sun's commitment in favor of jcaps, good for both partners and customers.

A Java CAPS Custom Security Provider Enablement

Recently I had to enable a Java custom security provider implemented by a customer. The implementation is based on a set of JAR files included into Java Collaborations, providing some special signing and hashing security features.
To have that libraries working I just had to add few lines to the server.policy file, which resides into:

logicalhost\is\domains\domain1\config

being domain1 my target domain. The JAR files were put into

logicalhost\is\domains\domain1\lib\ext

Below the additional permissions fragment:

// Basic set of required permissions granted to all remaining code
grant {
    ...
    // Java CAPS needs these permissions so that the Bouncy Castle provider can be used
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "insertProvider.BC";
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "removeProvider.BC";
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "putProviderProperty.BC";
    
    //----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    //  "InnoSec" custom security provider
    //----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "insertProvider.InnoSec";
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "removeProvider.InnoSec";
    permission java.security.SecurityPermission "putProviderProperty.InnoSec";
    //----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ...