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.

Fuji Simple Service API, SpringDM and OSGi Integration with JBI

Sujit Biswas wrote an interesting article which:

"[...] shows how to integrate Fuji simple service api with spring/springDM application, We will create a springDM application which instantiates the above provider Implementation , based on spring-config and spring-osgi-config files."

Fuji allows for Spring and OSGi services integration

"The simple service provides the capability to invoke/interact with JAVA code outside of JBI, i.e Service API provides a bridge between code that is hosted outside of a JBI component and service endpoints available on the NMR."

This enables integration of OSGI/POJO services with JBI. Read Sujit's article for more.

About Fuji:

"Project Fuji forms the core component of Open ESB v3 effort and represents Sun's next generation open source integration runtime, focused on providing a lightweight, developer-friendly, and extensible platform for composite application development.

At the core of Project Fuji is a lightweight micro-kernel based on JBI (JSR 208) and OSGi. Packaged as an OSGi bundle, the micro-kernel can be installed in any OSGi R4 compliant runtime (such as Felix, Knopflerfish or Equinox), including GlassFish v3. JSR 208 support introduces a robust, message-based service bus to the OSGi environment and allows the wide range of existing JBI "components" (adapters and containers) to run in Fuji.

Developer experience is a primary focal point in Fuji as evidenced by the level of flexibility and accessibility offered in the platform. Starting with a rapid, top-down development language, IFL (Integration Flow Language), developers can quickly and easily generate an integration application using a domain-specific grammar. The service development model favors convention and configuration over boilerplate code and framework APIs, allowing integration developers to focus on the code that matters. "

Link to Java CAPS Release 6.2 Documentation Center

The Java CAPS Release 6.2 Documentation Center is already available at:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/821-0538

Java CAPS 6.2 to be released

There are rumours that the latest Java CAPS 6.2 will be released within end of this month. So far Sun has already published the release notes.

In summary, from the release notes:

This release of Java CAPS uses the following versions of NetBeans and GlassFish:

• NetBeans IDE 6.5.1
  
• GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 patch 2

This release of Java CAPS provides new support for the following operating systems:

Design-Time

• Windows Server 2008
  
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 5.3 (64 bit)
  

Runtime

• Windows Server 2008 (OS: 32 bit; JVM: 32 bit)
  
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 (OS: 32 bit; JVM: 32 bit)
  
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.3 (OS: 32 bit; JVM: 32 bit)
  
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.3 (OS: 64 bit; JVM: 32 bit)
  
• IBM AIX 5L 5.3 (OS: 64 bit; JVM: 32 bit)

This release of Java CAPS adds support for the following browsers and external systems:

• Firefox 3.5.2 for accessing all Java CAPS browser components
  
• OpenSSO Web Services Security (WSS) Agent for the HTTP Adapter
  
• SWIFT 2009 messages and SWIFT 2009 certification
  
• SAP JCo 3 for the SAP BAPI Adapte

My comments:

• It is a bit disappointing that the IDE is not Netbeans 6.7. I have experienced JAX-WS Web Services deployment issues with Netbeans 6.5 and the suggested solution has been to upgrade to Nb 6.7 (!?!) so I really hope Sun has fixed some bugs in Nb 6.5 before packaging it with JCAPS. It would be annoying to start patching the stuff the day after downloading it.
  
• Finally Java CAPS has an understandable version numbering convention: this release will be called 6.2 and not "6 update 2", which meant nothing unless you want to remember customers a sound close to the Windows service packs...
  

Tungsten

It seems there is a fork of the old C-JDBC project that I was not aware of:

Tungsten is an open source stack for deploying and operating horizontally scaled database clusters, also known as database scale-out. Scale-out works by spreading data across multiple, independent database servers connected through a network. The model offers an intuitive, incremental approach to solving the following important database problems:

• Preventing data loss though up-to-date replica databases and coordinated backups
• Increasing overall application availability by providing rapid database failover
  
• Raising performance and through-put by dispatching read traffic to replicas
• Integrating data between heterogenous systems, for example to support scaling of commercial databases using low-cost open source databases.

C-JDBC is:

an open source (LGPL) database cluster middleware that allows any Java application (standalone application, servlet or EJB container, ...) to transparently access a cluster of databases through JDBC(tm). The database is distributed and replicated among several nodes and C-JDBC balances the queries among these nodes. C-JDBC handles node failures and provides support for checkpointing and hot recovery.