Andi Egloff's Weblog

Fuji GUI sneak peek: Fingers too tired to type DSLs?
How about Enterprise Integration in a browser?

The last few weeks we've been showing how easy it can be to compose services and route messages to create integration applications with the domain specific language in Project Fuji, check out the original Fuji screencast if you haven't already.

The natural question that came up regularly after showing the demo was: are you working on any visual tooling on top of the DSL? Well, the answer is a resounding YES; one goal of keeping the artifacts simple to start with is that adding tooling on top is much simpler.

I've been working with Kirill in St. Petersburg to experiment with web based tooling for Fuji. So here is a little sneak peek screencast showing how to build the same scenario as in the Fuji screencast using visual tools in a browser.

Hot off the developer's desk, so no fancy voice overs yet :) but I think it speaks for itself.

The technologies used? It's just CSS layers and canvases, no plug-ins to install. We're still working on integrating this with the OSGi and JBI based Fuji runtime; so stay tuned! Also remember that whilst the demo shows an RSS feed, we have over 30 adapters and containers already that can be leveraged, ranging from legacy systems to modern protocols. Have ideas of how this can be improved? Join Project Fuji!

Does this mean that we're moving away from full blown IDEs? Not at all, for doing the heavy lifting of writing services a fully featured IDE is the tool of choice; for composing services however and maybe simple scripting a low overhead approach looks promising. Actually I would also like to push some boundaries here to see whether JWebPane could bring the two closer together...

Posted at 11:20PM May 29, 2008 by Andreas Egloff in SOA  |  Comments[3]