Redhat joins Interop Vendor Alliance
Heise (a german IT news provider) reports that Redhat joined the Interop Vendor Alliance recently. I'd never heard of that alliance before, so I was curious and wanted to dig a little into this. I googled and didn't get a reasonable link on that and Heise seemed to be the only one with the announcement. So I clicked my browser to the site and had a look at the pages. Hm, the list of supporting companies (including my employer Sun) is quite large - if IBM and Oracle are joining the club, all major vendors are present. Other content? Not too much, just a few whitepapers. Let's click on the FAQs and surprise ... zero questions!?! Instead the following Information:
Alliance Mission Statement
The Interop Vendor Alliance community is designed to support these objectives:
- Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability.
- Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability.
- Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers.
This sounded quite a bit too fuzzy to me.
Microsoft has founded the gremium and they have a history of vendor collaboration and interoperability:
- Visual J++ and Java in Windows (read more)
- Open server protocols and WSPP (read more)
- XPS vs. PDF (read more)
- Open XML vs. ODF (read more)
- last but not least: the browser war
This syndrom is by no way limited to Microsoft at all. PDF is a good Adobe story, iTunes would be Apple. My employer Sun probably also has had his issues, but I can't go into any
details here 
I'll leave it to the interested readers/commentators to
come up with some good examples.
Some other areas of my personal concern. Have you ever tried to:
- export a UML project from one Tool and import into a different Tool?
- use one single installed JRE for different pre-packaged software applications?
- connect WebServices based on Axis 1.x, Axis 2.x, different AppServers and .Net?
- tried to import non-trivial WSDL from one tool into another?
- work with two (or more) IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans on the same project?
- integrate more than 5 tools from different vendors in a software project?
This is also not limited to software. E.g. I'm using all kinds of memory cards: CompactFlash and SD Cards for my iPAQ, xdCard for my Fuji Finepix and MemoryStick for my Sony Camera - yes, it's all about choice 
I'm definitely not going to buy two DVD-Players for HD-DVD and Blueray.
So I'm going to stop ranting now and make my contribution to the IVA:
Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability.
I hereby encourage you vendors to improve interoperability! Get things going or I won't buy a new DVD player at all. (Hm, that probably doesn't falls under the IVA)
Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability.
OK, take following Scenario:
Open a UNIX text file in Windows Notepad and see, if you can read that without to much scrolling. Run a UNIX shell Script with DOS characters.
Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers
Glassfish and Spring seem to work together (look here). I didn't have the time to try that myself yet.
I also have some questions (as a starting point for the FAQs)
Is this a placebo strategic initiative targeted to confuse customers for marketing? Will this end up in everyone pating each others shoulder? Why aren't the big pure open source players in the boat? I'm missing some kind of roadmap on concrete activities. And in the end, why another interoperability consortium? Shouldn't the standardization organizations foster interoperability (ISO, IETF, OMG, OASIS, WSI, to name a few)?
Summary (a german joke, not very funny and poor translation):
Three germans meet on the street. What are they going to do next? ... They start a society or register a club.
Posted at 09:49AM Feb 14, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Sun Related | Kommentare[0]
On my way to LA (Part 2)
I had a severe deja vu when I arrived at LA.
- I got a white colored rental car, that looks like a racing car, but driving feels like riding on a snail. I always get that car. BTW: Why are white cars so popular in the US? In Germany they are so rare that manufactures could probably remove white color from the pricelist. It makes me sick to see white Mercedes', Audis or (even worse) BMWs.
- After arriving at the hotel I went accross the street to get something to eat. I ordered something and the employee immediately asked me where I came from. I responded something like "From Munich, the sunny capital of Bavaria, Germany - home of the Octoberfest and BMW" and after that the conversation continues always like the following:
- the person talks german to me
- the person tells me he has been in Germany for holiday
- the person has been in Germany with the military
- the person has a relative/friend living somewhere near Munich
- the person asks, if it's true that everybody in Germany drives like hell on the Autobahn
Amazing! That kind of people seem to be waiting for me in every bar or restaurant throughout the US 
According to my internal statistics at least 98 percent of all americans have been in Germany and most of them also in Munich. Is that to be true?
Posted at 04:43PM Feb 12, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Personal | Kommentare[0]
Are you a System Hero?
Another great movie from the (german) web site systemhelden.com. Enjoy!
Dawn of the DAUs ( a DAU is the most stupid user you can think of, something like a sys admin's "maximum credible accident" in terms of a user request)
Dawn of the DAUs --Trailer
Dawn of the DAUs -- Episode I: Cohort of all Evil
Posted at 03:54PM Feb 11, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Sun Related | Kommentare[0]
On my way to LA
I'm going to attend a Sun internal conference in Monrovia, CA next week. To give myself a chance to accomodate to the nine hour timeshift from Munich, Germany, I took the plane yesterday. And (as always) the plane over the atlantic had the seat rows arranged tightly together and the flight was fully booked. The thing that IMO sucks most in the plane is the abjustable seat back. I'm 191 cm tall (more than 6'3" ) and a twelve hour flight is always a horror for me. If the person sitting in front of me then bends his seat back, I'm completely squeezed into my seat and immediately unable to:
- eat: I can't even see the tablett anymore
- work: neither with the laptop nor read a large-scale whitepaper
- watch the video: the display becomes unreadable because of the angle
This time I couldn't even stand up from my seat without almost breaking my legs.
Dear Airline Companies: On oversea flights please disestablish the adjustable seats, assign seat in a front row or (even better) business class seats to people like me, who can't afford or are not allowed to travel business class
Posted at 03:13PM Feb 11, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Personal | Kommentare[1]
Thumper light - clustering USB sticks with Solaris 10 and ZFS on a laptop
Live demonstration.
Honor and credits to my Sun collegues Christian Müller, Constantin Gonzalez and Rolf Kersten.
Posted at 12:36PM Feb 07, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Sun Related | Kommentare[5]
SOA from the trenches
I'd like to report a little on one of my last year's SOA projects. The goal of the project was to establish a basic J2EE infrastructure with SOA in mind. A basic Business Use Case was picked, that forced us to integrate with various backend systems (via Web Service, JMS and JCA). So we just decided to go with a JBI-based ESB and give JavaEE 5 (in particular EJB3 and JPA) a try.
The customer didn't have too much experience in neither J2EE, SOA nor Project Management so things went the wrong way very quickly.
Business Requirements
A lot of time was wasted until we had figured out, what would be the valid Business Requirements. I'm not sure, but I think the Use Case (and it's description) was not fully fixed even after 6 months when we left the project. The problem might have been, that the people from the Business Departments didn't get, what the project was all about.
Tool Hell
Even before we had a first architecture draft at hand various parties (internal and external) popped into the project and demanded that we used MDA, a BPEL engine, a Registry, a new Build Tool, a new GUI Rendering Framework, etc. All different vendors you can think of, partly Beta-quality software. Did I mention, that there had also newly been introduced a full blown Project Management and Collaboration Tool noone ever had worked before with?
Waterfall-modell
Since the customer was a government related organization we had to proceed after the V-Modell 97 (the old version), which is the standard for german federal administration and defense projects. It is very document centric and Waterfall-like, changes were only hard to integrate. All the lessons we learned were dismissed, since we had to proceed to the next mile stone. We didn't have a chance to correct our earlier errors and thus the overall result was extremly bloated, fragile, imprecise. The stack of documents consistently inconsistent, the implmentation awful.
Wrap and Re-Use
We had to integrate one of their latest, greatest and newest services, that was considered to be SOA-ready out of the box. No earlier than during implementation we discovered, that there were several design flaws inside the service. First it was tightly coupled to a service from a completely different domain. Secondly it exposed only a non WS-I BP compliant RPC-encoded Web Service interface. Believe me, the solution to ship around that issues was quite ugly.
Consequences and my personal Advice
- Don't start to introduce SOA by implementing a Business Use Case. The Business Use Case isn't what your SOA Project is all about. Yes, I know, we're preaching Top-Down at almost every SOA Architect's presentation. The point is, that you first should take a deeper look on the Services you're going to need. If you are going to "Wrap and Reuse", take a look at the interfaces first. If the service not SOA-ready (or not even ready to be "SOA-tized"), consider implementing it new. So, I think a little Bottom-Up can't hurt.
- Start with a (very) slim tool set. Otherwise you end up in spending a lot of time integrating a number of different tools and best practices, that hadn't been designed to work together.
- Last and most important thing: Understand that your Service-oriented Architecture is a living thing. At least plan for some iterations when setting up basic infrastructure and architecture for your SOA.
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and not Sun's
Posted at 04:50PM Feb 06, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in SOA, BI and Governance | Kommentare[2]
IBM, OpenSource, FUD and a little bit on Java
Just my 2 cents on CNET news.com "IBM cool to Sun's open-source Java plan"
I can't believe it. All IBM has to say about open source java, is that Sun is using the wrong (GPLv2) license? They would have preferred Java under an Apache license, since they are involved in the Apache project Harmony. The guys at Harmony are doing a pretty good job, I'm sure, but this is ridiculus. Harmony may import any of the released code into their own project, if they want to.
GPL v2 was chosen, since it is designed to help advance projects and code commons by requiring innovation sharing with the commons. This definitely leads to less proliferation and minimizes proprietary forks. And that is most important for the Java plattform. We already have pain enough in getting to run all our software on the current variety of Sun's, IBM's and BEA's varoious (incompatible) JDKs.
Open source Java would have been a great opportunity for IBM to show their own achievements and commitment to the plattform, instead they move themselves into the offside. IBM still seems to fight in the cold war and pulls the old (but well known) strategy "fear, uncertantiy and doubt" - FUD.
IBM's proprietary approach to software portfolio is probably all what this is about. We have seen this in the JBI (JSR-208) discussion earlier: Openness and in particular open standards seem to be a little bit against the corporate software strategy.
Cheers, Armin
PS: Disclaimer: I've really enjoyed working with a lot of excellent, skilled and congenial IBM people in my past projects. Some of them often frowned when we talked about corporate things during lunch break
Posted at 10:02AM Nov 23, 2006 by Armin Wallrab in Java | Kommentare[0]
Why "The Raven"?
There are several reasons why I chose "The Raven" as a title for my blog.
- They are fascinating and very intelligent animals. According to Wikipedia: "Ravens have impressed their biologist observers with their apparent
intelligence and insight. Experiments have shown that members of the
crow family are capable of using tools;
an experiment, where some desirable item lay on the bottom of a bottle,
showed that some of these birds were able to form a hook to reach the
item. Like other corvids, Ravens can copy sounds from their
environment, including human speech. They have a wide range of
vocalizations, which remain the object of interest to ornithologists.".
- Though the raven often has been considered a bird of ill omen, in nordic mythology the raven stands for "Wisdom". The raven often is utilized as messenger or consultant. The ravens Hugin and Munin are sitting on god Odin's shoulder and provide him with information on what is happening in the world.
- Last but not least, the raven is the second part of my last name "Wallrab". In german "Wall" stands for the english word "wall", "Rabe" stands for the raven.
Since this blog is intended to be a source of wisdom and should provide information (and maybe consultancy) on SOA, BI and Java technology, I chose the raven as my favorite symbol.
Cheers, Armin
Posted at 10:37AM Nov 22, 2006 by Armin Wallrab in Personal | Kommentare[0]
Here we go
Hi Blogosphere,
I've just read Scoble/Israel's book "Naked Conversation" and decided to give it a try. So here is my personal blog
My name is Armin Wallrab, I'm employed at Sun Microsystems since 2000 and working as technical presales consultant in the german SOA/BI practice. My intend is to share my views on SOA (and other topics related to my work) with others and maybe build some relationships. I'm a german native speaker, so my english won't be always correct an most of the personal stuff in this blog will be in german language.
Cheers, Armin
Posted at 09:47AM Nov 21, 2006 by Armin Wallrab in Personal | Kommentare[3]