7 September 2011

Cloud Computing: Too Many Choices?

While working on Cloud governance related ideas, I came accross Alistair Croll's presentation on "Cloud Computing: Too Many Choices?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl2ybT2kbgk).

Here is a slide I "completed" based on Alistair's which may be useful to some.



14 July 2011

Grails and hsqldb file in war deployment

This morning I've been trying to deploy my policy and rule driven distributed components governance proof of concept prototype onto a test server (as opposed to my development machine) for a colleague to be able to play with its RESTful API. Problem was, my data is in a hsqldb file and this won't be deployed together with the war.

You need to specify where you want your DB files ("prodDb.log", "prodDb.properties" and "prodDb.script") to be stored when the war is deployed.

in DataSource.groovy:
production {
dataSource {
dbCreate = "update"
url = "jdbc:hsqldb:file:./apache-tomcat-7.0.14/webapps/YieldBRGS-1/WEB-INF/lib/prodDb;shutdown=true"
}
}

Please note that in my case (apache-tomcat-7.0.14) the path is relative to the servlet container installation.

You also need to make sure your db files are copied to that location. For this, create a "_Events.groovy" script using the "create-script " command. This script should be placed in the "scripts" folder of your Grails project's root (there are other possibilities c.f. http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/4.%20The%20Command%20Line.html#4.3%20Hooking%20into%20Events). This script will be automatically detected and triggered.

_Events.groovy
includeTargets << grailsScript("Init")
includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsEvents")

eventCreateWarStart = { warName, stagingDir ->
if (grailsEnv == "production") {
println "Copying hsqldb script into war"
ant.copy(file: "prodDb.script", todir: "${stagingDir}/WEB-INF/lib/")
ant.copy(file: "prodDb.properties", todir: "${stagingDir}/WEB-INF/lib/")
ant.copy(file: "prodDb.log", todir: "${stagingDir}/WEB-INF/lib/")
} else {
println "grailsEnv != \"production\""
}
}

The events are not documented so a bit of googling around is necessary. Alternatively, if you have more patience or want to know what's going on under the hood you can look for the event('...') in the Grails source code (e.g. https://github.com/grails/grails-core/blob/master/scripts/_GrailsWar.groovy).

I hope this helps!

This is the software I will use in my demonstration later this year at ServiceWave 2011 in Poznan (http://servicewave.eu/2011/). C.f. official announcement here: http://servicewave.eu/2011/demonstration-evening/

16 June 2011

HD videos of policy driven components in distributed systems governance

I've been thinking about that for some time now: YouTube has the potential to be a great tool to increase research visibility and generate some feedback. I've already uploaded 3 videos showcasing some of the things I've done in the context of policy driven components in distributed systems governance.

The channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PDLAGH

A middleware infrastructure for multiple rule-engine distributed systems

The rule technological landscape is becoming ever more complex, with an extended number of specifications and products. It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to integrate rule-driven components and manage interoperability in multi-rule engine environments. The described work presents the possibility to provide a middleware infrastructure for rule-driven components in a distributed system. The authors' approach leverages on a set of middleware, discovery protocol, rule interchange and user interface to alleviate the environment's complexity.
http://youtu.be/uNvHXPPquCw

Towards governance of rule and policy driven components in distributed systems

The rule and policy technological landscape is becoming ever more complex, with an extended number of specifications and products. It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to integrate rule and policy driven components and manage interoperability in distributed environments. The described work presents an infrastructure going towards the governance of heterogeneous rule and policy driven components in distributed systems. The authors' approach leverages on a set of middleware, discovery protocol, knowledge interchange and consolidation to alleviate the environment's complexity.
http://youtu.be/i2PTbrTpNpY

yieldrif web console

Short tutorial on http://yieldrif.appspot.com/
http://youtu.be/fOUm55kkBr4

9 May 2011

PhD!

It's been a few months now, but series of rather happy events have kept me from updating this blog.

I've finally managed to defend my PhD thesis on the 13.01.2011. After 3.5 hours of intense debate - at the end of which my external was saying: "let's try to finish today, I can see we're going somewhere now" - my committee gave me "minor corrections" (the best in UK since "admitted immediately" is never awarded AFAIK) and congratulated me on my excellent defense...They just needed to make me work for it, that's how it's supposed to be (yeah welcome to the UK 'old universities' way of awarding a PhD).

Final title is: "Contextual Governance for Service Oriented Architecture Composition".

Of course it was a real blast to be back in Newcastle and meet my mates!

Industrial internship opportunities

I've started the recruitment for the next wave of SOA governance & security related internships.

UK, SOA Governance, BT, summer 2012, http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/index_files/BT%20AGH%20krakow%20uni%20internship%20offer.pdf

Sweden, SOA Security, Axiomatics, summer 2011, http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/index_files/axiomatics%20AGH%20krakow%20uni%20internship%20offer.pdf

Obviously students from AGH-UST, especially from the katedra informatyki, will be considered first.

4 May 2011

Yield RIF console

I've been working on policy-rule translation for a while now and a while back I published this little translation console: http://yieldrif.appspot.com/*. There, users can translate rules to/from DroolsML (http://www.jboss.org/drools), RIF-PRD (http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/PRD), JessML (www.jessrules.com) and edit translators (XSLT).

If you have any comments on the translators and/or rules, please do let me know. I'll do my best to keep them updated.

I will hopefully post more on this in the coming weeks. Indeed, Mark Proctor (http://markproctor.com/), the JBoss Rules Lead, has agreed to do some work on Drools XML output (aka DroolsML) in exchange for RIF-PRD and RuleML translators.

* Thanks Guillaume Laforge (http://glaforge.free.fr/weblog/) for your great work on Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/), Grails (http://www.grails.org/), Gaelyk (http://gaelyk.appspot.com/) and letting us use the source of your Groovy console app (http://groovyconsole.appspot.com/).

16 November 2010

POM dependency graph

I increasingly write my code in Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/). However, there are times where I cannot escape the hard reality of Maven, OSGi and other handsome Java tools...


Here is what I'm talking about:


I didn't make this up, this is the dependency graph of the drools-guvnor sources. Don't get me wrong, the Drools folks are doing an excellent job. But dealing with this kind of things when one needs to go through the sources is just...

30 July 2010

CFP: European Workshop on Practical Aspects of Service Oriented Computing Governance

Doing my job as organizer:

http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/e-passing/

European Workshop on Practical Aspects of Service Oriented Computing Governance (E-PASSING 10)
December 1-3, 2010, Ayia Napa, Cyprus

Overview

The way enterprises conduct business today is changing greatly. The enterprise has become more pervasive with a mobile workforce, outsourced data centers, different engagements with customers, suppliers and distributed sites. In addition, companies seeking to optimize their processes across supply chains are implementing integration strategies that increasingly include their customers and suppliers. This amplifies the need for the governance of end-to-end transactions between business partners and the customer.

The advantages of Service Computing to allow organizations to integrate service oriented resource regardless of their origins, re-use these assets in different contexts and manage the required contextualization efficiently are well known. However, there are still many challenges to be solved in this important field of research. The wide variety of tools, techniques, and technological solutions that can be implemented render the domain of SOC governance difficult to manage. In particular, the aspects of policy definition and enforcement, service asset visibility and alignment of services to business objectives have seen a lot of hype in the past years but very few concrete and effective solutions.

The European workshop on practical aspects of service oriented computing governance (E-PASSING), collocated with the 2010 European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS), is meant to be an opportunity for academic and industrial communities to discuss innovative implementations and techniques advancing the state-of-the-art in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) governance.


Topics

The workshop invites original submissions from both researchers and practitioners in the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:

* Mechanisms, tools and policies for developing, deploying, using, and evolving SOC assets; including service identification, service registration, SLAs, flexible exposition and versioning.

* Policy & rule types, languages and enforcement mechanisms for SOC governance.

* Interoperability and interchangeability between policy & rule languages and enforcement mechanisms.

* Management of policy & rule conflicts, policy combinations.

* Usability of policy & rule based service oriented systems.

* Design-time governance practices, which involves, for example, rules for the development of services that align with business goals and offer the greatest benefit at the lowest risk.

* Runtime governance practices, which, in part, involves the enforcement of rules to assure that services are executed legally and securely.

* SOC governance implementation descriptions and discussions.


Important Dates

Paper submission: September 20, 2010
Authors notification: October 30, 2010
Final paper submission: November 20, 2010


Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above. All papers will receive a peer-review. Papers should be formatted according to the IEEE proceedings guidelines, between 4 to 10 pages (Templates: Word Template (ZIP), LaTex Package (ZIP)).

Papers should be submitted electronically via the web-based submission system at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=epassing10


Publication

All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings book, published by CEUR-WS (http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/index.html) under an ISSN reference, and on paper support. The best papers of the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a journal special issue.


Workshop Venue

Ayia Napa, Cyprus The workshop is to be held in conjunction with The 8th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS2010)

Program Chairs

* Pierre de Leusse, AGH-UST (Poland)
* Nektarios Georgalas, BT (UK)
* Panos Periorellis, Microsoft (UK)
* Krzysztof Zielinski, AGH-UST (Poland)


Program Committee (to be completed)

* David Brossard, Axiomatics AB (Sweden)
* Nick Cook, Newcastle University (UK)
* Theo Dimitrakos, BT (UK)
* Mike Fisher, BT (UK)
* Howard Foster, City University (UK)
* Gabriela Gheorghe, University of Trento (Italy)
* Andrew Gordon, Unisys (USA)
* Aad van Moorsel, Newcastle University (UK)
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)


Contact

For more information and inquiries about the workshop, please contact Pierre de Leusse (pdl (at) agh.edu.pl).

16 November 2009

Wedding and next move

That should be in the previous post about the 2nd part of the summer 2009, but it's so important I thought it deserved its own post!

So yes Anna and I now share the same family name. The ceremony was nice, see some of the photos on my Facebook [1] account for more details. It was also the occasion for our families to meet – for the first time – and it all went smoothly. Funny moment when my parents “discretely” whispered to me during the ceremony that the rings were on the wrong hand...turns out in Poland and in France THE hand is not the same.

After this, I went to Krakow for a job interview at the Distributed Group of AGH University [2]. This went just as well as the wedding and I was offered a job on the spot! And guess what, I'm starting on the 1st of December. Needless to say that Anna and I are delighted, we'll finally be able to settle somewhere – and in Krakow s'il vous plaĆ®t!

[1] http://www.facebook.com/pierre.de.leusse (I've just realised that I'm a resource on the Facebook website, this is so cool and so geeky!)

[2] http://portal.ics.agh.edu.pl

Summer tour 2009 part 2, more submissions and writing up

It seems a bit late to write about the second part of last summer but here goes.

Following ICWS, I kept writing on my thesis (and still am) as well as polishing an article for a special edition “Security and Trust Management for Dynamic Coalitions” of the Wiley's Journal on Security and Communication Networks [1].

This was hard work that finally paid off thanks to David, Aris and couldn't have been done without Theo's guidance [2]. For the record this was a 6 months long denouement, with the 1st submission in January (2009) of 70ish pages which was accepted with major revisions, the 2nd submission of 20 pages long but which didn't comprise a change log that specified what and why we did changes in function of the reviews provided, before finally this last one...

By the way kudos to the reviewers for not only accepting the tedious task of going through and reviewing 70 pages of technical text but also doing it as well as they did! This is probably the best pieces of reviewing I have seen to date.

[1] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/114299116/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

[2] David Brossard, Nektarios Georgalas and Theo Dimitrakos