{ "Pierre de Leusse" }

Cloud Computing: Too Many Choices?

2011-09-07T12:18:00.004+02:00

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.

Grails and hsqldb file in war deployment

2011-07-14T10:45:00.007+02:00

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/

HD videos of policy driven components in distributed systems governance

2011-06-16T09:36:00.003+02:00

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

PhD!

2011-05-09T15:08:00.004+02:00

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

2011-05-09T14:58:00.004+02:00

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.

Yield RIF console

2011-05-04T11:54:00.006+02:00

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/).

POM dependency graph

2010-11-16T12:26:00.006+01:00

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...

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

2010-07-30T11:04:00.000+02:00

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).

Wedding and next move

2009-11-16T23:16:00.001+01:00

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 plaît!

[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

2009-11-16T23:01:00.002+01:00

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

Summer tour 2009 part 1, AFIN and ICWS

2009-07-21T11:28:00.006+02:00

AFIN’09 [1], in Glyfada, earlier this summer was a blast. These IARIA conferences might have a bad reputation amongst the academic community but I keep having a good time. This time I hooked up with some old acquaintance from Luxembourg University and met Reijo Savola from VTT amongst other Finns. We talked a bit about the GEMOM project [2] which seem to share a set of common goals with what we are working on at BT [3]. Hopefully further discussions with Reijo and Habtamu Abie from the Norwegian Computing Center will happen and be fruitful!

At the very opposite, ICWS [4], one of the top event in SOA in the academic calendar was very disappointing…Organisation was poor and the sessions I went to were almost empty. In addition, how can a paper on federated identity such as [5] can even make it to a research conference (especially one like ICWS) is staggering. As far as I can see there is no innovation, XACML solutions have been out there for 2-3 years at least now. Works from industry leaders like Layer 7, Vordel, Microsoft, Axiomatics and academic organisations like Newcastle, Vrije Universiteit and plenty others have been completely missed…very poor choice of paper. A quick look at that paper and its related work section will, I think, shock any SOA security researcher.

[1] The First International Conference on Advances in Future Internet, AFIN 2009, June 18-23, 2009 - Athens/Glyfada, Greece, http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/AFIN09.html

[2] Genetic Message Oriented Genetic Middleware (GEMOM), A FP7 European Project - January 2008 – June 2010, http://www.gemom.eu

[3] Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing the Service Oriented Infrastructure: research challenges and emerging solutions, Handbook on communications and information security, Stavroulakis, P, 2009, To be published

[4] IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA, http://conferences.computer.org/icws/2009/

[5] Regina N. Hebig, Christoph Meinel, Michael Menzel, Ivonne Thomas, Robert Warschofsky, A Web Service Architecture for Decentralised Identity- and Attribute-based Access Control, Proc. 7th IEEE ICWS (Application and Industry Track), Los Angeles, USA, July 2009

SOA governance architecture at ICWS

2009-05-26T14:52:00.005+02:00

Later this summer, at ICWS [1], I will be presenting some of the ideas developed during the last few months on SOA governance [2]. In our quest to find a way to render business capabilities (e.g. web services) exposure and management easier, we have developed an architectural model that describes how to go at it.

The main points covered are resource (e.g. a software artefact such as a service) contextualisation, visibility, adaptation and life-cycle management as well as policy administration and process management. I know, there is a lot to cover in just 8 standard IEEE style pages, but apparently we’ve managed to do a good enough job for the reviewers to accept the paper.

If you would like more information on the topic please do drop me an email.

[1] IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009) http://conferences.computer.org/icws/2009/

[2] de Leusse, P., Dimitrakos, T., and Brossard, D., A governance model for SOA, IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Academic achievements

2009-04-09T12:45:00.012+02:00

Workshop organisation
Burton Group & BT - SOA governance

Technical committee
MESH 2009, MESH 2010, AFIN 2010, SECURWARE 2011

Technical reviewer
Wiley Security and Communication Networks Journal - special issue on Security and Trust Management for Dynamic Coalitions
Third IFIP International Conference on Trust Management

Session Chair
MESH 2008, AFIN 09, SECURWARE 10

Book chapter
Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing the Service Oriented Infrastructure: research challenges and emerging solutions, Handbook on communications and information security, Stavroulakis, P, 2009, To be published

Journal article
de Leusse, P., Brossard, D. and Georgalas, N. (2010), Securing business operations in an SOA. Security and Communication Networks, 3: 456–485. doi: 10.1002/sec.188

Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing Business Operations in SOA, BT Technology Journal, vol.27, no.2 (https://www.btplc.com/Innovation/Journal/BTTJ/current/HTMLArticles/Volume26/22Securing/Default.aspx)

Conference/Worshop papers
de LEUSSE, P., Dimitrakos, T., SOA-based security governance middleware, SECURWARE 2010: the fourth international conference on Emerging security information, systems and technologies : 18–25 July 2010, Venice, Italy, eds. Reijo Savola, et al., IEEE, 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-7695-4095-5.

de Leusse, P., Dimitrakos, T., and Brossard, D., A governance model for SOA, IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA

de Leusse, P., Panos Periorellis, Dimitrakos, T., and Srijith K. Nair, Self Managed Security Cell, a security model for the Internet of Things and Services, The First International Conference on Advances in Future Internet, AFIN 2009, IEEE Computer Society, June 18-23, 2009, Athens/Vouliagmeni, Greece, Best paper award

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P. and Dimitrakos, T., A semi autonomic infrastructure to manage non functional properties of a service
In UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008, 8-11 September, Edinburgh, UK, National e-Science Centre, 2008

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P. and Maierhofer, A., Secure & Rapid Composition of Infrastructure Services in the Cloud, In The Second International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications, SENSORCOMM 2008, 25-31, August 2008, Cap Esterel, France, pp 770-775, IEEE Computer Society, 2008

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Dimitrakos, T. and Watson, P., An architecture for non functional properties management in distributed computing, Doctoral Consortium on Software and Data Technologies - Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium on Software and Data Technologies, DCSOFT 2008, In Conjunction with ICSOFT 2008
2008, Pages 26-37

Demo
de Leusse, P., Kwolek, B., Zielinski, K., A middleware infrastructure for multi-rule-engine distributed systems, Towards a service-based internet : third European conference, ServiceWave 2010 : Ghent, Belgium, December 13–15, 2010 : proceedings / eds. Elisabetta Di Nitto, Ramin Yahyapour. — Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag, cop. 2010. — (Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; ISSN 0302-9743 ; 6481). — ISBN-10 3-642-17693-2 ; ISBN-13 978-3-642-17693-7.

de Leusse, P., Kwolek, B., Zielinski, K., A common interface for multi-rule-engine distributed systems, RuleML-2010 Challenge : 4th international rule challenge : Web rule symposium, p. 21–23, 2010 : proceedings., eds. Monica Palmirani, et al. Washington, DC, USA, October. (http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-649/)

de Leusse, P. and Brossard, D., Distributed systems security governance, a SOA based approach, Third IFIP International Conference on Trust Management, Springer, June 15-19, 2009, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

Technical reports
de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P., CS-TR No 1037 Enterprise Service Bus: An overview, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Jul 2007

Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” 2009

2009-04-04T22:11:00.002+02:00

The Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” version 2009 has arrived [1]. Of course it mentions that with the current crisis, SOA governance is more than ever of importance for organisations. But more importantly the report mentions that albeit the market (of SOA governance technologies) is still in turmoil, the companies have dramatically matured. This might mean that we could finally get some policy enforcement and governance common specifications...yes I'm an idealist...Please note that the report does mention the non existence of SOA governance interoperability common specification.

Governance seems to have officially passed the stage of being just “stick it into a registry so that we know where it is” (i.e. resource visibility) and we can read in this report a little bit about integration, interaction, monitoring, validation and life cycle management. I do keep hearing about governance product that are in fact “just” registries and repositories.

In fact, I'm quite pleased with this report as the very topic of my research in underlined as a “very apparent key data point”: “Customers are looking to govern their interactions with business partners and services provided by the cloud”.

We even get a quick definition (their own): "SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality".

[1] Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets”, available at http://www.softwareag.com/Corporate/Images/Software_AG_Article4_SOA_tcm16-37108.pdf

Self Managed Security Cell, a security model for the Internet of Things and Services (IoTS)

2009-03-12T10:27:00.003+01:00

I'm delighted to announce that my paper with Panos [1] and Theo [2] on Self Managed Security Cell, a security model for the Internet of Things and Services (IoTS) has been accepted at AFIN 2009 [3].

This paper discusses what we feel is necessary for security to work efficiently in the IoTS. IoTS is such an exciting domain and this paper is a written version of dicussions on the topic we've had at work/coffee/home/in front of the XBox...:)

[1] http://periorellis.blogspot.com/

[2] http://labs.bt.com/cissr/People.html

[3] The First International Conference on Advances in Future Internet AFIN 2009

SOA governance Burton Group & BT workshop

2009-03-10T18:39:00.005+01:00

A few weeks back I got very frustrated that BT's contract with the Burton Group didn't allow me to get the SOA Governance Infrastructure [1] report from Anne Thomas Manes. This could basically be the title of my thesis! :)

So as the good student that I am (I don't want to hear any laughs!), I wrote to them to explain my predicament and propose a deal: i'll show you mine, if you show me yours!

A few hours later I had a polite answer requesting a date for this meeting and names of Burton's analysts. Yes my work is that interesting! :) Thanks to my supervisor, Theo Dimitrakos [2] we could arrange for the meeting to take place and host it.

The SOA governance Burton Group & BT workshop is taking place at Adastral Park this Thursday (03.12.2009) where we will receive Richard Watson [3] and Manfred Haertel to discuss this very exciting topic.

[1] Anne Thomas Manes, SOA Governance Infrastructure, Application Platform Strategies Reference Architecture template, Burton Group, http://www.burtongroup.com/Research/PublicDocument.aspx?cid=946

[3] Theo Dimitrakos, Head of Security Architectures Research http://labs.bt.com/cissr/People.html

[3] Richard Watson, Analyst, Emphases: XML, java, J2EE, SOA, web services http://www.burtongroup.com/AboutUs/Bios/PrintBio.aspx?Id=149

IFIPTM'09 SOA security governance demonstration

2009-03-10T18:27:00.007+01:00

No post for ages as I've been kept very busy for the last few months.

But some results are starting to show up and to start: a demonstration proposal from David Brossard and myself has been accepted at IFIPTM 09 [1]. I'll present a prototype of SOA security governance I'm working on (the evaluation bit of my thesis). Some interesting (complex) middleware that allows to simplify and render security more dynamic for distributed systems. I cannot write much more about it since BT is attempting to patent it but it's both interesting and cool ;).

I've seen in the accepted papers that my ex colleague at Newcastle University Georgios PITSILIS is presenting his research. I hope I'll be able to catch up with him and see what he's up to now [2].

[1] The 3rd IFIP International Conference on Trust Management (IFIPTM'09) http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/IFIPTM/

[2] Georgios PITSILIS. Trust-enhanced Recommender Systems for Efficient
On-line collaboration http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/IFIPTM/apaper.html

SOA is Dead; Long Live Services

2009-01-08T23:14:00.004+01:00

It's been all over the technical news for the last few days and it won't fail to stir up quite a few heated discussions: it's of course Anne Thomas Manes' article SOA is Dead; Long Live Services [1].

It is indeed very interesting. But as Stefan Tilkov comments on Infoq [2]:

In all fairness, Anne seems to object to the word SOA, not necessarily the concept, because it seems to have lost its meaning for many people.

[1] http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html

[2] http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/is-soa-dead

Under new supervision

2008-12-18T14:46:00.003+01:00

With Panos leaving academia and joining Microsoft to pursue his career in the industry, Nick has kindly accepted to step in to replace him as my supervisor for the last year of my PhD.

I'm looking forward to working with Nick. His work is an inspiration (Nick's thesis is one of the best I've read) and I hope we'll be successful working together.

What is Cloud?

2008-09-25T16:36:00.001+02:00

After hearing so much about Cloud Computing [1], a few months ago I decided to find my own answers...

You can find these in this document: What is Cloud? [2] Named after the famous “What is Grid? A three point check” [3]. I don't expect my document to reach such a high level of visibility, but it might start a few discussions...

Following is a short teaser:
I start by introducing distributed computing and Grid because, frankly said; I didn't think there was anything new in Cloud. However, the principal points I’m trying to make in this document are:
We’ve reached such a high level of complexity and size in distributed systems that more and more tasks should be managed automatically.
Computing resources are not only the usual data or processor time anymore, but could be anything.

I’ll follow the discussions over on wiki and in the different events I’ll attend because these two points are at the base of my work.

More on this later as I am working on some exiting stuff related to Cloud and security…(did I hear security in Cloud computing?!).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
[2] http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/pierre.de-leusse/files/whatIsCloud.pdf
[3] http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/Articles/WhatIsTheGrid.pdf

Highlands roadtrip

2008-09-18T11:01:00.015+02:00

Following AHM [1], Anna and I went on a roadtrip in the highlands. From Edinburgh to Inverness, followed by Gairloch, Ullapool and Stoer (amongst other destinations). It was a blast, we saw so many nice things like seals, baskin sharks or wonderfull landscapes...still 641 miles (1000km+) in 4 days is a lot.

We're both looking forward to go there again!

[1] http://de-leusse.blogspot.com/2008/09/uk-e-science-all-hands-meeting-2008.html

Committee

2008-09-18T11:01:00.014+02:00

It's now official, I'm member of the technical committee for the MESH 2009 event. This year's event was a blast, both in term of content, with some interesting work presented, and in term of networking with amazing researchers from a lot of big companies (Siemens, Nokia, Cisco, Thales, Atos Orgin...) and universities.

I got to know Andreas and Marcel, and I'm please to see they're both committees as well. I'm looking forward to more interaction with them.

Finally, a little advertising for my own paper :) Secure & Rapid Composition of Infrastructure Services in the Cloud (here).

UK e-Science ALL HANDS MEETING 2008

2008-09-18T11:01:00.011+02:00

Last week I was present at the AHM in Edinburgh. Amongst other cool things were talks from Andrew Martin and from Ross Anderson. Andrew's defence of the fact that security specialists should work together to come up with practical solutions (e.g. patterns, guidelines, scenarios) rather than work in their own corner was spot on.

The AssessGrid project demo along with the poster by Karim Djemame were also interesting. I'm working on similar issues of negotiation of non functional properties and I hope to have the chance to discuss more of this with Karim in the futur.

John and Paul's talks [1, 2] went well and it was good to see what they've been up to in more details.

Finally, my talk [3] went rather well, although I was disapointed by the low attendence.

[1] A Peer-to-Peer Database Server based on BitTorrent
[2] An Adaptive Distributed Query Processor for e-Science using Dynamic Service Deployment
[3] A semi autonomic infrastructure to manage non functional properties of a service

Exploits of a mum

2008-09-18T11:01:00.001+02:00

This SQL injection joke makes me laugh...Plus I wouldn't be surprised if that would really happen.

ESB : Technical Report

2008-09-17T18:57:00.000+02:00

It's been a very long time since my last post, but I found the motivation to start again. To let you know that I authored a technical report on ESB. You can find this one here (http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/abstract/1037).

Please feel free to comment here or send me an email if you have any comment or suggestion. Following is the abstract:

Currently, business requirements for rapid operational efficiency, customer responsiveness as well as rapid adaptability are driving the need for ever increasing communication and integration capabilities of the software assets. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), which is the process of integrating enterprise systems with existing applications and in general distributed computing, have produced diverse integration techniques and approaches to undertake these challenges. This has brought the development of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) variants, which is partly supported by commonly accepted standards that ensure interoperability, sharing and reusability. As a result of this, a safer and faster level of return on investment (ROI) can be generated while inter-software communication and integration has becomes ever easier. In this paper we discuss ESB and evaluate the concept against already existing broker architectures and paradigms.

SOA Acronyms

2007-03-07T23:48:00.000+01:00

The more I read about SOA related topics, the more buzz words and acronyms I encounter. I therefore decided to try to list these and to share them here.

Disclaim: Due to their plethoric number, all acronyms won’t necessarily be covered by this list or one meaning could have been missed. I will be more then pleased to add anybody's participation if I receive a correction/addition with the source(s) where it can be found.

AAP: Attribute Assignment Policy

AC: Assertion Certificates

ACP: Access Control Policy

ACRL: Assertion Certificates Revocation List

B2B: Business to Business

BAM: Business Activity Monitoring

BPEL: Business Process Execution Language

BPEL4WS: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

BPM: Business Process Management

BPSS: Business Process Specification Schema

CA: Certification Authority

CBR: Content Base Routing

COM: Component Object Model

CVS: Credential Validation Service

DIS: Delegation Issuing Service

DN: Distinguished Name

DSL: Domain Specific Languages

EAI: Enterprise Application Integration

ebXML: Electronic Business XML

EDI: Electronic Data Interchange

EIM: Enterprise Integration Management

ELT: Extract, Transform and Load

ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning

ESB: Enterprise Service Bus

GGF: Global Grid Forum

GSI: Global Security Infrastructure

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

IP: Integration Platform

JAXB: Java Architecture for XML Binding

JAXP: Java API for XML Parsing

JBI: Java Business Integration

JCA: Java Connector Architecture

JCP: Java Community Process

JMS: Java Message Service

JMX: Java Management eXtension

MEP: Message Exchange Pattern

MQ: Message Queue

MQB: Message Queue Broker

MOM: Message Oriented Middleware

MSMQ: Microsoft Message Queuing

PDP: Policy Decision Point

PEP: Policy Enforcement Point

PKI: Public Key Infrastructure

RBAC: Role Based Access Control

RFC: Remote Function Call

SAML: Security Assertion Markup Language

SecPal: Security Policy Assertion Language

SLA: Service Level Agreement

SoA: Source of Authority

SOA: Service Oriented Architecture

SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol (depreciated)

SP: Service Provider

SSDL: SOAP Service Description Language

SSL: Secure Socket Layer

SSO: Single SignOn

STP: Straight Through Processing

TCO: Total Cost of Ownership

TTP: Trusted Third Party

UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration

VAN: Value Added Network

VETO: Validate, Enrich, Transform and Operate

VO: Virtual Organisation

VOMS: Virtual Organisation Management System

WS: Web Service

WSDL: Web Service Description Language

WSN: Web Services Networks

XACML: eXtensible Access Control Markup Language

XML: eXtensible Markup Language

XML-RPC: XML Remote Procedure Call

XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language

XSLT: Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

Enterprise Service Bus

2007-02-22T11:50:00.000+01:00

ESB Has been the focus of my interest (maybe even a bit too much) recently. I will try to keep up to date with its actuallity (yes ESB are still being looked at) and list here the most interesting materials I've found.

- brief introduction on the topic on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus).

- practical and concise book: Enterprise Service Bus from David A. Chapell (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esb/index.html).

Catching up

2007-02-22T11:42:00.000+01:00

I have been mostly reading for the past three months (papers, technical reports and books).

Here is a list of part of what I've read thus far, I'll try to keep that up to date.

http://www.citeulike.org/user/PierreDeL

My colleague Jake lists his readings as well (Here).

http://www.citeulike.org/user/jakewu

Family Tree

2006-12-05T22:48:00.000+01:00

My first post and it's not about computing...

I just had a e-chat with a far cousin of mine who lives in Belgium. He has made the effort to put the de Leusse family tree (hence the title) online which is fantastic. He told me that 12 years ago they organised a big family meeting with about 200 persons attending. There would be a possibility that it is reconducted, as I've never met any de Leusse appart from my close family, it could be interesting.

Two or three years ago I exchanged a few e-mails with Charles. Charles was very kind and introduced me to the history of our family. This pretty much set me up to date on this topic.

For those who know a litle bit about me, you know that I get excited about the history fluff. I find it great to get to know anything about history moreover if it's about my family. There's been a few books written on the de Leusse, so maybe one day I'll know the underlying history more in details.