Page 2 of 2   « previous page

The lab we did today took us through the process of developing a stored proc, creating a service for it, deploying it into UO, and testing it. Very easy, pretty simple, and very effective. Most databases can do Web services in the database, but you still need to orchestrate them somehow. I kind of like this idea about deploying the service to a services container and not keep it in the database. Somehow, I've always believed that data is the database's problem, not all sorts of other things.

All in all, a good (but long) day. We had some mixed feedback at the end of the day, where some guys felt very positive about Workspace, some thought it was too complex, and other just didn't get it. Combining PD modeling with services is very aggressive and ambitious, but Sybase needs to be aggressive with this, I feel. There's definitely room for something like this, and if you buy into the whole MDA and MDD thing, we could be onto something brilliant here. What I keep on repeating is that this tool is only on version 1.0. The integration with the Sybase servers works well, no blue screens (yet), and the documentation is brilliant. The only criticism I have is that you need to be very careful when installing this, and make sure you have enough disk space and resources. It's pretty fat, but it'll get better.

Going get to bed now, tomorrow will be tough...

Day 4: Boot Camp
On day 4, we covered the SODA part of Sybase Workspace. Without going into too much detail, the day was about orchestration, service creation, and consuming the services in a variety of ways. The product is very impressive, but will take some time to understand the "why' part of the equation. What I mean is that while the product is technically very sound, we need to find ways of expressing how our customers could use these features pretty quickly.

Another cool feature was the work done with the WTP project. Sybase has built a tool in Eclipse specifically for Web development and has integrated this with JSF. JSF (so far) is not our chosen architecture, but still looks useful. Combined with Hibernate, this framework is pretty flexible, and I liked the visual way of developing the applications.

Samir Nigam also demonstrated the DataWindow capabilities from Eclipse. We created a JSF application, with DataWindows as the presentation layer, and called a Web service to calculate a stock quote. This is what Workspace is especially good at: combining different technologies under one framework and making deployment very easy. By the way, you don't need EAServer to run these DataWindows - we deployed to Tomcat!

Tonight, we went out to Strassendorf to the "real" Vienna, as our hosts put it, to a little restaurant. The food was very good but, in the end, the restaurant ran out of beer... Now, this might sound interesting, but I counted the bottles on our table, and there weren't even 10. Earlier in the week, we visited a Spanish restaurant, and I waited for two hours for my food.

I still can't believe how cold it is here. Apparently it gets a lot colder, but coming out of 30 degree Celsius into this -4 degree cold is a bit strange.

So far, the boot camp has been very good. I've met a few guys worth remembering, and the highlight so far was seeing what Vladimir did with his best practices stuff. As I mentioned, Workspace is pretty cool; I'll need some time to formulate some ideas about this product. Positioning is key, and the product has so many facets that you could easily get this completely wrong.

Tomorrow is the last day, and we will be covering Avaki. I'm pretty interested to see what this is about - data virtualization is an interesting concept that I feel could be used more in a lot of projects that we are busy with.

Day 5: Boot Camp
On the last day of the boot camp we covered EAServer 6 and Avaki.

An interesting piece of news was that Sybase has plans to turn EAServer into the fastest, high-performance application server around. To achieve this, EAServer has been completely redesigned into a much more lightweight, high-impact architecture. This goal of Sybase's is pretty ambitious, but makes a lot of sense. Tools like UO run inside EAServer and if the throughput is not high enough, an integration bus like UO will never succeed, and therefore the promising Workspace could also fail.

To make things nice and short: the new architecture looks a lot better than it currently is; every object is a Java object and the support for other app servers is a lot better. You would be able to add EAServer as a plug-in to other Web servers, some of the proprietary code has been replaced with the current standards in the J2EE world, and a few patents have been registered with regards to design. It's still early days, but Gartner has commented that EAServer is a promising product, and I have to agree that these new changes seems pretty good.

Avaki -wow, what a product. I don't know if Sybase fully understands what they have here - this product is unique and could change the way we think about EII. Data integration is a hot topic, with ETL and EAI, and (slot your three or four letter abbreviation in here). Avaki is a grid technology data abstraction layer that allows you to incorporate and integrate different sets of data, structured or not, into a virtual database or virtual storage location. This could very well be the answer to single view projects and will challenge the way we currently integrate data.

You can expose tables, data operations, unstructured files, etc., as data services, which could be consumed by JMS or other Web services. I still need to spend some more time with this product, but again, a few people I know would sit up straight when I show this to them.

This was the last day of boot camp. I'm nervous about my flight back from JHB, from Schipol Airport, as I only have 45 minutes to get off the plane from Vienna to the other one. Great.

This article was adapted from Rudi Leibbrandt's blog: http://rudileibbrandt.blogspot.com

Page 2 of 2   « previous page