BPEL4People

Joe McKendrick links to David Chappell's discussion of BPEL as an executable language (or not). I wrote some short thoughts here.

However, the more interesting part of his article is his discussion of BPEL4People. To my shame, I haven't yet read this spec but I have a fair idea what will be in it (for reasons that will soon become clear).

Joe links to an article by Bruce Silver. Bruce doesn't seem to like BPEL4People very much. It seems that he doesn't see a need to make a "human" a first-class activity type in BPEL... believing that it's sufficient to standardise an interface that human task manager services must implement (externally to the process).

At first glance, a wholly external human task management service does, indeed, have many advantages: assigning work to a person is achieved by "invoking a human as a service" and you can swap between automated and human tasks simply by changing where a particular invoke activity points to... why "hard code" the use of a human in the process?

WebSphere Process Server offers this way of working and it works well.

But there's a problem: and the problem is process context. A tenet of SOA is that it doesn't really matter which system implements an interface provided they do implement it and implement it with a quality of service that you find acceptable. Unfortunately, in BPM, you really, really do care who performs a particular step in a process and the entire context of the process is sometimes needed to determine who this right person is.

The only way you can pass enough context to an external human task manager for the most complicated scenarios is by including a lot of human-task-specific stuff in the interface. That means you can't swap human implementations and automated implementations in a seamless fashion and it means that the interface will be rather unpleasant: huge amounts of process context would be flowed across multiple service calls, regardless of whether it was needed.

The solution in WebSphere Process Server (and, I suspect, also in BPEL4People) is to accept that, in many cases, having human tasks expressed directly in BPEL is the superior way to do things (we offer a choice). If a human task really is performed by a human, it's more natural to drop that human task straight onto the BPEL canvas and, because the task is inline, it has access to all the context it could possibly need (i.e. for complex role resolution such as "this task can only be done by the manager of the person who performed task A", etc, etc).

As for Bruce's claim that mandating support for all five cases in the specification is "overly ambitious and unlikely to be adopted beyond IBM and SAP themselves – if even they can achieve it", I'd urge him to take a closer look at WebSphere Process Server. This product is a gem in IBM's software crown that is beginning to get the wider recognition that it deserves. It's quite amusing to see people discussing features of Process Server that are available today as if they're some sort of unachievable nirvana :-)

And, while I'm talking about it, clients are getting results.

It also means I'm so busy that I barely get any time to spend at home but I guess being busy is a good sign...

Central heating makes you fat

Tim Worstall is probably right.

I devised my own theoretical weight-loss plan some time ago. The only problem was that I could find no way to market it. It's based on a trivial bit of physics.

Let's start with some assumptions or background:

* Let's assume the core temperature of the body is 37 degrees centigrade
* Remember that the specific heat capacity of water is about 4.2 Joules per kilogram kelvin. That's almost precisely 1 calorie. (Hmmm... strange that....).


This means that if you drink a litre of ice-cold water, you will burn off 37 calories by the simple process of warming it up inside your own body.

Fantastic! You can burn off about a hundred calories simply by drinking three litres of icewater.

I thought I had stumbled upon the germ of a truly great business idea until I remembered that humans tend to measure energy in kilocalories. You'd have to drink over 81,000 litres of water to lose a pound. Oops....

TCPMon

I try to stay away from overly geeky subjects on this blog (no, really...) but sometimes true perfection has to be recognised.

As I do more and more design and development of solutions using web services (SOAP/HTTP, in particular), I find myself wanting to see exactly what is flowing over the wire. (That's code for: getting interoperability to work isn't always trivial....)

The number of times I've been saved by a groovy little tool called TCPMon is large. What's more, almost nobody knows about this tool.... until I tell them.... and then they can't get enough.

So, what is it? It's nothing more than a little app that listens for TCP requests on one port, dumps what it gets, forwards the data (unchanged) to a TCP port at another (or the same) machine and then dumps what comes back, before returning it to the original client... i.e. it's a proxy that dumps the traffic.

So, if you've ever wanted to see the SOAP-ENV or the fault or whatever as it flies over the network, now you can... and you've been able to for ages (since at least WAS 5 - and probably longer since I think there's also an apache version).

How?

If you're running any WebSphere Application Server based product, grab a command prompt and navigate to the lib directory

java -classpath webservices.jar com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.utils.tcpmon

Tell it which port to listen on (that is where you will subsequently point your client) and which hostname and port to forward the requests to (i.e. the "real" server) and off you go. Fab!

Note: the "ws" in the package name makes me suspect this isn't actually a supported part of the product so don't blame me if it doesn't work for you and don't even *think* of pretending that my mentioning it gives you the right to raise a PMR :-)

How to upset a climatologist

Ask them who debugged their models..... Fantastic stuff.

My view on "climate change" is that it comes down to a value judgment: do you believe that the jaw-droppingly poor people of today should be kept poor in order to reduce the risk that the human race may die out sooner than it might have? If so, sacrificing economic growth and prosperity today (and hence reducing the number of people that are lifted from poverty thanks to trade) is the right thing to do. If not, it is clearly the wrong thing to do.

The problem is: how can we weigh the balance? Perhaps climate change will affect us far more savagely and quickly than many expect? Perhaps it's a mirage. Accurate computer models are critical if we are to come remotely close to guessing right. If they're wrong, our leaders will make the wrong decisions. Dangerously wrong decisions.

HT: Devil's Kitchen

Welcome to Aidy...

Hursley's Adrian Spender has ventured out into the external blogosphere. He modestly describes himself as working on "the development of IBM's WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus". Those who know him understand quite what an understatement that is...

Welcome, Adrian!

It depends

I knew I was going to be a successful consultant when I realised that I no longer felt shame when I answered a client question with "It depends"....

It turns out other professions do it too... who'd have guessed?!

Brad DeLong has a great list of "Twelve Things Economists Need to Remember to Be Helpful Journalistic Sources"

Number four is the best:

4. Never say, "on the one hand, on the other hand." Always say, "I think X because I believe Y is most important; other economists will tell you Z because they think Q is most important. They're probably wrong because of R."

I'm going to remember that.... it works just as well in consulting.

Anyone can fake their readership...

... the annoying thing is that Andy hasn't.

I'll just console myself by pretending that most of my readers use the RSS feed and so don't show up in my stats.... :-)

WebSphere Process Server Rocks!

RedMonk's James Governor has been on a roll of late.... his posts for the last week have been uniformly educational. Sadly, my feed reader couldn't handle his new clever feed and so I missed them all. For anyone else who's missed his output recently, I suggest you check if your RSS reader is confused, too.

He posted yesterday about a ringing endorsement for WebSphere Process Server from Delaware Electric, a medium sized business in the US.

This was the first I'd heard of that company (which, given the relatively close-nit community of ISSW, suggests that they really did succeed without needing armies of IBM consultants...). It's an extremely positive reference.


Now..... I said he was on a roll. Well..... what I really mean was that he spelled HIPAA correctly. It doesn't take much to impress me.




RedMonk WebSphere Process Server IBM

If I'd known being an industry analyst was this easy...

James McGovern explains all you need to know about being an industry analyst:

Examples:

• Only talk about vendors and products. Never actually start a conversation about the problem space that customers may face. Steer all conversations to your contrived taxonomy instead of seeking to understand and explain in their own terms


• State in some form or fashion that success is tied to obtaining explicit buy-in from senior management ignoring the fact that folks not only have heard this on too many occasions but that this is somewhat obvious to folks worth their salt



• State something even more insultingly obvious such as the importance of understanding your enterprise's specific business requirements

I really hope there's more to it than that..... I mean *I* can do that!

Required reading for consultants?

Dave Lorenzo's Career Intensity is a fabulous treasure trove of career advice (that always leaves me somewhat deflated by my inability to put any of it into action... but that's another post).

In one of his posts today, he talks about "Building Buzz" and how he was impressed by seeing a successful professional's request for help. What caught my attention was his claim that David Maister's books are "required reading" for McKinsey and Bain and BCG consultants.

Just as I once wondered who the elder statesmen of IT were, I can't help wondering what the required reading for IT professionals is? "The Mythical Man Month"? Gang of Four? "Why Most things Fail"?!

My personal opinion is that any professional in IT should have read a book on concurrent programming and a book on transaction systems. Forget project management, architecture, SOA or anything else: if you don't understand transactions and concurrency, you have no business in IT; you're just too dangerous and you certainly won't be working on any of my projects.

Is BPEL the bytecode for the process space?

David Chappell suggests that it might be.

One sentence in his article stuck out. He wrote:

And just as almost nobody except tool vendors works directly in or even thinks much about Java bytecode, the day may come when almost nobody except tool vendors works directly in or thinks much about BPEL

I agree with that sentence, but the implication is odd. I don't know anybody even today who works directly in BPEL or thinks about it. On my client projects, when I am building executable processes, I will use a graphical tool (in my case WebSphere Integration Developer or WebSphere Business Modeler, depending on what I'm doing). With one or two exceptions, I can't think of a time where I've even needed to look at the generated BPEL.

This is why security is hard

Ouch!

Your purchase free if we don't give you a receipt

Bruce Schneier explains why shops do it

Farewell, Robert

I'm obviously not in the loop..... Fortunately, Andy is.

Robert Scoble is the guy who single-handedly transformed my opinion of Microsoft. I joined IBM in 2000 with a headful of weird beliefs about politics, economics, the IT industry and the world in general. In particular, I had a strong antipathy towards both Microsoft and Sun (I forget why I hated Sun but I'm sure there was a good reason...). As is common amongst recent university graduates, it didn't take me long to realise that most of the opinions I'd formed at college were hopelessly naive but I never really lost my distrust of Microsoft. I developed a grudging respect but no more.

Robert changed that... he helped show that, just like in any other company, there are real people working in Microsoft, doing real work. Raymond is how I discovered how clever they are but Scoble is who showed me they're not evil.

Good luck at PodTech; they've made quite a catch.

Scoble meets Jonathan

I took a mini-swipe at Sun's boss yesterday for his compulsive obsession over power consumption. On the other side of the world, however, Scoble was having lunch with him and getting to know him. Interesting article. I still have no idea what Sun is for (question: if they didn't exist today, would anyone invent them?) but if anyone is going to make them relevant again, I suspect it might just be Jonathan.

The macroeconomics of Superman

Tyler Cowen asks a perfectly reasonable question. If Superman existed, how could he best use his talents?

Dan Klein's suggestion seems the most sensible: "Perform amazing stunts on TV, become a big celebrity, and then preach the virtues of economic literacy" :-)

Via Café Hayek

I can only assume that Jonathan is shorting oil

If Jonathan Schwartz mentions the massive power consumption of his customers' data centres one more time I might start to get angry. I *get* it! :-)

He does, of course, have a point; the amount of heat pumped out by my humble ThinkPad does not go unnoticed when it's sitting on my lap on a warm day; I dread to think how much heat is being pumped out of all the data centres in the world.

I think his relentless harping on about this subject could be more evidence that our industry is finally maturing. Implicit in his comments is the hint that he's selling commodity boxes and differentiates himself on things like power consumption. Taken with Vinnie Mirchandani's ongoing campaign to get corporates to start looking at their phone bills, there's more than a small risk that everything's about to get very boring indeed :-)

The law of unintended consequences set to a disco beat

I never had the Pet Shop Boys down as economists.... but what do you know? The lyrics of "Twentieth Century" on their new "Fundamental" album could have come straight from a textbook!

I learned a lesson
From the Twentieth Century
That I don't think we can just dismiss
After one hundred years
Of inhumanity
The lesson that I learned was this:

Sometimes the solution
Is worse than the problem

Welcome to Brian!

Brian Peacock is a Hursley IBMer who has recently made the transition from the walled-garden of our internal blog community to the big, scary outside world. Having recently returned to work after a five month absence recovering from a Subarachnoid Haemorrhage, he has a rather unique perspective.

Welcome back to Hursley, Brian.

SOA++

Thanks to James for pointing me at the "Stop the SOA 2.0 petition".

I can't helpbut be perplexed by the outrage surrounding "SOA 2.0".

As Sandy Kemsley points out, this whole thing seems to have been driven by Gartner (and Oracle, who are touting their Fusion middleware). I agree that using the "SOA 2.0" moniker is silly and potentially dangerous; it freaks out the thoughtful client and gives the incorrect impression to everyone else that the SOA bandwagon is utterly out of control.

However, we should not lose the key insight that Oracle and Gartner have brought to the table: SOA is not just "CORBA 2.0"; it is also an event-driven thought. A lot of the marketing slides out there could easily lead you to believe that SOA is a new name for DCE. Not so... and Gartner/Oracle have done us all a service by getting some attention for this often-overlooked side of the equation.

However, IBM's SOA reference architecture has always made it clear that an event bus is critical to SOA (if I'm not mistaken, WebSphere ESB was even announced at the same time as IBM's big SOA launch last year). If I had only just realised the importance of events, the last thing I'd be doing would be drawing attention to myself by implying my "SOA 1.0" thoughts were missing 50% of the necessary functionality.

[2006-06-06 23:55 Minor edit]

"Mr Watson, come here. I want to bill you."

Vinnie Mirchandani has a bee in his bonnet about the cost of telecoms. I was originally sceptical about his claims that we were being colossally over-charged and argued that the benefits of proliferating wireless hotspots, "3G" connections and high-speed home broadband far outweighed their cost. In other words, I believed that there was a large consumer surplus when purchasing these services. Vinnie argued with me in the comments to my posting and helped me see his side of the argument.

He has now expanded on his argument and written an article on the topic for Real Finance where he points out how the cost of conference lines, calling cards, ad-hoc employee wifi access and all the rest can really mount up.

Sobering stuff.

Cringely Speaks

IBM Eye links to an interesting article by Robert X. Cringely (looks like Coté has seen it too. Oh... and Vinnie. And Dennis... And... oh you get the picture....)

If what he writes is true (we're in "malaise"; the company is "going nowhere") then we should all be very worried. The problem is that what he writes is not dis-similar to the general negativity on the BCS (now GBS) discussion board at The Vault. In both cases, there's a mismatch between what I read and what I experience. (I mean... if I took everything I read on the vault at face value, I'd have sunk into a deep depression a long time ago)

I thought for a while that perhaps Software Group (where I work) and Global Business Services (formerly BCS - the target of much of the negativity) were completely different and the supposed malaise was unique to GBS. However, I'm working with a lot of my GBS colleagues on my current project and I've been dazzled by their professionalism, hard work, passion and skills. Something doesn't add up...

However, given that he's written what he has, what is the best way a rational observer could make use of the observations? Well, if he's right, I should run for the hills! (Or start making more of a difference...). If he's wrong, however, then there is probably an opportunity lurking somewhere.

I'm reminded of my experience buying William Morrison stock last year. I had already decided to invest some money in a UK retailer (retail being the only business I can claim to understand apart from IT - and I already have too much human capital tied up in IT for it to be wise to invest any more real capital). I figured that the crescendo of bad news surrounding Morrison's meant that all the downside was priced into the stock and so it would be a good time to buy. So it proved. I'm now comfortably ahead (even after the recent falls on the FTSE). I'm not sure that there's a lesson for IT stock pickers (and if there is, I'm certainly not qualified or authorised to advise) but the more general lesson it taught me was: take advice, listen to experts but always trust your own judgment.

Shooting for the stars

EclectEcon points to Austan Goolsbee's piece on how one's first salary has a big role to play in predicting lifetime earnings.

Eek! My first salary wasn't terrible but is was far from great.....

This paragraph is scary:

"The Stanford class of 1988, for example, entered the job market just after the market crash of 1987. Banks were not hiring, and so average wages for that class were lower than for the class of 1987 or for later classes that came out after the market recovered. Even a decade or more later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered."

Can you hear it?

Tyler Cowen links to this fantastic exploitation of the ability of young people to hear a wider range of frequencies than adults.

I'm failing to live up to Oracle's expectations for me

According to Oracle, it appears that, at a Brit, I should be "technically skilled, slightly disrespectful of authority, and [show] just a touch of criminal behaviour". It seems I need to make more of an effort on the whole "breaking and entering" side of things.... can't let my compatriots down.

Oracle's CSO Mary Ann Davidson does make some good points: there's too much patching going on in the IT industry. I'll resist the easy temptation of pointing to Oracle's record on fixing security problems...... it wouldn't be sporting (another British trait...)

However, what are we to do? Regulation of the IT industry would be the best recipe known to man for plunging the world into a death spiral of low innovation, low productivity, low growth, high poverty, high misery (and that's just Oracle Apps customers.... ho ho ho).

Eric Sink wrote an article about buggy code in the Guardian recently.

He takes the view that all vendors knowingly ship code with defects... but what separates the good vendors from the bad vendors is that they have tested extensively and they know what the quality of their code is. That is: you can ship code with no known defects by simply not testing it. His view is that it is far better to understand the overall quality and then make a reasoned judgement. (I count Oracle amongst the "good vendors" by the way...)

What makes security problems so difficult is that they are not at all amenable to the severity/frequency/cost/risk methodology...... it's finding them in the first place that is so treacherously difficult.

So, I think there's definitely a case for vendors getting far, far better at designing for security, coding for security and testing for security..... Microsoft have actually done a lot to educate the wider community on how to do this (credit where it's due...). However, I don't see how we can get away from the recurrence of "emergency patches". By their nature, they're patches that have been released to correct a problem that was not previously known about (or which was incorrectly assumed to have a lower risk).

SOA Reference Model

I was following James' links to the general outrage over the ludicrous coining of the term "SOA 2.0" (I mean.... honestly!) and found this linked from Technoracle.

It appears that the OASIS folks have built a reference model to explain, in architectural terms, what SOA means.

Fantastic.

I need to find some time to read through this and see how it corrsponds to what IBM says it means..... I'm rather hoping we're all saying a similar kind of thing :-)

Fancy writing about IBM?

The ever-interesting IBM eye is looking for a writer....

Ouch

I went ten-pin bowling with the rest of my team and the client's team on Wednesday. I hurt today.

Is IT a non-growth industry?

Apparently

I love the idea of "IT spend items with the most empty calories".

Totally agree about the horrors of shelfware. I have to confess to being rather confused as to why it seems to be such a prevalent occurrence in the wider industry. One would think that incentives should be aligned: purchasers of software presumably have a reason for buying it and sellers have an incentive to get it deployed as customers aren't going to come back for more (licenses, CPUs, etc) if they haven't used the stuff they already have.

For example, my job exists - in part - to ensure WebSphere customers successfully deploy our software. We want our customers to deploy this stuff and get value from it and to come back for more after they've seen for themselves what it can do for them. Perhaps the problem is that when a market is growing very fast, it's easier to sell to new customers than worry about ensuring you'll be able to sell to the last lot again any time soon. If so, and if IT really is a non-growth industry, I expect to see other vendors paying closer attention to this area in the future.

Not so sure I agree with his swipe at "Telecom fringe services" though. I couldn't do my job anywhere nearly as effectively without international mobile and Wi-Fi hot spots. So this raises an interesting question: the price of such services is clearly massively above the cost but, even at the price they charge, they still provide value. So everyone wins, right? Well... I'd get even more value from these services if they cost less :-) Competition is usually the way to squeeze prices nearer to marginal cost but I guess there's no harm in indignant purchasers hammering away at their vendors in the meantime...

Liverpool Street Station

When are they going to fix their ticket machines?

I'm commuting to Ipswich most weeks at the moment and have the privilege of travelling through Liverpool Street. I quite like the station. It's bright, airy and more relaxed than Waterloo.

I also like travelling on one railway. They're (usually) reliable, the staff are friendly and their timetable matches my schedule.

But... how long is it going to take them to fix their ticket machines? I've tried every card in my wallet and have encountered more error messages than I ever thought possible. It means I have to get up ten minutes earlier to wait in a queue to buy my ticket at the counter and I don't like it.

Web 3.0? Not me... I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups...

Joe... you have it all wrong!

Well, I mean... you're right to be cynical about Web 3.0.... surely 3.1 is when multimedia will be supported as part of the infrastructure?

But, if we're serious about collaboration, social networking and all the rest, my money's on Web 3.11 for Workgroups.

You know it makes sense.

Ouch!

RedMonk's O'Grady doesn't hold back with his opinions of 1and1.

The lesson I've learned time and again is that, even when my anger with a vendor is at its peak... when I say I'm never going to use them again, a well-timed explanatory and realistic phone call can soften my mind. I don't doubt Stephen's resolve to quit 1and1 but, assuming there actually is anybody at 1and1 who cares about his custom, I'd still be tempted to make a go of restoring his opinion of me.

Am I missing something?

I've just seen an advert for "Digital UK" on ITV2.

Digital UK is the organisation tasked with encouraging TV owners in the UK to invest in a model capable of receiving digital broadcasts.

ITV2 is only available in multi-channel homes.

Am I missing something?

The worst thing is that I have a horrible feeling that I'm paying for this organisation in some indirect way.

HTX

Darren describes some of the other stuff going on in Hursley today.

Sadly, I only had time to attend my own session. If I'd known Darren and Roo had found a way to play with Lego on work time or that Simon Singh was there, I would have tried to clear more time in my schedule.

Vodafone's 3G coverage sucks

I was very excited when I received my Vodafone Mobile Connect Card last year. I'd finally be able to get more work done on the train and I'd be able to stay in touch with work when working at remote locations.

Sadly, the reality has been somewhat less successful. 3G coverage at my current client location is almost non existent and I can't even get GPRS at the hotel.

As for when I commute between London and Winchester (to get to Hursley), forget it. I'm lucky if my card can maintain a connection for more than a few seconds.

At least losing a connection doesn't cause my machine to blue-screen (like the GPRS card did) but it's still unacceptable. Come on Vodafone... sort it out!

Does anybody know if any of the other providers are any better?

[Posted from a South West Train somewhere near Clapham Junction.... hopefully]

Blog Post Length

Bill Higgins asks what the optimal length of blog posting is. His question was prompted by Irving W-B's Reflections on his year of blogging.

My preference is for short, snappy posts and for them to be made regularly. Perhaps it means I'm still tied to the world of appointment media but I particularly like Raymond Chen's technique of delivering a short-ish post every day at the same time.

He's not the only one to do this (Tim Worstall is a British political blogger who can be relied on to produce a stream of snappy insights at roughly the same time every day but I promised I'd keep politics off this blog so I'll say no more :-) )

Does this mean I don't read blogs with long postings? No... it just means I tend to put them to one side when I'm doing one of my regular "speed reads" through my reader. The danger is that they'll expire from my viewer before I get to them but I guess that would be my loss.

I'm in Hursley today

.... presenting on WebSphere Process Server.... just what on earth is it?!

Come and say hello.

I've marked the presentation confidential primarily because that means more people will come if they think they'e going to hear something secret...

Feeling Gloomy

No. Not me. I feel rather good.

I'm talking about the fab club I went to last night.

Who'd have thought being miserable could be so much fun?

Mini-housing surge slowing?

I was called by two estate agents today asking if I was still looking for a flat. For most of this year, agents have wasted no time reminding me that buyers were ten-a-penny and it was vendors they were desperate for. One anecdote does not make a trend but I thought it noteworthy, nevertheless.

Making it tangible

Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me quite how intangible the stuff I do really is.

I'm currently working full time on a project for a communications company which involves lots of interesting SOA, Process Choreography, Business Process Modeling and integration issues. I'm leading the SOA assembly team.... we're the ones wiring everything together, so to speak.

In a different team is one of my colleagues: he is the voice guy.... and yesterday made me realise he had by far the cooler job. His day seemed to consist of dialing numbers on cell-phones, desk phones and soft-phones and watching various other phones ring. What made it fun to watch was that everything was being routed through a piece of software that had trace turned on.

Watching the trace whizz across the screen whenever he pressed "green" or "red" or picked up a handset was very fun.

So, whilst the stuff my team is doing to integrate all the voice stuff with some interesting back-end technologies will make for a very useful solution, there's no escaping the fact that making real, physical devices beep and ring and flash makes for a far more tangible work experience than musing over flavours of doc/lit wrapped web services.