SoftwareAG ProcessWorld 2011 Day1

I see conferences like ProcessWorld as a class-room training. You can get a lot of (high level) info from the whole software stack in just 2 days. Unfortunatly, like training, there are less interresting parts that you have to sit through. But you as a blog reader, can dive right into the good stuff:

– Process roundtrip

I saw some process roundtripping, but I still have to make it to the boot of Process Transformation to see if it goes round all the way. The integration with ARIS seems nice, when you change the model in Designer, you can notify the analyst to verify the changes.

-Mobile Technolgy

I had a interesting discussion with someone from Matismo, the company bought by SAG to complement their stack with mobile-apps. Apparantly they can generate not only mobile apps for the major platforms (Android, IPhone iOS, Blackberry), they can also generate Flash and HTML5. We won’t see see anything from it in the near near future, simply because the aquisition is that recent.

For me personaly I don’t see the purpose for the app, I would choose to create a mobile webApp. Most of the gui’s from SAG are web-based, so that would be more consistent. However the guys from Apple didn’t like Flash, so their you might have a problem (BPM, Mashup)… maybe will have to wait until HTML5 is the defacto standard.

-TerraCotta/Cloud

Terracotta will leverage the abilty to scale easily. This will be the backbone of their cloud offerings, however I don’t have any specifics on that (yet). When talking whith the guy at the Terracotta boot, he was all praise for the technology. So I asked him why we didn’t see the technology everywhere. Apparently it is used in a lot of code and it is even used on IS’s. So if anyone has experience with it, I’m interested to hear about it.

-Deployment 8.2

They are working hard on changing the deployment cycle. With version 8.2 you now have the option of deploying from builds. Builds can be created from scripts (ant), which gets the assets from a VCS, file-system or other location. The assets itself are defined through ADL’s (asset discription language). This way they can keep dependencies between different assets: ex. a process uses several services.

So you have a setup where the developer checks in its code, and the script runs nightly/weekly/… builds of the latest version and puts them into a repository, most of the cases a filesystem (not yet in centrasite as this will be for a future release). That repo than acts as a source for deployer.

-Complex Event Processing

This looks very interresting, they have the engine that runs in the same osgi container as the IS. They are not the same process, you could theoretically run the engine seperatly, but most of the time you would need the IS for connection to other systems. The engine itself is JMS in/ JMS out, it works with broker documents as events. These are processed by rules which are defined in SQL. You can then monitor events through Aris Mashup (which looks like a nice and powerfull tool – unfortunally on flash).

Hopefully the next day will be as interresting as the first.

Auf wiedersehen.

Author: Stefan De Wandeleir