enterprise 2.0 : the bdg way

Why the New Gap Logo was Awesome

2010-11-07T10:27:00.013-05:00

Ok, so not the logo itself. I'm not an idiot who thinks it was a good logo or that crowdsourcing is healthy for the design community. What I'm saying is that YOU'RE an idiot for getting all enraged about Gap's new logo and how much it sucked. Why? Because that's exactly what they wanted you to do.

Any press is good press, right? Well, in this social-media-ridden world where every two-bit wonk has his own soapbox, that phrase should now read: "any trending topic is a good trending topic."

The logo not only had Gap trending for weeks, but it inspired so much passionate vitriol that some one even built a web application to allow you to "crap" your own logo. These logos spread to people's Facebook and Twitter avatars, blogs, web sites. I'm just waiting for "Gap Logo Sucks Freeze-Dried Donkey Bollucks," the song. The t-shirt. The TV mini-series. Jeezus, enough already.

How many web applications were built in honor of the original Gap logo? Exactly.

I can't prove that Gap (and Laird & Partners) intentionally duped the social media community into talking about (almost nothing but) their astoundingly shitty logo for weeks. Perhaps it was a happy accident for Gap. Perhaps it was a bit more Machiavellian than that. We may never know. But one thing is indisputable: it worked. And you were duped. And that was awesome.

Oracle Announces Roadmap for Plumtree / AquaLogic / WebCenter

2010-10-07T08:46:00.011-04:00

UPDATE 2: I've incorporated all the great feedback and comments from ex-Plumtreevians, ex-BEA and ex- and current Oracle folks.

UPDATE: A bunch of Plumtreevians are contributing really good comments on this post over on Facebook.

I worked at Plumtree Software, Inc. from June 1998 to December, 9th 2002. In four-and-a-half years, the company grew from 25 employees to over 400 and it had thousands of happy customers before it was purchased by BEA Systems in 2005 for $220M. Here at bdg, we've been supporting dozens of Plumtree/AquaLogic Interaction (ALI)/WebCenter Interaction (WCI) customers since we opened our doors in December of 2002.

Back around 2005, BEA's BID (Business Interaction Division) still had a lot of really smart engineers from Plumtree working on a lot of really interesting things, including Pages (think CMS 2.0), Pathways (kind of an enterprise version of del.icio.us) and Ensemble (the portlet engine/gateway, minus the overhead and UI of the portal itself). They were also working on an enterprise social network, kind of a Facebook for business if you will.

However, there was a lot of wrangling at BEA, primarily between BID/AquaLogic and BEA's flagship product, WebLogic (the world-class application server). Most of the strife came in the form of WebLogic Portal vs. AquaLogic/Plumtree Portal nonsense. Senior management at BEA, in their infinite wisdom, had taken a "let's try not to alienate any customers" policy and in the process they confused all their customers and alienated/frustrated quite a few of them as well. They renamed Plumtree to AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI), put in place a "separate but equal" policy with WebLogic Portal (WLP) and spewed some nonsense about how WLP was for "transactional portal deployments" vs. ALI for .NET and non-transactional portals, but no one, including BEA management, had any idea WTF that meant. To further confuse the issue, the WLP team, which also had a lot of really smart engineers, built products like "Adrenaline" (which was basically a less-functional and more buggy version of Ensemble) rather than do the unthinkable and integrate Ensemble into WLP so that WLP could finally host non-Java/JSR-168 portlets.

I was really pissed about BEA's spineless portal strategy, their "separate but equal" policy between WLP and BID/ALUI and their waste of precious engineering resources in an arms race between WLP and ALUI rather than just stepping back, growing a spine, and coming up with a portal strategy. Because I can't keep my pie hole shut, I started several loud, messy and public fights with BEA management. Why? Because the real loser here is the customer. And BEA, because management got mired in politics and chose to waste engineers' time on in-fighting and competition instead of building enterprise Facebook, which Steve Hamrick and I arguably already wrote in our spare time. All they needed to do was productize that and they would have owned that market.

In 2008, Oracle inherited this clusterfuck of a portal strategy when they bought BEA for $7B+, giving me new hope that cooler heads would prevail and fix this mess. The first thing they did was fire all the impotent BEA managers who were afraid to make any decisions. (I won't name any names, but you know who you are. I just hope that you learned, for the sake of your new employers, that it's worse to make no decision than a bad decision.) It took Oracle a while, but alas, they have finally arrived at a portal strategy that makes sense. I first learned about this strategy when I crashed the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board last Thursday.

First of all, let me say this: under the leadership of Vince Casarez, current (and future) customers are in good hands. I realized when he said "everyone still calls it Plumtree" that this was going to be a bullshit-free presentation. He also said something regarding the "portal stew" at Oracle that puts all of my ranting and raving in perspective: "Oracle did not buy BEA for Plumtree or WLP, just like it didn't buy SUN for SUN's portal product." To rephrase that, Oracle bought BEA for WebLogic (the application server, not the portal) and Sun for their hardware (not for Java, NetBeans and all the rest of Sun's baggage).

So, let's face it, portals are a relatively insignificant part of Oracle. However, they've finally did what I called for 2008 and what BEA never had the wits to do: pick a single portal strategy/stack and stick to it. SO, if you're a current Plumtree/ALUI/WCI or a current WLP customer, you have a future with Oracle. Here's the plan, as I understand it.

1) All roads lead to Web Center (not Web Center Interaction, but Web Center)

At the heart of Web Center will be WebLogic's app server and portal. Plumtree/ALUI as a code base will be supported, but eventually put into maintenance mode and retired. You get nine or twelve years of support and patches (blah blah blah) but if you want new features, you need to switch to the new Web Center, powered by WLP. CORRECTION: WebCenter will not be "powered by WLP." At its core will be the Oracle-developed, ADF-based WebCenter Portal running on WebLogic Server.

2) All the "server products" (Collaboration, Studio, Analytics, Publisher) will be replaced by Web Center Services or Web Center Suite

Publisher will be subsumed by WCM/UCM (Web Content Management / Universal Content Management, formerly Stellent). The other products will be more-or-less covered by similar offerings in Suite or Services.

3) What about Pages, Ensemble and Pathways?

Pages is dead as WCM/UCM does it better. Pathways is getting rolled into the new Web Center somehow, but I'm not sure how yet. Perhaps I can follow up with another blog post on that. Ensemble has been renamed "Pagelet Producer" -- more on that below. CORRECTION: Pathways is now called "Activity Graph" and it will be part of the new WebCenter. Think of an enterprise-class version of the Facebook News Feed crossed with Sales Force chatter and you'll be on the right track.

4) What about .NET/SQL Server, IIS and everything else that isn't Java?

This is a really interesting question and the key question that I think drove a lot of BEA's failure to make any decision about portal strategy from 2005-2008. Plumtree had a lot of .NET customers and some of the biggest remaining Plumtree/ALUI customers are still running on an all-Microsoft stack. In fact, one of them told me recently that they have half a million named user accounts, two million documents and 72 Windows NT Servers to power their portal deployment.

So, let's start with the bad news: Oracle doesn't want you to run .NET/Windows and they REALLY don't want you to run on SQL Server. (That will change when Oracle acquires Microsoft, but that's not gonna happen, at least not any time soon.) WebLogic app server and WLP/WCI, to the best of my knowledge, will not run on SQL Server. They will, however, run on Windows, but I would not recommend that approach. I think it's inevitable that large enterprises will have both .NET and Java systems along with a smattering of other platforms. So, if you're a .NET-heavy shop, you'll need to bite the bullet and have at least one server running JRockit or Sun's JVM, one of Oracle's DB's (Oracle proper or MySQL), WLS/WLP/WCI and preferably Oracle Enterprise Linux, Solaris or some other other flavor of Un*x. CORRECTION: WLP will run on SQL Server. Not sure about the new WebCenter Portal, but my guess is that it does not.

Now, for the good news: the new WCI, powered by WLP and in conjunction with the Pagelet Producer (formerly Ensemble) and the WSRP Producer (formerly the .NET Application Accelerator) will run any and all of your existing portlets, regarless of language or platform. This was arguably the best feature in Plumtree and it will live on at Oracle. .NET/WRSP and even MOSS (Sharepoint) Web Parts will run in WebCenter through the WSRP Producer. The Pagelet Producer will run portlets written in ANY language through what is essentially a next generation, backwards-compatible CSP (Content Server Protocol, the superset of HTTP that allows you to get/set preferences, etc. in Plumtree portlets). So, in theory, if you're still writing your portlets in ASP 1.0 using CSP 1.0 and GSServices.dll, they will run in the new Web Center via the Pagelet Producer. Time for us to update the PHP and Ruby/Rails IDKs? Indeed it is. Let me know if you need that sooner rather than later.

5) How do I upgrade to the new WebCenter?

Well, first off, you have to wait for it to come out later this fall. Then, you have to start planning for what's less of an upgrade and more of a migration. Oracle, between engineering and PSO, has promised to provide migration for all the portal metadata (users, communities, pages, portlets, security, etc.) from Plumtree/ALUI/WCI to the new Web Center, with WLP at its heart. (Wouldn't it have made sense for some of those WLP engineers to start building that migration script in 2005 instead of trying to compete with ALUI by building Adrenaline? Absolutely.) All your Java portlets, if you're using JSR-168 or JSR-286, will run natively in WLP through a wrapper in WebCenter Portal. Everything else will either run in the WRSP Producer (if it's .NET) or in the Pagelet Producer (if it's anything else). The only thing I don't fully understand yet is how to migrate from Publisher to UCM, but I'm due to speak with Oracle's PSO about that soon. Please contact me directly if you need to do a migration from Publisher to WCM/UCM that's too big to do by hand.

The only other unanswered question in my mind is how the new WebCenter will handle AWS/PWS services -- the integrations that bring LDAP/AD users and profile information/metadata into Plumtree/ALUI/WCI. I wrote a lot of that code for Plumtree anyway, so if Oracle's not working on a solution for the new Web Center, perhaps I can help you with that somehow as well. CORRECTION: User and group objects are fully externalized in Web Center, so there is no need for AWS/PWS synchronization. (Thanks, Vince, for pointing that out.)

So, that's my understanding of the new portal strategy at Oracle. Kudos to Oracle's management for listening to their customers, making some really hard decisions and picking a path that I think is smart and achievable. I'm here to help if you have questions or need help with your portal strategy or technical implementation/migration.

Q&A

(Some other notes about discussions that have spawned from this original post.)

Q: What's the future of the Microsoft Exchange portlets (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and the CWS for crawling Exchange public folders. Retired and replaced with something Beehive related? Still supported? For how long? Against what versions of Exchange?

A: We've got updated portlets for Mail & Calendar in WebCenter now for Exchange 2003 & 2007. We don't have a Contacts portlet but it could be added quickly if we see a large demand. Crawling public folders can be done with an adapter we have for SES [Oracle Secure Enterprise Search] already. We're working but aren't done with a new version of KD on top of the new infrastructure that will come out post PS3. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: If migration scripts are provided to move WCI metadata into WebCenter, I understand that a portlet is a portlet, but what about pages and communities, users and groups, content sources and crawlers, etc.? Do they all have analogous objects in WebCenter or is there some reasonable mapping to some other objects?

A: Pages and Communities follow a model where we extract/export the meta data and data, then run it through a set of scripts that create a WebCenter Space for each Collab project/community and a JSPx page for every page. Users and Groups will come out of the LDAP/AD directory they are already using and the scripts associate the right permissions to each of the migrated objects. I don't recall what we did about crawlers but since we use SES directly, all the hundred or more connectors we ship for SES are now available for direct usage. The scripts go through a multiphase approach to move content, then portlets, then pages, then communities so that dependencies can be fixed up versus trying to do a manual fix up. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: Will any existing WCI-related products that are slated for retirement (e.g. Publisher, Collab, Studio, Analytics, etc.) be re-released with support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, IE 8, IE 9 or Chrome?

A: For Publisher, we are planning a set of migrations to quickly move them to UCM. For Collab & Studio, we have new capabilities in WebCenter Spaces to match these functions. For Analytics, we've also rebuilt it on top of the WebCenter stack with over 50 portlets for the different metrics and made sure we provide apis/ access to the data directly. These analytics data also feeds the activity graph in providing recommendations for people on the content and UIs that are relevant to them. These are tied into the personalization engine that we brought over from the WLP side. So there is a rich blending of the best features from WLP with WCI key features. As for Neo [the codename for the next release of WCI], we are certifying the additional platforms. On the IE 8 front, we've just released patches for WCI 10gR3 customers to be able to use IE8 without upgrading to Neo. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

On Open Letter to the Java Community

2010-09-23T13:25:00.016-04:00

In the wake of the Sun acquisition by Oracle, the much-lambasted Oracle vs. Google lawsuit over Google's alleged JavaME patent infringement, and the rumblings I've been hearing at Oracle Open World / JavaOne / Oracle Develop 2010, I have a message to the Java community:

Quit your bitching and moaning and start doing something productive!

Now that I've offended all the Java fanboys/girls out there, let me explain:

why I'm qualified to give you all one big collective kick in the ass, and
why this collective ass-kicking is coming from a place of love, not hate.

My first experience with Java was in 1994/95, when Stanford started switching its Computer Science curricula from C/C++ to Java. After struggling with memory management, segmentation faults, horrific concurrency problems and the other ways I kept shooting myself in the foot, Java was a breath of fresh air. My first corporate experience with Java was working as a summer intern for JavaSoft (a former subsidiary of Sun) in 1997 porting Patrick Chan's Java 1.0 sample applications (remember Hangman?) from JDK 1.0 to JDK 1.1.

I went on to join Plumtree. Originally, they were a Microsoft darling. I helped lead the charge to switch them from COM/DCOM, ASP 1.0 and SQL Server to Java and Oracle.

In 2002, I started a Plumtree-focused consulting firm, helping 50+ customers install, maintain and grow their Plumtree deployments. In all but a precious few of those accounts, I wrote all of the code in Java/JSP.

Since about 2008, we've been using Ruby on Rails for most of our software. When Rails hit the scene, I had a similar "breath of fresh air" moment similar to when I first encountered Java.

But this letter is not about Ruby or about Rails; it's about Java. A language I've used since it's very first iteration in 1994/95 and up to the present day. A language where I've written at least half a million lines of code, most of which still run in production today inside Plumtree/AquaLogic User Interaction/WebCenter Interaction, at major customer sites in the corporate world and in the federal government.

So, fast-forward to today, this is what I'm hearing about Java, in a nutshell:

Oracle's going to kill/close-source/fuck up Java
Life's not fair!
Blah blah blah

All of this bitching and moaning starts right at the top with Java grandfather and CEW (Chief Executive Whiner) James Gosling, who is showing incredibly poor leadership, lousy judgment and massive immaturity with his totally irrelevant, outdated and hateful anti-Oracle bitch-fest.

I've heard people whining about everything around them that's not running on Java: mobile applications, web sites, conference tools, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I even saw someone complain on Twitter that the Black Eyed Peas, who Oracle paid an undoubtedly handsome sum of money to entertain your sorry asses last night, gave a shoutout to Oracle and not "The Java Community." Seriously?
Give it a rest, folks! There are lots of choices of development stacks and people are free to choose the one that works best for them. Embrace that freedom; don't fight it. And the word Oracle doesn't mean "database" anymore. It is an umbrella term that could refer to thousands of different products.

Let's take a look at some of the advantages of Oracle owning Java.

With respect to OpenWorld, the Java Community got:

Your own conference with around 400 sessions
Your own tent
Your own street closure (Mason Street)
Invited to OTN Night, one of the best parties at OpenWorld

More importantly, with Oracle Corporation, the Java community gets:

Cemented into the infrastructure of nearly all of Oracle's products, meaning that nearly all of their customers -- most of the Fortune 1000 -- are now Java shops (if they weren't already)
Stability, stewardship, thousands of really bright engineers and nearly unlimited resources
One of Corporate America's most powerful legal teams backing you up
A secure and promising future, including a just-announced roadmap for JDK 7 and 8

And, with all that being said, guess what? Java is still open source. Do you know what that means?

Let me answer that question with another question: what brilliant phoenix rose out of the ashes of the debacle that was the AOL acquisition of Netscape in 1998?

It was Firefox, a free, open source-based browser that literally revolutionized the massively screwed up browser market and gave the dominant browser (IE 5, and later, IE 6) a true run for its money. From wikipedia:

"When AOL (Netscape's parent) drastically scaled back its involvement with Mozilla Organization, the Mozilla Foundation was launched on July 15, 2003 to ensure Mozilla could survive without Netscape. AOL assisted in the initial creation of the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to the organization and employing a three-person team for the first three months of its existence to help with the transition and donated $2 million to the foundation over two years."

IBM's beneficial relationship with Eclipse is another great example.

So, dear Java community, to ensure your own survival, please, in the name of Duke, stop complaining and start thinking strategically about how you can "pull a Firefox" here. You're all brilliant engineers, so start putting all the effort you're wasting in complaining toward something productive.

I love you all and I love all your passion and energy, but I hate your bitching -- use that energy to go save the world, Java style!

Google Blog Search Doesn't

2010-08-03T14:29:00.005-04:00

Google is a search company, right?

Then why is it when I tried to use the blog search box, I never get any results? Click the image to try the search for yourself.

Yet when I do a site-specific search on Google.com for the very same blog, I get 28 results for the same search terms.

I just thought of a really easy way for Google to fix this problem. Oh, for gosh-dang-darn, I forgot it! Wait, it'll come to me. Ick, still drawing a blank. Well, they're smart; I'm sure they can figure it out.

I would call Google support, but they don't deign to provide any such thing. So, what gives?

Sound Business Advice from Jerry Garcia

2010-08-01T15:46:00.008-04:00

Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons

Today would have been Jerry Garcia's 68th birthday. Musically, politically, emotionally and spiritually, he has probably had more of an impact on me than any other human being whom I never knew personally.

As I was perusing YouTube today looking for some footage of him that I hadn't seen already, I found that he was a pretty sage businessman as well. In his 1982 appearance (with Bob Weir) on The Letterman Show (full video embedded below), David asked him why he allows taping of his live shows when it obviously leads to fewer commercial sales of their official recordings. His response?

"The shows are never the same. Ever. And when we're done with it, they can have it."

Jerry was the not the creative force behind the lyrics of most of the music he played. Of their 420 original songs, only maybe 75 or 80% were truly originals; many others were adaptations of traditional bluegrass, folk or blues songs (in much the same fashion as Led Zeppelin, at least as it pertains to the blues). On the remaining originals, poet/lyricist Robert Hunter wrote the words and Jerry composed the music.

However, Jerry really did have an uncanny efficiency with his words, packing in multiple meanings into short, pithy phrases. In his response to Letterman, he's really saying (at least) all of the following:

No, it's not impacting our record sales negatively

The experience of seeing The Dead live is dramatically different each time

I don't own the music once I have released it from being; rather, by playing it live, I set it free to be enjoyed by whomever is listening

In many ways, this philosophy actually results in more record sales

No price tag can be assigned to the value of the community of fans that has grown organically around our music and our culture

These lessons are raft with really important business advice, especially since we're living in the age of social media. In many ways, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have created communities that are just like the traveling circus of hippies that followed The Dead (and, later, other jam bands like Phish) on their tours, perhaps without as many drugs nor as much free love nor rock'n'roll and certainly a bit more personal hygiene. Okay, so maybe they're not really that much alike. But the sense of belonging to something larger than oneself is the same. How else can account for the explosive growth of Deadheads, the community around Burning Man and social sites like Facebook?

So, in this age of social media and utter disregard for things like "copyright" and End User License Agreements, how can musicians/bands, restaurant owners and other small businesses still manage to make "good bread" (as they called it in the 60s and 70s) in this age of the internet where everyone feels entitled to get nearly everything -- music, software, etc. -- for free?

The answer lies in Jerry's response to Letterman. Give away as much as you can. Think of the community around your business as a empty field. It needs to be tilled, seeded, watered and fertilized before you can reap the benefits of the harvest. Giving your products away for free is akin to planting your seeds. Engaging with your online community is akin tending to your crops. Selling your products and services is akin to harvesting your fields and selling the goods at the farmer's market. But you can get to the farmer's market if you're not taking good care of your farm.

I've heard this argument before. Someone told me once that consultants should take a page out of the professional chef's playbook (pardon the mixed metaphor). Take for instance, Hawaiian master chef Roy Yamaguchi, the creative force behind Roy's restaurants. If you buy his cookbook, you will have nearly all of Roy's recipes, free for you to make at home any time you want. But will you still eat at his restaurant? You betcha!

So what do you think? How does this apply to your business? Can you think of ways that you could give away the goods and still make money? I'd love to hear stories of how you've tried this and it has worked for you (or hasn't), so please leave a comment if you'd like to share.

Upcoming Oracle Web Center Interaction Training

2010-04-29T22:44:00.008-04:00

Just wanted to let you know that I (formerly Plumtree's Lead Engineer, worked with hundreds of different Plumtree, BEA and Oracle customers and now an Oracle ACE Director) am leading a public training course over the next two weeks and if you're interested, there are few available slots left.

We're partnering with training provider Peak Solutions and you can find the full details on their web site. Here's the critical information:

THIS Monday, May 3rd and Tuesday, May 4th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Administration - $1,200
Deployment planning, installation, configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc.

NEXT Monday, May 10th, 11th and 12th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Portlet Develoment in Java and .NET (also Ruby and PHP) - $1,800
Hello world all the way through advanced portlet dev concepts like setting preferences and using caching

Please drop us a note if you'd like to attend. There are only 4-5 slots left, so please act now to reserve your space!

My Oracle OpenWorld Sessions

2009-10-07T13:16:00.002-04:00

I'm going to be speaking in two different Oracle OpenWorld sessions on Sunday. They are OOW-S312303 -- Enterprise-Enable Dynamic PHP, Ruby, Python Apps: Oracle WebCenter Interaction and OOW-S312304 -- Enterprise Ruby on Rails: Rolling with JRuby on Oracle WebLogic Suite.

Here We Go Again: SXSW 2010

2009-08-26T12:56:00.003-04:00

I know it feels like we just put the wraps on SXSW 2009, but Panel Picker Voting is already live for 2010! This year they're using the Panel Picker to crowdsource session proposals for all three conferences: Music, Film and Interactive (whereas in the past it has only been used for Interactive).

As you well know, Social Collective, Inc., a company I started to serve the conference industry with better and more social software tools, provided the official social network and schedule builder for SXSW 2009. We're on tap to provide that service again this year -- in fact, the site is already live at my.sxsw.com. We have some exciting new features planned for this year, so stay tuned for announcements on that front as we get closer to the event.

So, even though we're intimately involved with SXSW, I still have to EARN the privilege of speaking there. 30% of that is decided by YOU, the voters. So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, I must ask you to vote for my proposed talks (if you think they're worthy):

SXSW Interactive: Developer from Mars Takes on Designer from Venus
Every great project needs a designer and a developer. Yet sometimes working side-by-side can be about as fun as pulling teeth. A veteran developer and a veteran designer use real-world anecdotes to spar on the dynamics that make it challenging for people in these two disciplines to collaborate effectively.

Neo-patronage: Can It Save the Music Industry?
Starting with the idea that all recorded music should be free (as in beer), I will explore the idea that a system of "neo-patronage" -- think of the way European artists were commissioned during the Renaissance -- can help reinvent the beleaguered music industry to ensure that artists can get fairly compensated in a world where music is free for consumers.

You have until Friday, September 4th at 11:59PM CST to cast your vote. Thanks for your support and see you at SXSW!

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA

2009-06-26T14:44:00.002-04:00

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server

2009-06-26T10:23:00.005-04:00

I just returned from the fabulous ODTUG (Oracle Developer Tools User Group) Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA. I had the pleasure of giving two solo presentations and sitting on one panel.

I recorded both presentations and the panel. Here is the first full recording for your edutainment pleasure.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for two more new videos which will be posted very soon.

Chris Bucchere Can Haz Professional Speakerness

2009-04-07T00:53:00.006-04:00

So, rumor has it that I'm now a professional public speaker. Sch-weet! How did that happen, you might ask? Or maybe you're thinking, if Bucchere can haz professional public speaker-a-bility, how can I haz professional speaker-hood too?

Well, it's actually easier than you think. Here is a simple, five-step guide so that you too can haz professional public speakerness:

1) Speak (a lot) -- this is really crucial. You need to have a good track record of presentations, lectures, etc. Hopefully you have a nice collection of audio and video clips too. If not, well, then start volunteering to speak at different events in your area of expertise to help build your speaker cred. And bring a friend with a handy-cam.

2) Find a photo you like of yourself. This is not 100% necessary, but it might be nice if your "speaker page" (look ahead at Step 3) has a photo of you on it. If you can't speak well, at least maybe you can haz good looks. Purrrrrrrr.

3) Hire a great designer (like Paula Bee) to give you good looks, even if you don't have them naturally or via surgical enhancement. Your speaker page should be your home on the web for all your past and upcoming public speaking engagements along with links to your other achievements, e.g. books you've published, companies you've started, podcasts, blog posts, web sites, awards, testimonials, etc. Let your ego guide you to the highest form of self-aggrandizing and narcissistic speaker web page Valhalla. w00t! (Oh, BTW, if you haven't done any of those things, maybe you're not actually cut out for professional public speaker-dom just yet.)

4) Ask for money. No one is going to pay you to speak unless you ask them. How much? Well, that depends on who's asking, how much of your career you want this to be (e.g. are you a full time professional speaker or a full time software developer with a speaking habit/hobby), and how much you think your words of wisdom are actually worth. Start small and grow your rates as you continue to build your speaker cred. Oh, and negotiate a bit, please. A certain person recently asked for $40,000 + two first-class airline tickets, hotel and meals. He ended up getting $20,000 and flying SLF-style, by his damn self. (For you those of you who haven't heard of that great TLA, SLF stands for "Self Loading Freight," which is the most succinct and accurate description of coach-class airline travel that I've ever heard.)

5) Ask for feedback. Just so that you don't think my ego has inflated itself beyond all sense of reason and responsibility, I do want to let you know that I take feedback very seriously. Nearly every event at which I've spoken has had some formal or informal feedback process. And if not, there's always Twitter. Why bother telling me you didn't like my talk when you can tell the whole fucking world, right? Seriously, carefully consider and respond to each bit of feedback -- positive, negative and all points in between -- and consistently use feedback to make each talk better than the last. Brad King had a great tip on responding to feedback: use humor. If someone calls you a douchebag, respond by saying, "Thanks for your feedback! Since we don't know one another well, can I ask that you please refer to me as Mr. Douchebag from now on?" You might get surprisingly good results -- often a line like this can convert a hater to a fan.

If you keep that up, before you know it, you'll be a coveted and highly compensated professional public speaker. However, it's not all fun and games. Please be prepared to really "Bring It/Kill It" when you speak. Repeat business is super important and no one's gonna pay for your speaking services again or recommend you to anyone if you give a dull and lackluster performance. As Dubya so eloquently put it: "Can haz fooled me once? Shame on you. Can haz fooled me twice? Well, um, you can't fool me twice 'cause I can haz Presidency or some shit." Oh, STFU George. (And while I'm on the subject of politics, who anointed Karl Rove as a Fox News commentator? Haven't we all had enough of his piss-all-over-the-constituion horseshit?)

My SXSW Panel: Social Networks for the Anti-Social

2009-03-14T01:13:00.009-04:00

UPDATE: SXSW released a complete audio recording of this panel!

I'm at SXSW again this year. I attended SXSWi last year and, if my memory serves me correctly, I also attended SXSW Music in 1995, though I might be confusing it with H.O.R.D.E., Austin City Limits or one of the other great music festivals in this fine city which is known internationally for its eclectic music scene. Anyway, because The Social Collective is powering my.SXSW, I actually have the pleasure of spending 10 full days in Austin and attending all three festivals this year: Film, Music and Interactive. I'm also speaking, oddly enough, in a Music Panel called Social Networks for the Anti-Social. I have to warn you, most panels (at any conference, not just SXSW) totally suck and this may not be an exception. But who knows, it might be a completely magical and transcendental experience, but you won't know unless you check it out.

You Are What You Eat

2009-02-10T13:50:00.006-05:00

I've never really understood the phrase, "You are what you eat." If it were true, I'd probably be an In-N-Out burger (double double animal style) or something far worse for you and/or better tasting.

Recently, I overheard someone on Twitter saying something to the effect of: "You are the sum of the five people you hang out with the most." My immediate reaction was to disagree vehemently. I'm totally not like that! I'm exactly who I want to be! I don't subject myself to the influence of others like that! Etc.

Not only am I completely wrong about this, but it may be that -- in some strange cosmic way -- I'm actually the sum of ALL the people around me, good, bad and everything else under the sun.

Today I discovered TwitterSheep. (No, this has nothing to do with sheep, fraternity rituals or anything else of a sexual nature, I assure you.) TwitterSheep simply looks at your followers and constructs a tag cloud based on keywords in their bios. That's not really remarkable, but what is remarkable is that when I ran my Twitter account through the application, the resulting tag cloud literally read like my own bio. Seriously. It's a visual representation of terms that -- when you sum them all together -- equal me. The largest words are what I do and care about most.

Am I right about this? Are you the sum of your followers? Try TwitterSheep and let me know how it worked for you!

my.SXSW Launches on The Social Collective

2009-02-02T16:54:00.005-05:00

We're rolling out a huge conference site today called my.SXSW for the legendary film, music and interactive festival SXSW!

We certainly haven't done a scientific study about this, but using "thumb in the air" math, I would venture to guess that this is the largest conference ever to roll out a white-label social networking platform. We're very pleased they they chose The Social Collective.

You can read the full story on Collectively Speaking, The Social Collective blog.

There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

2009-01-25T22:42:00.004-05:00

Today Robert Scoble wrote a really interesting and thought-provoking article on his blog about the alleged suspension/removal of Joel Comm's Facebook account. He draws a parallel to the revocation of Robert's own Facebook account and makes a good case for Facebook being outta line.

Here's my response to Robert:

In defense of you, Joel and countless others who have been suspended or removed from Facebook, it certainly doesn’t seem like you’re being treated fairly. It’s hard to imagine that someone with 5,000 confirmed Facebook friends and ten times as many followers on Twitter could be considered a spambot. Generally speaking, online communities, wikis, social networks, etc. have a way of policing themselves; content that other people enjoy gets shared and promoted while spam and other “noise” gets blocked or ignored. Facebook and other social sites would all be best-served by this sort of grassroots self-policing, rather than a top-down approach.

However, there’s a subtle point to which some other readers have alluded in the comments. You wrote, “I don’t support companies that ‘erase’ MY data without my permission.” What you may not realize is that based on Facebook’s TOS, what you think are “your data” actually are not “your data,” not by a long shot, not once you’ve posted them on Facebook.

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In return for providing “free” distribution of “your” content, companies like Facebook, Google and the likes are creating massive databases of incredibly valuable “information capital.” This in turn allows them to offer you a “free” service while they sell this information capital — the stuff you gave them, remember? — to advertisers. That pays their bills, which in turn allows them to continue to give you “free” content distribution.

Average people (who upload videos of dogs on skateboards, etc. to Facebook) don’t care about data ownership and are perfectly happy to hand the rights to their content over to Facebook or Google it order to share it more easily with their friends. Average people — however — aren’t one man media outlets, either, but YOU are. So, being an internet/social media mogul, I’m sure you understand that content distribution isn’t free.

The solution? Host your content yourself! People like you and Joel have the resources to pay for your own hosting AND you have loyal audiences that will follow you wherever you go. You can leverage social media to help the viral spread of your content, but the obvious goal of your participation in social media and social networking should be to drive eyeballs/click-throughs back to YOUR site so people can view YOUR content, ensuring that YOUR advertisers get bang for their buck.

It really all boils down to two old sayings: there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you get what you pay for. Want to pay for your own hosting and distribution? Then you can own your own content. Want to get free distribution from Facebook or Google? Then be prepared to give them something in return.

How to Convince Your Company to Pay for a SXSWi Pass

2009-01-14T11:30:00.004-05:00

Times are tough, right? Everyone is slashing spending, especially around travel and conference budgets. But you need (read: want) to be at SXSWi. So it's time to convince your boss that your attendance at SXSWi is something that the business needs to be successful.

Fortunately, if your company does or wants to do anything with the interwebs (and seriously, who doesn't these days?), this is easier than you thought. Just follow these five easy steps.

1. Look at the SXSWi speaker/panel lineup and pick ten panels that are relevant to your line of work. I'm a web 2.0 developer with more than a passing interest in social media, so this is easy. But the panels run the gamut of topics, so you should be able to find something that works for your business/industry. Here's an example: Building Personal and Company Brands with Web 2.0 Tools. Every company wants a stronger brand, right?

2. Copy the titles and abstracts into an e-mail to your boss and elaborate on how you'll benefit from them. More importantly, give specific reasons why what you learn will help you and your team, peers, etc. achieve 2009's business goals. To continue with our example, my company needs to grow our social media cred. The panel consists of Saul Colt, C.C. Chapman and Gary Vaynerchuk. According to their bios (on their web sites), Saul is "an accomplished marketing professional, with more than a decade of diverse high-level experience and a respected publisher" and C.C.'s company, The Advance Guard, "focuses on helping brands of all sizes smartly and strategically leverage emerging technologies for radical marketing programs." Gary doesn't really require an explanation, but if your boss has been living in a cave, then you might want to drop a few adjectives like "inspirational" and "passionate." Example: This panel will help me form an action plan on how to grow my company's social media cred, following the examples set by these three extraordinary social media mavens.

3. Outline the maximum line item costs for the event. The pass, the travel, the hotel and the food. If you really want to go, make your food budget less than $50/day, your hotel budget less than $100/day and cover the rest (if necessary) with your own cash. Don't provide a total, as it might overwhelm your boss at first brush. Besides, I'm sure he or she can add.

4. Plan a post-conference re-cap meeting. This is crucial! Set a date and make a list of team members who you will invite, including your boss. During this meeting, promise to share the highlights of what you learned at SXSWi and what you recommend that the business do differently. Explain how these revolutionary ideas will boldly move the company forward in ways they never could have imagined.

5. Split the difference. Remind your boss that the conference takes place Friday-Tuesday (March 13th to 17th). If you travel after work on Thursday or on Friday morning and return to work the following Wednesday, you're only missing three days of work AND you're donating your time to the company you love so much over the weekend.

There you have it, your "free" pass to SXSWi. Well, it's not exactly free. You have to deliver on all the promises you're making to your boss, especially if you want to go next year! Now if only it was this easy to justify the music festival. . . .

(Thanks to allisonb00, the inspiration for many things in my life, including this blog post.)

BIL Conference 2009 Selects The Social Collective to Provide Conference Social Network

2009-01-13T15:08:00.004-05:00

(I-Newswire) - Long Beach, CA

The second annual BIL Conference, scheduled to take place on February 7th and 8th, 2009, announced today that they have selected Herndon, VA-based BDG's white-label conference social networking platform, The Social Collective, as their provider for conference registration and social networking services.

BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It’s a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action. Last year's BIL had over 300 attendees. This year, almost twice that have already signed up on the social network. Confirmed speakers include TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD.

Other proposed talks include Silona Bonewald's (founder of The League of Technical Voters) "Transparent Government Starting With The Federal Budget" and Ben Huh's (of I Can Has Cheezburger) "What's Funny About The Interwebs."

BIL's "unconference" format permits anyone to speak, so interested parties may sign up to give a talk.

The talks are then "favorited" to the main stage by peers, or remain in a breakout room if they don't receive enough favorites.

"We chose The Social Collective because it's a great way to herd smart people," said BIL Conference co-chair Todd Huffman. "In addition to posting new talks and adding talks to their favorites, people can create and join groups, engage in discussions, make a new network of friends and keep their new relationships alive post-conference. The format was a great fit for BIL, but I can see it working well at more structured events, too."

"We're really enjoying the experience of watching and participating in the growth of the online BIL community, powered by The Social Collective," said BDG chief and one of the The Social Collective developers, Chris Bucchere. "The BIL team has been a pleasure to work with and the community has been very supportive of our efforts. The outstanding content and people involved should make BIL one of the must-attend events of 2009."

For additional information or to register for free, visit the BIL Conference web site.

Top Ten Tips for Writing Plumtree Crawlers that Actually Work

2008-10-26T21:19:00.006-04:00

Just in time for Halloween, I've decided to publish my Top Ten Tips for Writing Plumtree Crawlers that Actually Work. This post may scare you a little bit, but hey, that's the spirit of Halloween, right?

[Editor's note: yes, we're still calling it Plumtree. Why? I did a Google search today and 771,000 hits came up for "plumtree" as opposed to around 300,000 for "aqualogic" and just over 400,000 for "webcenter." Ignoring the obvious -- that a short, simple name always wins over a technically convoluted one -- it just helps clarify what we're talking about. For example, if we say "WebCenter," no one knows whether we're talking about Oracle's drag-n-drop environment for creating JSR-168 portlets (WebCenter Suite) or Plumtree's Foundation/Portal (WebCenter Interaction). So, frankly, you can call it whatever you want, but we're still gonna call it Plumtree so that people will know WTF we're talking about.]

So, you want to write a Plumtree Crawler Web Service (CWS), eh? Here are ten tips that I learned the hard way (i.e. by NOT doing them):

1. Don't actually build a crawler
2. If you must, at least RTFM
3. Hierarchyze your content
4. Test first
5. When testing, use the Service Station 2.0 (if you can get it)
6. Code for thread safety
7. Write DRY code (or else)
8. Don't confuse ChildDocument with Document
9. Use the named methods on DocumentMetaData
10. RTFM (again)

Before I get into the gory details, let me give you some background. First off, what's a CWS anyway? It's the code behind what Oracle now calls Content Services, which spider through various types of content (for lack of a better term) and import pointers to those bits of content into the Knowledge Directory. This ability to spider content and normalize its metadata is one of the most underrated features in Plumtree. (FYI, it was also the first feature we built and arguably, the best.)

Each bit of spidered content is called a Document or a Card or a Link depending on whether you're looking at the product, the API or the documentation, respectively. It's important to realize that CWSs don't actually move content into Plumtree; rather, they store only pointers/links and metadata and they help the Plumtree search engine (known under the covers as Ripfire Ignite) build its index of searchable fulltext and properties.

Today, Plumtree ships with one OOTB CWS that knows how to crawl/spider web pages. Not surprisingly, it's known as the Web Crawler. Don't let the name mislead you: the web crawler can actually crawl almost anything, as I explain in my first tip, which is "Don't actually build a crawler." But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, back to the background on crawlers. Oracle ships five of 'em, AFAIK: one for Windows files, one for Lotus Notes databases, one for Exchange Public Folders, one for Documentum and one for Sharepoint. Their names give you blatantly obvious hints at what they do, so I won't get into it. Along with the OOTB crawlers, Oracle also exposes a nice, clean API for writing crawlers in Java or .NET. (If you really want to push the envelope, you can try writing a crawler in PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, C++ or whatever, but it's hard enough to write one in Java or .NET, so I wouldn't go there. If you do, though, make sure that your language has a really good SOAP stack.)

So, after reading this, you still want to write a crawler, yes? Let's get into my Top Ten Tips:

1. Don't actually build a crawler

Yes, you really don't want to go here. Building crawlers is not that hard, as there's a clean, well documented API. However, getting them work is a whole other story.

Most applications these days have a web UI. So, take advantage of it. Point the OOTB web crawler at the web UI and see what it does. Some web UIs will work well, other won't (particularly if they use frames or lots of javascript.)

Let's assume for a moment that this technique doesn't work. Or perhaps you're dealing with some awful client-server or greenscreen POS that doesn't have a web UI. Either way, you may still be able to use the web crawler.

How? Well, the web crawler can crawl almost anything using something that we used to call the Woogle Web. Think of it this way. Say you want to crawl a database. Perhaps that database contains bug reports. Rather than waste your time trying to write a database crawler, just write an index.jsp (or .php, .aspx, .html.erb, .you-name-it) page that does something like "select id from bugs" and dumps out a list of all the bugs in the database. Then, hyperlink each one to a detail page (that's essentially a "select * from bugs where id = ?" query). Your index page can be sinfully ugly. However, put some effort into your detail pages, making them look pretty AND using meta tags to map each field in the database to its value.

Then, simply point the OOTB web crawler at your index page, tell it not to import your index page, map your properties to the appropriate meta tags, crawl at a depth of one level, and get yourself a nice cup of coffee. By the time you get back, the OOTB web crawler will have created documents/links/cards for every bug with links to your pretty detail pages and every bit of text will be full-text searchable. So will every property, meaning that you can run an advanced search on bug id, component, assignee, severity, etc.

At Plumtree, we used to call this a Woogle Web. It may sound ridiculous, but a Woogle Web is a great way to crawl virtually anything without lifting a finger.

However, a Woogle Web won't work for everything. If you're dealing with a product where you can't even get your head around the database schema AND you have a published Java, .NET or Web Service API, then you might want to think about writing a custom crawler.

2. If you must, at least RTFM

If you're anything like me, reading the manual is what you do after you've tried everything else and nothing has worked out. In the case of Plumtree crawlers, I recommend swallowing your pride (at least momentarily) and reading all of the documentation, including their "tips" (which are totally different from and not nearly as entertaining as my tips, but equally valuable).

Once you're done reading all the documentation, you might also want to consult Tip #10.

3. Hierarchyze your content

Um, yeah, I know "hierarchyze" isn't a word. But since crawlers only know how to crawl hierarchies, if your data aren't hierarchical, you darn well better figure out how to represent them hierarchically before you start writing code. Even if you don't think this step is necessary, just do it because I said so for now. You'll thank me later.

4. Test first

Don't even try to write your crawler and then run it and expect it to work. Ha! Instead, write unit tests for every modular bit of code that you throw down. To every extent that's it's possible, write these tests first. It'll save your butt later.

5. When testing, use the Service Station 2.0 (if you can find it)

When you do finally get around to integration testing your crawler, it'll save you a lot of time if you use the Service Station 2.0. However, it may take you a long time to get it, so start the process early. Unlike every product Oracle distributes, it is 1) free and 2) not available for download. Yeah, you read that correctly.

To get it, you need to contact support. I called them and told them I needed it and after two weeks I got nothing but a confused voicemail back saying that support doesn't fulfill product orders. Um, yeah. So I called back and literally begged to talk to someone who actually knew what this thing was. Then I painstakingly explained why I couldn't get it from edelivery (because it's not there) nor from commerce.bea.com (because it's permanently redirecting to oracle.com) nor from one.bea.com (because there it says to contact support). So, after my desperate pleas and 15 calendar days of waiting, I got an e-mail with an FTP link to download the Service Station 2.0.

After installing this little gem, my life got a lot easier. Now instead of testing by launching a Plumtree job to kick of the crawler (and then watching it crash and burn), I could use the Service Station to synchronously invoke each method on the crawler and log the results.

Another handy testing tool is the PocketSOAP TCPTrace utility. (It's also very handy for writing Plumtree portlets.) You can set it up between the Service Station and your CWS and watch the SOAP calls go back and forth in clear text. Very nice.

6. Code for thread safety

So, as the documentation says (and as I completely ignored), crawlers are multithreaded. The portal will launch several threads against your code and, unless you code for thread safety, these threads will proceed to eat you for lunch.

Coding for threadsafety means not only that you need to synchronize access to any class-level variables, but also that you must use only threadsafe objects (e.g. in Java, use ArrayList instead of Vector).

7. Write DRY code (or else)

Even though you're probably writing your CWS in Java or .NET, stick to the ol' Ruby on Rails adage: Don't Repeat Yourself.

Say for example, that you need to build a big ol' Map of all the Document objects in order to retrieve a document and send its metadata back to the mothership (Plumtree). It's really important that you don't build that map every time IDocumentProvider.attachToDocument is called. If you do, your crawler is going to run for a very very very long time. Crawlers don't have to be super fast, but they shouldn't be dog shit slow either.

As a better choice, build the Map the first time attachToDocument is called and store it as a class-level variable. Then, with each successive call to attachToDocument, check for the existence of the Map and, if it's already built, don't build it again. And don't forget to synchronize not only the building of the Map, but also the access to the variable that checks whether the Map exists or not. Like I said, this isn't a walk in the park. (See Tip #1.)

8. Don't confuse ChildDocument with Document

IContainer has a getChildDocuments method. This, contrary to how it looks on the surface, does not return IDocument objects. Instead, it expects you to return an array of ChildDocument objects. These, I repeat, are not IDocument objects. Instead, they're like little containers of information about child documents that Plumtree uses so that it knows when to call IDocumentProvider.attachToDocument. It is that call (attachToDocument) and not getChildDocuments that actually returns an IDocument object, where all the heavy lifting of document retrieval actually gets done.

You may not understand this tip right now, but if drop by and read it again after you've tried to code against the API for a few hours, and it should make more sense.

9. Use the named methods on DocumentMetaData

This one really burned me badly. I saw that DocumentMetaData had a "put" method. So, naturally, I called it several times to fill it up with the default metadata. Then I wasted the next two hours trying to figure out why Plumtree kept saying that I was missing obvious default metadata properties (like FileName). The solution? Call the methods that actually have names like setFileName, setIndexingURL, etc. -- don't use put for standard metadata. Instead, only use it for custom metadata.

10. RTFM (again)

I can't stress the importance of reading the documentation. If you think you understand what to do, read it again anyway. I guarantee that you'll set yourself up for success if you really read and thoroughly digest the documentation before you lift a finger and start writing your test cases (which of course you're going to write before you write your code, right?).

* * *

As always, if you get stuck, feel free to reach out to the Plumtree experts at bdg. We're here to help. But don't be surprised if the first thing we do is try to dissuade you from writing a crawler.

Have a safe and happy Halloween and don't let Plumtree Crawlers scare you more than they should. Boo!

bdg welcomes Michael Buckbee!

2008-09-29T22:42:00.004-04:00

We're very pleased to announce that industry veteran, entrepreneur and Rails developer Michael Buckbee joined the bdg team today as CTO and Lead Developer on The Social Collective!

Mike's career path is surprisingly similar to my own -- in multiple ways. Fresh out of college, he joined a health industry startup called Aristar in 1999. They were acquired by SoftMed, which was then acquired by 3M HIS. (Recall that I worked at Plumtree, which was bought by BEA, which was bought by Oracle.) Unlike yours truly, who left Plumtree in 2002, Mike stayed on at 3M. As someone who just doesn't know what it means to get bored, he also started several side projects. The most successful of these was Fabjectory, which could best be described as a 3D printshop that allows people to take their avatars (or other objects from the virtual world) offline and reincarnate them as real life figurines.

Again, our paths resemble one another, in an almost uncanny way. As I was toiling away on Feedhaus, Mike was building FeedMail, which essentially tried to allow people to read and respond to email from inside a feed reader. Like Feedhaus, the idea never really took off. However, some of Mike's other projects -- like Fabjectory -- generated an amazing amount of buzz, including articles in the New York Times and WIRED. Prior to starting Fabjectory, Mike had yet another side project called Second411 which allowed people to search for virtual items both in-world and on the web. Second411 was purchased by ESC in October of 2006.

Never one to settle for just a few side-projects, Mike also worked on FoxyMelody, Watchlister, OneToFive, FeedSpeaker and an open source HTTP queue that runs on Google's Application Engine. Here at bdg, we've long been in the business of throwing lots of spaghetti at the fridge and seeing what sticks, so obviously Mike will fit right in. Visit Mike's blog and project page for more about his amazing career.

As Lead Developer on The Social Collective, Mike is already busy getting the site prepped for SXSW 2009, which will launch early in Q1.

Please join me and the rest of the bdg team in extending a warm welcome to Mike!

I Don't Even Like Radiohead, But. . . .

2008-09-26T15:26:00.006-04:00

I wouldn't consider myself a Radiohead fan. But what they just did is about to turn the music industry on its head . . . again. Check out this snippet from an e-mail they just sent me:

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes...
Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304
...we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here.
Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. [Emphasis mine.] To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.

Whatever you want to call this (user-generated production?), it's downright brilliant. The idea that I -- a mere mortal -- get to mix and produce the next Radiohead song and that my version (if the general public likes it) could be the next big Radiohead hit is simply a mind-blowing and totally game-changing idea. Starting with Napster, then Kazaa and other P2P networks, then the idea that a major-label artist like Radiohead would put up an album (In Rainbows) and ask people to name a price for it -- including $0 -- the music industry has changed dramatically over the past ten years. And Radiohead is, as usual, leading the charge.

Chris Bucchere's Oracle Open World Schedule

2008-09-18T11:05:00.007-04:00

I'm headed to Oracle Open World on Saturday, 9/20. Here's my proposed schedule. Like I said earlier, I'm probably going to spend most of my time in the unconference anyway, but here's what looked interesting to me.

[Editor's note: I've removed the gCal from here because it defaults to the current date, so it's not really usable anymore, now that Oracle Open World 2008 is a thing of the past.]

If you'd prefer, you can also access this schedule in XML or ICAL format.

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

2008-09-04T14:54:00.007-04:00

I am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Sneak Preview of Chris Bucchere's SXSW RSS Preso at the Oracle Open World Unconference

2008-09-03T09:11:00.008-04:00

For anyone attending Oracle Open World, I'm planning to give a preview of my SXSW 2009 talk entitled "Not So Simple Any More: RSS's Bleeding Edge" in the unconference track at OOW. (This will happen regardless of whether or not SXSW selects my talk for inclusion in the 2009 agenda.)

The talk is scheduled for Monday, 22 September 2008 at 2 PM Pacific in Moscone Overlook II. BTW, I'll probably be spending most of my time in the unconference track at OOW, because I'm just that kind of guy.

Conference Social Networking Made Simple

2008-08-31T20:00:00.003-04:00

Three and a half months have transpired since our stellar debut at BEA Participate. (In internet time, that's a lifetime.) But better late than never, I'm very pleased to announce the launch of our marketing home on the web: www.thesocialcollective.com!

Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Friday Fun: Rails, Django and Caprese Salad

2008-08-29T19:29:00.004-04:00

I had this Twitter argument today with former coworker, fellow web developer and friend Bryan Hughes:

bucchere: The Spring Framework is driving me crazy. If this were Rails, I'd be done already.

huuuze: @bucchere If it was Django, it'd be faster and ready to scale.

bucchere: @huuuze I'm not interested in a religious war right now. Please don't provoke me. ;-)

huuuze: @bucchere No war -- even the Rails guys agree: http://is.gd/1ZZu

bucchere: @huuuze Apparently Gluon is even faster than Django. But is anyone using it? You have to consider factors other than performance.

huuuze: @bucchere Um, Django's used by thousands. It's not some fringe framework. Guaranteed anyone that's used RoR and Django will prefer Django.

bucchere: @huuuze How could you make that "guarantee" when you've never used Rails? I said I didn't want a religious war, you damn Python Nazi. ;-)

huuuze: @bucchere I've built a couple site using Rails. How many sites have you built using Django?

bucchere: @huuuze bdg's svn server just crashed. I have more important things to do than continue this pointless argument.

huuuze: @bucchere Then quit wasting time on Twitter. I'm not trying to start anything with you. Just be aware that RoR isn't the only game in town.

bucchere: @huuuze There are lots of religions too. And if I want to pick one and say the others are "wrong" then that's my prerogative.

huuuze: @bucchere Whatever dude. Not sure why you'd say Django is "wrong."

bucchere: @huuuze All I'm saying is that language/framework wars are like religious wars. I have mine, you have yours. Leave it at that.

bucchere: Enjoying a homemade caprese -- my favorite salad. (Now watch while @huuuze tells me his favorite salad is better than mine.)

huuuze: @bucchere Having never tried caprese, I have no opinion on the matter.

bucchere: @huuuze LOL. I'm glad we can still be friends. :-)

huuuze: @bucchere Get real. I'm only friends with Christians and Django users. ;)

* * *

So the time it took me to compile this discussion made me wonder why Twitter doesn't have threaded discussions. Summize (now search.twitter.com) has "conversations" but, like Facebook's wall-to-wall feature, just because the posts occur consecutively, it doesn't mean that they're actually "in" the same thread. If I were re-writing Twitter, adding threaded discussions -- and with it, the ability to reply to a specific Tweet -- would be near the top of my list.

Happy Friday everyone (and happy 3-day weekend for hard-working and hard-twittering Americans)!

Shameless Self-Promotion

2008-08-19T21:58:00.003-04:00

At last year's SXSW I said to myself: "Self, you need to be speaking at this conference next year."

Help me fulfill my self-fulfilling prophecy and please take a minute to vote for one (or both) of my proposed talks! Unlike the SXSWi Web Awards last year, you don't have to vote every day -- once is plenty.

The first is a solo presentation on the future of RSS.

The second is a panel discussion on whether it's better to have one horizontal social network like Facebook or loads of smaller, niche social networks.

Thanks for your support.

Middleware for the REST of us

2008-08-18T09:20:00.010-04:00

I'm sitting in my third Oracle Fusion Middleware briefing, this one at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. Thomas Kurian has been going through all the products in the Oracle stack in excruciating detail.

First let me say this: Thomas Kurian is a really smart guy. He holds an BS in EE from Princeton summa cum laude (that's Latin for really fucking good). He holds an MBA from the Stanford GSB. He's been working for Oracle forever and he even knows how to pronounce Fuego (FWAY-go). I'm dutifully impressed.

Unfortunately, all those academic credentials and 10+ in the industry is barely the minimum requirement for getting your head around the middleware space. Either I don't have enough (0) letters after my name, or I just don't get it.

For starters, there are way too many products -- the middleware space is filled with "ceremonious complexity" (to quote Neal Ford). App servers, data services layers, service buses, web service producers and consumers -- even portals, content management and collaboration has been sucked into this space. Don't get me wrong: the goals of the stack are admirable -- middleware tries to glue together all the heterogeneous, fragmented systems in the enterprise. Everyone knows that most enterprises are a mess of disparate systems and they need this glue to provide unified user experiences that hide the complexity of these systems from the people who have to use them. That makes the world a better place for everybody.

That was also, not coincidentally, one of Plumtree's founding principles and the concept -- integrating enterprise systems to improve the user experience -- has guided my career since I got my lowly undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1998.

So, it's a good concept, however, if you're considering middleware because you're trying to clean up the mess that your enterprise has become, you need to ask yourself the following fundamental question: does middleware add to or subtract from the overall complexity of your enterprise?

Your enterprise is already insanely complicated. You've got Java, .NET, perhaps Sharepoint, maybe an enterprise ERP system like SAP and say, an enterprise open source CRM system like SugarCRM or a hosted service like SalesForce.com. The bleeding edge IT folks and even (god forbid) people outside of IT are installing wikis written in PHP (e.g. MediaWiki) along with collaborative software like Basecamp written in Ruby on Rails. I'm not even going to mention all the green-screen mainframe apps still lurking in the enterprise -- wait, I just did. This veritable cornucopia [editor's note: I love those two words, especially when used together!] of systems just scratches the surface of what exists at many large -- and even some mid-to-small-sized companies -- today.

So clearly there's a widespread problem. But what's the solution?

At the end of his impressive presentation, I asked Thomas the following question: "How can middleware from Oracle/BEA help you make sense of the fragmented, heterogeneous enterprise when you have existing collaborative (web 2.0) technologies written in PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. running rampant throughout IT and beyond?" (Okay, so I wasn't exactly that pithy, but it was something close to that.)

His Aladdin-esque answer came in the form of three choices:

"Take control of" and "centralize" your IT systems by replacing everything with Oracle Web Center spaces

Ditto by migrating everything to UCM (Stellant)

Build a services framework and aggregate everything in one of four ways:
1. Use a Java transaction layer (JSR 227)
2. Use a portlet spec like JSR 168 or WSRP
3. Build RESTful web services
4. Use the WebPart adapter for Sharepoint

I like to call answers one and two "The SAP Approach." In other words, we're SAP, we're German, wir geben nicht einen Scheiße about your existing enterprise software, you're now going to do it the SAP way (or the highway).

Will companies buy into that? Some companies may. Many will not. ERP is a well understood space, so this approach has worked for SAP. Enterprise 2.0 is not terribly well understood, so that means even more diversity in the enterprise software milieu. [Editor's note: English, German AND French in one blog post -- not bad!]

So the only approach that I believe in is #3: integrate. Choose the right tool for the right problem, e.g. the WebPart adapter if you're using Sharepoint. Use REST when appropriate, e.g. when you need a lightweight way to send some JSON or XML across the wire between nonstandard or homegrown apps. Use JSR 168/286 for your Java applications. Even use SOAP if the backend application already supports it. Keep things loosely coupled so that you can plug different components in and out as needed. This requires a lot of development -- the glue -- but, I don't think there's any way around that. (You should take that with a grain of salt, because my company has been supplying the government and the commercial world with exactly that kind of development expertise since 2002.)

As for the overarching, user facing "experience" or "interaction" product -- that's where I've always used Plumtree (or AquaLogic Interaction). Will I start using Web Center Spaces? At this point, I'm still not sure. If it can be used as the topmost bit of the architectural stack to absorb and surface all the enterprise 2.0 software that my customers are running, then perhaps. If it's going to replace all the enterprise software that my customers are running, then no way José.

This conundrum really opens up a new market for enterprise software: I call it "Middleware for the REST of us" or MMM (not M&M, 3M or M3, because they're already taken): "Mid-Market Middleware" -- similar to the way 37signals approaches (with a great deal of hubris and a solid dose of arrogance) the Fortune Five Million by marketing their products toward the whole long-tail of small and medium-sized companies. Maybe the world needs a RESTful piece of hardware that just aggregates web services and spits out a nice UI, kind of like the "Plumtree in a Box" idea that Michael Young (former Plumtree Chief Architect, now Chief Architect at RedFin) had back in the last millennium.

Oracle Web Center Spaces might be the right choice for some very large enterprises, but what about the REST of us?

How the New Facebook Utterly Destroyed my Favorite Application (and Why That Makes Me Sad)

2008-08-16T15:35:00.004-04:00

I used to love Feedheads. It's a simple, elegant and beautiful application that does one thing really well: help you share your Google reader shared items.

Unfortunately, the "new" Facebook has rendered the application utterly useless and I can't think of a good way, as an end-user, to fix it. In fact, as someone who's built two facebook apps, I can't even think of a way that the Feedheads developers can fix it. What a calamity.

So here's the problem: the News Feed (and the Mini Feed) introduced an option that allows end-users to set the story "size" as shown on the right. When a Google shared item story comes through Feedheads now, it defaults to the "one line" size and as a result, it doesn't say anything other than "Chris posted an item to Feedheads."

Thank you very much, Facebook. That piece of information is completely useless. People who are reading your feed need to click through into the Feedheads application in order to see what story you posted -- and the whole point of Feedheads is to help you share your shared items, not make them harder to find.

(As a result of all this, Facebook also broke one of my applications, called WhyI. It has < 200 users, so very few people care, but . . . the point of the app was to help people ask themselves and their friends questions that have to be answered in five words or fewer. And of course, the questions and answers would show up in the Mini Feed and News Feed. But not anymore! Now it just says: "Chris posted a new mini-update using WhyI." Again, a totally useless piece of information. Drats.)

As an end-user, I can set the "size" of each feed item. So that means, after I hit Shift-S in Google Reader -- which doesn't take much effort -- I have to wait for the story to be published in Facebook and then, if I remember (which at this point is unlikely), I have to go into that little drop down on the right and set the size to "small" instead of the default, which is "one line." And here's the best part: I can't tell Facebook to remember this, so I have to do it every time.

All this just to share a shared item on Google Reader through Feedheads . . . ick.

Here's the best part. I just noticed that Facebook added their own feature to the new and "improved" news feed. You can import your shared items from Google Reader! And, not surprisingly, the news feed actually shows the stories' titles. In other words, Facebook took a great application -- Feedheads -- and replaced the functionality with their own feature; in the process, they rendered Feedheads useless.

This makes me sad. I only have one thing to say:

Wow, Facebook, how very Microsoft of you.

Nobody's Gonna Read This (and Why That Makes Me Happy)

2008-08-15T16:58:00.005-04:00

Boy do I love the fact that no one reads this blog. And to the few people who are exceptions to that general rule -- thank you for being so supportive!

I just hit two or three web pages in a row (TechCrunch, Digg and the Meebo blog) where each post I read had 80+ comments that reminded me why I rarely ever actually read comments.

Haters, trolls, flamers, spammers -- whatever you want to call them, the internet is ridden with people who are filled with spite and rage. The funny thing is that in no other forum (except for perhaps while driving) are people this cruel to one another. It's just not socially acceptable.

I realize that e-hate isn't a new problem: in fact, it dates back to the early days of UseNet, Netiquette and the ol' "do we allow AOLer's on the internet" debate. While doing some fact-checking on wikipedia, I was really amused to read about Godwin's Law, which sums up what I'm talking about better than I ever could: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

We all know the Kathy Sierra story. I'm glad she had a thick enough skin to re-emerge in the blogging world and on Twitter because the world is a better place with her contributions than it is without them.

We all remember The Great Sarah Lacy Twitter Massacre of SXSW 2008. I recently met Sarah at a tech event in DC and, believe it or not, she doesn't have horns, literally or figuratively.

Jason Calacanis recently "retired" from blogging. When I read his post, I immediately thought that it was just a PR stunt, but I'm beginning to realize that I can sympathize with his viewpoint. I really don't want to ever be an A-list blogger or "internet famous" because it's just like painting a big target on your own ass.

I love my family and close friends, I love the physical neighborhood in which I live and I love the virtual networks that have developed around my career and my passions for the past 15 years or so that I've been using the internet.

But honestly, a big part of me doesn't want anyone else to read this. Not because I don't take criticism well. (I don't, but then again nobody does.) I just wish some of the same general rules that apply to social interactions -- at say, a cocktail party, a baseball game or at the supermarket -- would apply to the internet.

Comments welcome. Just be nice, ok?

Are Twitter Replies Fundamentally Broken?

2008-08-14T00:03:00.007-04:00

Has anyone noticed that Twitter replies are fundamentally broken? Or, I should say, at least the "Replies" *tab* is jacked.

This isn't another "Twitter is down" post -- this is about a feature that doesn't work as it's designed.

As far as I can tell, replies to me only end up in my "Replies" tab if my Twitter account name (@bucchere) is the first token in the tweet. Yet a lot of people reply to multiple people or use the "@" notation in context, e.g. "I'm playing tennis with @bucchere."

That "reply," although it's clearly got my name in it, won't end up under my replies tab. Oops.

In The Social Collective, any time an @<username> token is found, it stores the message as a reply to <username>. Isn't that how Twitter should work as well?

Has anyone else noticed this? Is anyone else annoyed like I am by this obviously broken "feature?" WTF?

There is a workaround, but it's kludgey. You can use Summize (now located at search.twitter.com) to search for @<username> (or just <username> if you like). I did this, then ingested the resulting RSS feed into Google Reader and now I go there instead of to my Replies tab in Twitter. FAIL.

[Update: This is now fixed. Yay, Twitter!]

New Video: Demo of Conference Social Application

2008-08-05T10:51:00.003-04:00

This is a 30-minute clip from the general session at BEA Participate from back in May. Jay Simons and I demo the social application that bdg built for the conference.

BEA Participate 2008 Social Application Demo from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

RubyNation Community Site Accepting Registrations!

2008-07-18T11:28:00.003-04:00

bdg is very proud to be a RubyNation sponsor! The sold-out conference is just two weeks away. However, whether you're registered or not, if you want to network with other DC-area Rubyists, please take a minute to sign up for the Ruby Nation community, which you can access at http://rubynation.org/community.

We built this site for RubyNation using our new white-label social networking product for conference attendees and other members of the local Ruby community. This application made its debut at the BEA Participate conference in early May. It attracted over 800 registrants and generated 75,000 page views during the week of the conference. And of course, it's written entirely in Ruby on Rails.

If you're coming to RubyNation, thinking about coming to RubyNation (or you're a Rubyist who wishes he or she could make it to RubyNation), feel free to sign up for the site. Registration is easy and painless. Once you're in, you can "pimp" your profile with an avatar or photo, links, RSS feeds and products that you know and love. You can view and participate in discussions about each session at RubyNation and you can create and join groups to interact with your peers about a variety of interesting topics about Ruby (or anything under the sun).

So, don't waste any more time reading about this stuff -- come on in and let's get social at http://rubynation.org/community!

Our Web 2.0 Strategy

2008-07-01T13:31:00.001-04:00

Here at bdg 2.0, we plan to capture long-tail ecologies by disintermediating citizen-media value while we integrate Cluetrain life-hacks to aggregate user-centered podcasts, blogging and tag clouds that reinvent social ad delivery and syndication while designing rich-client widgets that enable rss-capable peer-to-peer communities to engage user-centered folksonomies.*

*Courtesy of the Web 2.0 B.S. Generator

Chris Bucchere Speaking at the NovaRUG on June 18th, 2008

2008-06-17T09:10:00.006-04:00

Update: you can now download the slides from my presentation!

Calling all local Rubyists! I'm speaking about modular page design in Ruby on Rails at tomorrow night's NovaRUG. The title of my talk is "To Portal or Not to Portal: How to Build DRY, Truly Modular Mashups in Rails."

The meat of my talk is going to come from these two recent blog posts:

Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 1)
Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 2)

I'll be followed by Arild Shirazi of FGM giving a presentation entitled "CSS for Developers."

Get all the details here.

P.S.: Free pizza!

Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 2)

2008-06-16T22:20:00.007-04:00

In Part 1, I explained how you can develop clean, DRY and encapsulated MVC code that allows for completely modular page assembly in Ruby on Rails.

In this follow up post, I explain how you can use a combination of layouts and content_for to apply title bars and consistent styles to your page components (or modules or portlets, or whatever you want to call them). The image to the left shows the finished product -- read on to see how I wrote the layouts and views to allow me to use some simple, straightforward CSS to apply this nice, consistent look-and-feel to this page (and the entire site).

The code here is easy to follow and it pretty much speaks for itself. It consists of two layouts (which I called aggregate and snippet), a sample controller and two sample views. Let's start with the controller for one page in your site that, say, aggregates a couple of modular page components together to show a nice view of company information.

Controller code (app/controllers/company_controller.rb):

def index
  render :action => 'index', :layout => 'aggregate'  
end

This controller simply delegates the rendering of the page to the index.html.erb view and tells Rails to use a layout called aggregate.

Now let's inspect the view.

View code (app/views/company/index.html.erb):

<% content_for :left do %>
 <%= embed_action :controller => 'company', :action => 'company_list' %>
 <%= embed_action :controller => 'feed', :action => 'feed' %>
<% end %>

<% content_for :center do %>
 <%= embed_action :controller => 'company', :action => 'detail' %>
<% end %>

<% content_for :right do %>
 <%= embed_action :controller => 'home', :action => 'sponsors' %>
<% end %>

This view defines three content regions, with the end goal being to create a page with three columns of "portlets." The left column contains two portlets: a list of all companies (company_list) and a news feed (feed). The center column contains a company detail portlet and the right column contains a portlet with information about sponsors. (Note that the portlets come from three different functional areas of the site, so they're decomp'd appropriately into three different controllers.)

Now, let's take a look at some layout magic.

Here's the aggregate layout (app/views/layouts/aggregate.html.erb):

<table class="main" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
 <tbody><tr>
  <td id="column-left" class="column" valign="top">
   <div id="region-left" class="region">
    <%= yield :left %>
       </div>
      </td>
  <td id="column-center" class="column" valign="top">
   <div id="region-center" class="region">
    <%= yield :center %>
       </div>
      </td>
  <td id="column-right" class="column" valign="top">
   <div id="region-right" class="region">
    <%= yield :right %>
       </div>
      </td>
  </tr>
</tbody></table>

I chose a table (yes, I still use tables) with three divs in it, one for each region of modules, but you could use pure divs with floating layouts or any other approach.

The three content regions, left, center and right, match up with the three content sections defined in the index view above using content_for. In case this isn't obvious, when the layout encounters a page-level definition of a content region in the view, it renders it. If there is no definition for a particular region, the containing column will just collapse on itself, which is the behavior we want.

This is a slight digression, but note how I used CSS classes to identify the columns and regions in a general way (using classes) and a specific way (using ids). This allows me to style the whole module-carrying region with CSS using table.main as my selector, all the columns using table.main td.column as my selector or all the regions using table.main td.column div.region as my selector. I can also pick and choose different specifc areas (e.g. table.main td.column#column-right) and define their style attributes using CSS. As you'll see in a minute, I can write CSS selectors to say if module A is in the left column, apply style X but if module A is in the center or right column, apply style Y. Pretty cool.

Now, let's explore the module layout. (Note that I've been calling page snippets portlets, modules or components, pretty much interchangeably. I think this illustrates that it doesn't make a difference what we call 'em -- e.g. portlets vs. gadgets -- the concept is fundamentally clear and fundamentally the same.)

Module layout (app/views/layouts/snippet.html.erb):

<div id="<%= yield :id %>" class="snippet-container">
 <div class="snippet-title"><%= yield :title %></div>
 <div class="snippet-body"><%= yield :body %></div>
</div>

This layout expects three more content regions to be defined in the view: id, title and body. Here are the matching content regions from one sample view (for sponsors) -- for brevity's sake, I didn't include all the views.

Sample module view (app/views/home/sponsors.html.erb):

<% content_for :id do %>sponsors<% end %>

<% content_for :title do %>Our Sponsors<% end %> 

<% content_for :body do %>
Please visit the sites of our wonderful sponsors!
<% end %>

Now, because of some nicely-placed classes and ids, I can once again use CSS selectors to give a common look-and-feel to all portlet containers (div.snippet-container), portlet titles (div.snippet-title) and to portlet bodies (div.snippet-body). Of course, if I want to diverge from the main look-and-feel, I can call out specific portlets: div.snippet-body#sponsors.

If I really want to get fancy, I can use CSS selectors to select, say, the sponsor portlet, but only when it's running in the right column: table.main td.column-right div.snippet-container#sponsors.

So, in summary, using layouts, content_for and some crafty CSS, I can create a page of modules that can be styled generically or specifically. Combine this approach with what I described in Part 1, and you can "portal-ize" your Rails applications without using a portal!

Was this useful to you? If so, please leave a comment.

Nominate Chris Bucchere for an Oracle OpenWorld Session

2008-06-12T13:36:00.009-04:00

I've presented at seven Plumtree Odysseys, one BEA World and two BEA Participates. Help keep the streak alive by voting up my Oracle OpenWorld presentation!

Here's what people had to say about my P08 preso this year. . .

Q5: What did you like most about the session?

The ppt presentation style!
Straight and to the point, dives right into it. Chris did a fantastic job!
very nice to hear how they put this together
amazing and inspiring
great session; should be one of the first sessions provided.

Q6: What could we do better next year?

bring this guy back (again)

The Social Collective Debuts at RubyNation

2008-06-10T16:16:00.006-04:00

We're very pleased to announce that, together with the organizers of RubyNation, we debuted our social application "The Social Collective" today as a means for RubyNation conference attendees and other Rubyists to meet and interact with their peers.

This is a very similar codebase to what we deployed at BEA Participate in May, but without ALI or ALBPM. These BEA (now Oracle) products provided a great, scalable and flexible architecture, but we didn't feel it was a good use of our resources (i.e. $$$s) to continue to use these products and we didn't want to pass this cost on to RubyNation, which, BTW, is only charging $175 for two jam-packed days of Ruby awesomeness.

So, for those of you who have been following all this social goodness coming from BDG, there are now two distinct versions of "The Social Collective:" one that uses BEA/Oracle products and one that does not. This affects pricing (obviously), so if you're interested in either, please contact us to find out more.

And in the meantime, if you're as gung ho about Ruby as we are, sign up for an account and help us grow the Ruby community here in DC and beyond!

Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 1)

2008-06-03T22:55:00.007-04:00

Recently I was faced with an interesting problem: I wanted to create a modular, portal-like page layout natively in Ruby on Rails without using another layer in the architecture like SiteMesh or ALUI. Java has some pretty mature frameworks for this, like Tapestry, but I found the Ruby on Rails world to be severely lacking in this arena.

I started with Rails 2.0 and the best I could come up with at first brush was to create a html.erb page comprised of several partials. Each partial would basically resemble a "portlet." This works fine, but with one showstopping pitfall -- you can't call controller logic when you call render :partial. That means in order for each page component (or portlet, if you like) to maintain its modularity, you would have to either 1) put all the logic in the partial view (which violates MVC) or 2) repeat all the logic for each component in the controller for every page (which violates DRY).

If that's not sinking in, let me illustrate with an example. Let's say you have two modular compontents. One displays the word "foo" and the other "bar", which are each contained in page-level variables @foo and @bar, respectively. You want to layout a page containing both the "foo" and the "bar" portlets, so you make two partials.

"foo" partial (app/views/test/_foo.html.erb):

<%=@foo%>

"bar" partial (app/views/test/_bar.html.erb):

<%=@bar%>

Now, you make an aggregate page to pull the two partials together.

aggregate page (app/views/test/aggregate.html.erb):

<%=render :partial => 'foo' %>
<%=render :partial => 'bar' %>

You want the resulting output to say "foo bar" but of course it will just throw an error unless you either embed the logic in the view (anti-MVC) or supply some controller logic (anti-DRY):

embedded logic in the view (app/views/test/_foo.html.erb):

<%@foo = 'foo'%>
<%=@foo%>

embedded logic in the view (app/views/test/_bar.html.erb):

<%@bar = 'bar'%>
<%=@bar%>

-- OR --

controller logic (app/controllers/test_controller.rb):

def aggregate
 @foo = 'foo'
 @bar = 'bar'
end

Neither solution is optimal. Obviously, in this simple example, it doesn't look too bad. But if you have hundreds of lines of controller logic, you certainly don't want to dump that in the partial and if you also don't want to repeat it in every controller that wants to aggregate that piece of code, which is supposed to be modular.

What a calamity.

I did some research on this and even read a ten-page whitepaper that left me with no viable solution, but my research did validate that lots of other people were experiencing the same problem.

So, back to the drawing board. What I needed was a way to completely modularize each partial along with its controller logic, so that it could be reused in the context of any aggregate page without violating MVC or DRY. Enter the embed_action plugin.

This plugin simply allows you to call invoke a modular bit of code in a controller and render its view, but not in a vacuum like render :partial. With it, I could easily put controller logic where it belongs and be guaranteed that no matter where I invoked the "portlet," it would always render correctly.

Here's the "foo bar" example, implemented with embed_action.

"foo" controller (app/controllers/foo_controller.rb):

def _foo
 @foo = 'foo' #this logic belongs here
end

"bar" controller (app/controllers/bar_controller.rb):

def _bar
 @bar = 'bar' #this logic belongs here
end

aggregate view (app/views/test/aggregate.html.erb):

<%= embed_action :controller => 'foo', :action => '_foo' %>
<%= embed_action :controller => 'bar', :action => '_bar' %>

That's it! Note that there is no logic in the aggregate controller -- that's not where it belongs. Instead, the foo and bar logic has been modularized/encapsulated in the foo and bar controllers, respectively, where the logic does belong. Now you can reuse the foo and bar partials anywhere, because they're 100% modular.

Thanks to embed_action, I was finally able to create a completely modular page (and site) design, with very little effort on my part.

In a follow-up post (Part 2), I'll explain how you can create really nice-looking portlets using everything above plus layouts and content_for.

This Just In -- BEA Participate Social App Stats

2008-06-03T22:29:00.009-04:00

I find this a little hard to believe, but the numbers don't lie. We had a whopping 75,000 page views the week of the conference!

That's more than 100 page views per registered attendee. This chart was from our
hottest day, Tuesday, 5/13.

Thanks to everyone for using our application. I think we may be on to something here!

Oracle and the BEA Deadpool

2008-06-03T21:38:00.006-04:00

Today Oracle announced that they will reveal their strategy for integrating (and/or shitcanning) BEA products. And boy are there a bunch of them -- almost 50 in total! With so many to choose from, we can play a fun little game. Which products are going to live and which ones are headed for the deadpool?

I've created a nice little anonymous poll here on my blog -- feel free to pick as many products as you like. A yes vote means you think the product will live on at Oracle and not voting for it means you don't.

I'll share my votes, because I'm just that kind of guy.

WebLogic Server: +1 (as I think it will replace Oracle's application server in the Fusion Middleware stack)

WLP, ALUI, Tuxedo and EVERYTHING ELSE: -1

It's too bad, but all good things (like ALUI) and even some lousy things (like WLP) must come to an end. The real shame is that many of the Enterprise 2.0 initiatives that BID started are not going to go anywhere. Oh well.

But hey, this is just one guy's opinion. Poll closes on 7/1 at 9 AM PDT/12 PM EDT -- then all will be revealed by the Oracle. Or not. We'll just have to see.

BEA Participate 2008: The Social Code

2008-05-21T01:50:00.009-04:00

I took the professional footage of my 1-hour presentation and overlaid it on top of the slides and demos. I had to break the video into two half-hour segments, which you can find below. (Note: you can't watch the video in HD in the embedded version; if you want to do that, you need to click through into Vimeo.)

The Social Code Breakout Session (Part 1) from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

The Social Code Breakout Session (Part 2) from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

I <3 Usage Data

2008-05-08T07:46:00.003-04:00

There's nothing better than reviewing usage data for an application you just launched, especially when those data show that people are loving it!

In our first week since the application went live, we've had more than 300 account registrations. That alone is a significant accomplishment. But it gets better. Here are some more stats:

350+ messages sent (Rumbles and Private Messages)
200+ podmob (Twitter) messages
100+ shout-outs (pokes)
100+ links and feeds added
200+ groups created
500+ mob adds (contacts)
3000+ breakout session registrations
3500+ notable actions (that have appeared in the Observation Deck feed)

We've also had almost 6000 page views since Monday and over 10,000 page views last week, our first week "in business."

Here's a great chart, courtesy of AquaLogic Analytics Server:

What's even more encouraging is that I've seen a surge in shoutouts, messaging and group activity as the conference approaches. And it hasn't even started yet! I expect our heaviest usage to come during the conference, although hopefully not the way it did on Twitter during Sarah Lacy's SXSW08 interview of Mark Zuckerberg.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

do you have any post conference metrics? would love to see how those look!
Posted by: geoffgarcia on May 20, 2008 at 1:00 PM

Participate.08 Social Applications Launched!

2008-05-01T01:15:00.004-04:00

You can read all about it on dev2dev, so I won't repeat myself here.

Congrats to Rich, Andrew and Remy for all their hard work on these applications! They came out great and I'm sure the conference attendees will love them.

Announcing the Launch of the Social Applications for BEA Participate '08

2008-04-30T20:33:00.002-04:00

You've heard the phrase "social applications" being kicked around by BEA and bdg. But what exactly does that mean?

In a nutshell, it means that your experience at BEA.Participate.08 will be like that of no other conference you've ever attended. In fact, it may change the entire way you feel about technology conferences.

If you're registered for the conference, you can visit this link to sign up to get started. (If you're not registered yet, you can register for the conference here.) You'll be directed to a web site where you can help us kick off this grand social experiment. During registration, you'll be asked to fill out a corporate profile by selecting or adding your company, your department, your title and some biographical information. You'll be asked what products (from BEA or elsewhere) you're currently using and what products interest you. You'll be able to "pimp" your profile with an avatar or photo, links, and RSS feeds. Finally, you'll be asked to take a stab at registering for different Participate.08 breakout sessions. (Don't worry, you can always come back later and make changes to your breakout session agenda.)

At this point, you'll be directed to a highly-customized installation of BEA ALI 6.5 backed by a host of bdg-designed and engineered Ruby on Rails applications which form the core of this groundbreaking social system. Log in and you'll be presented with a simple, elegant UI for:

browsing and selecting tracks and sessions,
viewing other people's company and personal profile pages and adding them to your "mob,"
sending "shout outs" other users (a playful way to get people's attention),
sending private (mail) or public (podmob) messages to other people,
browsing and interacting with product pages,
asking questions at a breakout session (through the session rumble),
joining and leaving interest groups focused on industries, products or "whatever,"
updating your status (to let others know where you are, what your mood is, etc.),
browsing an aggregate feed (the observation deck) which allows you to see what others are doing prior to, at (and even after) the conference.

On top of all this social application goodness, everyone who attends Participate will receive an iPod Touch, with 802.11b/g wireless baked in. (Of course, the conference hotel will have lightening fast free wireless internet access.) In addition to a sleek full-sized browser experience, most of the applications will also be optimized for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) form factor. This means that wherever you are at the conference -- sitting in a session, wandering the halls or the partner pavilion, even taking a bathroom break -- you'll be able to network, network, network with your fellow conference attendees.

Let's face it: are you attending the conference to hear a talking head rattle off lists of features in ALUI or ALBPM? No! You're going to Participate to learn from your peers. And not just in sessions, but in the halls, during the meals, at the evening events and of course, through these amazing social applications.

So, don't waste any more time reading about this stuff -- come on in and let's get social!

BEA Participate is Only Two Weeks Away

2008-04-29T11:20:00.001-04:00

There's still time to register for this great conference and take part in a one-of-a-kind social computing experiment.

Comments

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I heard some rumors that this event is going to demo some seriously killer app love that will blow people away. OK - they're not rumors. It's just common sense when you put this much brain power and off the wall creativity in one spot. I'm all for long fireside chats about protocols and geek plumbing (/swoon), but what really excites me about Participate is the ability to kick back with developers, product managers, and engineers and talk about business challenges and solutions - then arm you with the tools and tricks to get your business humming. Got a problem? Chances are these pros have a suggestion that will make your life easier and your business users that much more productive. Food, folks, fun, and forward thinking. You just can't beat that.
Posted by: ewwhitley on April 29, 2008 at 5:16 PM

Tada! The triumphant return of Eric Whitley to dev2dev!
Posted by: bucchere on April 30, 2008 at 12:33 PM

Countdown to BEA Participate

2008-04-22T11:21:00.006-04:00

Here at bdg, we're working tirelessly to bring you a revolutionary social networking application that will drive your interactions with BEA Participate 2008 conference attendees. Here's a sneak preview of what we've been up to!

The Social Code from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

Thanks to Derek K. Miller and the Podsafe Music Network for his groovy instrumental "That's No Dream" which we used as this video's soundtrack.

Removing iTunes DRM Using Tools from Apple

2008-04-14T20:19:00.003-04:00

The other day I was creating a Keynote presentation that needed a soundtrack. I wanted to use some regular (non-iTunes Plus) songs that I had legally purchased on iTunes for my soundtrack. The problem was that I first wanted to cross-fade three songs together and cut them to the exact length to match my slide deck. To do this, I had to import the songs into Audacity, but I couldn't do that without first removing the iTunes DRM.

Now, bear in mind that I didn't (and I don't suggest that you) do anything illegal with your music. Using some music you own in a presentation isn't, as far as I know, illegal.

Now that that's out of the way, let me tell you what I discovered. In the past, if I wanted to crack iTunes DRM, it was easy, but it cost the price of one CD-R or CD-R/W. But on this particular evening, I was working in the living room and there were two flights of stairs separating me from my home office where my stack of blank CD-Rs resides. (The old-school process is, if you're wondering: burn the DRM-protected songs to a CD-R, then rip them back in.) Due not to the cost of a CD-R (pennies), but to the energy I would have expended climbing up and down two flights of stairs, I discovered a method of stripping DRM without ever leaving your seat and using, ironically enough, completely legal tools provided by Apple!

Here's what you'll need:

1. A Mac
2. iMovie or iMovie HD
3. A short quicktime movie
4. About five minutes

Here's how to do it:

1. Open iMovie or iMovieHD and create a new project
2. Import the song for which you want the DRM removed into iMovie(HD)
3. Import a the short quicktime movie*
4. Export the iMovie(HD) project, select "audio only" and choose your format (mp3, wav, etc.)

That's it! Bye-bye DRM.

*You need the short quicktime movie because if you try to import and export audio only from iMovie(HD), Apple will give you this funny little warning about how you imported DRM-protected music and you can't export it without adding some video. There's an easy workaround: add some video!

AquaLogic Consulting SEO Game

2008-02-20T11:01:00.005-05:00

Well, I guess we won.

Feeling lucky?

bdg welcomes Rémy Miralles!

2008-02-15T21:30:00.007-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce our first hire of the year, Rémy Miralles!

Rémy hails from just outside Paris, France, so this marks the first time bdg has hired outside the US. He joins our team as part of the AIPT Trainee program, which granted Rémy a J-1 visa that allows him to work for us as an intern/trainee for 18 months.

During that time, he'll be applying the web visual/graphic design to our Participate 2008 Social Applications and also porting them to the iTouch/iPhone. Given that no bdg-er is ever content to work on "just one thing," I'm sure he'll be involved in lots of other projects as well, including Feedhaus.

Rémy has already proven himself as an outstanding developer. In fact, he recently built a Facebook application that has 15,000+ users even though it's only been out for a few months now.

Needless to say, all of us at bdg are very excited about working with the newest addition addition to our team.

Please join me in welcoming Rémy Miralles!

How to Build your own Temple of Ego in Five Minutes

2008-02-13T09:52:00.000-05:00

My wife is arguably my biggest fan, although my mom probably deserves "honorable mention."

If you too are a fanboy or fangirl of someone, like, say Robert Scoble, you may want to know what he's blogging about, pod/vod-casting about, Twittering about, etc. Someone put together this great aggregator called Robert Scoble's Temple of Ego.

I thought, wouldn't it be great if we all had our own Temples of Ego?

Back to my wife. Despite her self-professed fanhood, she's been having trouble lately (well, okay, ever) keeping up with all my web activity. This all stems from the fact that Feedhaus, a site I built and launched last fall, was selected as a SXSW Web Award finalist and I've been blathering about this fact in every online setting imaginable, including here on dev2dev. (Please vote for us, BTW.)

So, with upwards of five different blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared items, flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us -- keeping track of my enormous ego is a formidable task. But now, with the power of the semantic web and a great tool called Yahoo! Pipes, you can create your own Temple of Ego in five minutes. Here's mine.

Simply go to Yahoo! Pipes, log in and create a pipe that looks like this:

In the "Fetch Feed" node at the top, simply enter the RSS or ATOM feed from whatever you want to include in your Temple of Ego. For example, I included all my blogs, my tweets (from Twitter), my Facebook posted items, my Google Reader Shared Items, my del.icio.us links, my flickr photos and my YouTube videos. That's a good start.

Now, drag in a "Sort" node and sort by descending pubDate. This puts all the newest stuff first, known to geeks as "reverse chronological order."

Finally, wire together the Fetch Feed node with the Sort node and then the Sort node with the Pipe Output node. (Just look at the picture if that didn't make any sense.)

Now, if you're really egotistical, you can email all your friends a link to your Temple of Ego and encourage them to add the pipe's outbound RSS to their feed reader of choice. (Here's mine.)

So, what on earth does this have to do with ALUI? I'm so glad you asked.

ALI 6.5 -- which the good folks at bdg are using to build social applications for Participate.08 -- has some pretty slick RSS capabilities and some really beautiful user profile pages. Imagine if everyone's profile page had the output from their Temple of Ego embedded in it. How powerful would that be? And, with ALI 6.5 and a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, setting this up in your ALI deployment will be a breeze.

Comments

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Thanks for helping me keep the title of "your biggest fan" -- your Pipe implementation is working beautifully.
Posted by: allisonbucchere on February 13, 2008 at 1:17 PM

this reminds me of a similar feature on google reader that lets you create a public feed based on your tags. so i could tag multiple feeds with the same tag. then if i make that tag public, it results in a feed that combines all feeds with that tag. pipes looks to be a little more powerful with respect to sorting, etc, but if you don't need that, reader offers a little bit of the same. james
Posted by: jbayer on February 13, 2008 at 5:17 PM

Feedhaus Selected as a SXSW Web Award Finalist

2008-02-10T08:46:00.001-05:00

We're very pleased to announce that Feedhaus has been selected as a finalist for a prestigious SXSW (South by Southwest) 2008 Web Award!

We've been selected, along with four other great nominees, from among a pool of hundreds of sites for the "Technical Achievement" category, which, according to SXSW, describes "sites that are re-inventing and re-defining the technical parameters of our online experience."

Kudos to the SXWS committee for recognizing Feedhaus! Hope to see you in Austin from March 7th-11th for this great conference.

Running ALI on SQL Server 2005 Express

2008-01-30T14:49:00.000-05:00

Download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. As with SQL Server 2000, make sure you select "mixed" authentication mode instead of Windows only.
Download and install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express.
Open the Management Studio and create your database. Then, right click on the database and set "SQL Server 2000 Compatibility Mode."
Create your database user and grant rights to the new database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
Script your database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration, select Protocols for SQL2005. Double click on TCP/IP and make sure that it's enabled and set to run on a static port (1433) for all IP addresses.

You should be good to go! (Remember that this is not a configuration supported by BEA, but it works well for development purposes.)

Comments

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Cool. I think ALI also works on Oracle 10g XE. I will give it a shot next week.
Posted by: twang on February 8, 2008 at 10:28 PM

Indeed it does. You might want to refer to this post for tips on getting ALI running on Oracle 10g XE on Linux. Some of the tips probably apply to Windows too.
Posted by: bucchere on February 9, 2008 at 8:11 AM

Twitter down again?

2008-01-30T11:01:00.000-05:00

With the amount of downtime that twitter experiences, it makes me wonder whether or not Ruby on Rails is a viable alternative to PHP, Java, etc.

Is it the platform (RoR) or is it just bad code from Twitter? Or something else entirely?

Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0 Videos Released

2008-01-26T20:44:00.000-05:00

A couple months ago, I gave a talk entitled "The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0." Over the past few days, I've split the recording of that talk into six ten-minute segments and uploaded them to YouTube and Facebook. I also embedded them on my BEA dev2dev blog. I've included the links here for your convenience:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

If you want to follow along, here are the full-res slides.

Enjoy!

Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0

2008-01-22T22:22:00.002-05:00

Back in November of 2007 I gave a one-hour talk in Tyson's Corner, VA entitled "The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0." There were probably about thirty people in attendance. Since then, I've had several people tell me that they were sorry they missed the talk, etc. If you were one of those people, these next six posts are for you.

Why I am delivering this content in a six-part series? I don't have a video streaming server set up nor do I care to put one up and pay for the bandwidth. So, YouTube is an obvious solution to the hosting and bandwidth problem. (For those of you who have been living in a cave, YouTube has a ten-minute limit on the length of their videos.) So, I'm in the process of editing my talk into six, ten-minute clips.

Therein lies the problem.

What I'm learning in the process is that HD video editing is a major PITA, even on a Mac. The first problem is space: I've got about five gigs of raw footage. My conversion program, Voltaic, was choking near the end of each 2 Gb conversion, so I switched to a PC (for shame!) and used the software that came with the camera (a Sony HDR-SR5) to convert from MTS (raw AVCHD format) to MPEG-2. Then I needed to buy a program from Apple for $19.99 (thanks for nickel-n-dime'n me, Steve) to convert from MPEG-2 to MOV (QuickTime format). Now I'm importing into iMovieHD. Each one of these conversions takes about two hours and has an output between 2x and 12x the size of the original MTS file! That means, just to be safe, you need like 15Gb of scratch space to edit a 1Gb movie! On top of the space issue, I've hit Google already dozens of times to figure out how to deal with things like frame rates, aspect ratios, sound compression, format conversion, and so on, ad infinitum.

And this is supposed to be easy! I'm on a Mac for goodness's sake!

So, why am I ranting about my video editing woes in a post that's purportedly about the enterprise relevance of Web 2.0? Because I think there's a lesson to be learned from all this. If personal computing is this challenging, that does not bode well for the enterprise, where everything is 10-100 times more expensive and 10-100 times more complicated. Is this a good thing? For me and my company, maybe, because we're making a living trying to make sense of the complexities of the enterprise and building user interfaces that help abstract people away from all the complexity so that they can do their jobs effectively.

But to truly bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise, we need to take these concepts -- abstracting, simplifying, beautifying and "social-ifying" -- enterprise applications down to the point at which they're simple, beautiful and fun to use, all the while maintaining their power and utility. The experience people have using corporate software should mirror the experience they have using well designed, functional sites like Netflix, Facebook, Wishlistr, Dopplr and Kayak.

Most people writing corporate/enterprise software these days -- with a few notable exceptions like 37 Signals (the makers of Campfire, Basecamp and Highrise) -- are stuck in a function-over-form rut that's really hindering the process of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Those of you who have had the pleasure of using AquaLogic Pages know that it doesn't have to be this way. Software can be both fun and functional at the same time.

So that's an awfully long-winded and angst-ridden introduction to my six-part series on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. If any of the above struck a chord with you and resonated even a little bit, then I highly recommend that you check out the forthcoming videos. That is,
assuming that I actually succeed in producing them!

Comments

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Chris, enjoyed your post. I've got a little one on the way so I imagine I'll have to understand all of the video nuances of encodings/converstions soon for youtubing for the grandparents. It doesn't look like it's going to be as easy as I thought! James
Posted by: jbayer on January 23, 2008 at 7:44 AM

Write an ALUI IDS in Under 15 Lines Using Ruby on Rails

2008-01-18T20:46:00.000-05:00

Not only is it possible to write an ALUI Identity Service in Ruby on Rails, it's remarkably easy. I was able to do the entire authentication part in fewer than 15 lines of code! However, I ran into problems on the synchronization side and ended up writing that part in Java. Read on for all the gory details.

As part of building the suite of social applications for BEA Participate 2008, we're designing a social application framework in Ruby on Rails and integrating it with ALI 6.5. Not being a big fan of LDAP, I decided to put the users of the social application framework in the database (which is MySQL). Now, when we integrate with ALI, we need to sync this user repository (just as many enterprises do with Active Directory or LDAP). So I set out to build an IDS to pull in users, groups and memberships in Ruby on Rails.

It's pretty obvious that Ruby on Rails favors REST over SOAP for their web service support. However, they still support SOAP for interoperability and it mostly works. I did have to make one patch to Ruby's core XML processing libraries to get things humming along. I haven't submitted the patch back to Ruby yet, but at some point I will. Basically, the problem was that the parser didn't recognize the UTF-8 encoding if it was enclosed in quotes ("UTF-8"). This patch suggestion guided me in the right direction, but I ended up doing something a little different because the suggested patch didn't work.

I changed line 27 of lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/encoding.rb as follows:

 enc = enc.nil? ? nil : enc.upcase.gsub('"','') #that's a double quote inside single quotes

Now that Ruby's XML parser recognized UTF-8 as a valid format, it decided that it didn't support UTF-8! To work around this, I installed iconv, which is available for Windows and *nix and works seamlessly with Ruby. In fact, after installation, all the XML parsing issues went bye-bye.

Now, on to the IDS code. From your rails project, type:

ruby script/generate web_service Authenticate

This creates app/apis/authenticate_api.rb. In that file, place the following lines of code:

class AuthenticateApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
 api_method :Authenticate, :expects => [{:Username =>
:string}, {:Password =>
:string}, {:NameValuePairs =>
[:string]}], :returns =>
[:string]
end

All you're doing here is extending ActionWebService and declaring the input/output params for your web service. Now type the following command:

ruby script/generate controller Authenticate

This creates the controller, where, if you stick with direct dispatching (which I recommend), you'll be doing all the heavy lifting. (And there isn't much.) This file should contain the following:

class AuthenticateController < ApplicationController
 web_service_dispatching_mode :direct
 wsdl_service_name 'Authenticate'
 web_service_scaffold :invoke

 def Authenticate(username, password, nameValuePairs)
   if User.authenticate(username, password)
     return ""
   else
     raise "-102" #generic username/password failure code
   end
 end
end

Replace User.authenticate with whatever mechanism you're using to authenticate your users. (I'm using the login_generator gem.) That's all there is to it! Just point your AWS to http://localhost:3000/authenticate/api and you're off to the races.

Now, if you want to do some functional testing (independently of the portal), rails sets up a nice web service scaffold UI to let you invoke your web service and examine the result. Just visit http://localhost:3000/authenticate/invoke to see all of that tasty goodness.

There you have it -- a Ruby on Rails-based IDS for ALUI in fewer than 15 lines of code!

The synchronization side of the IDS was almost just as simple to write, but after countless hours of debugging, I gave up on it and re-wrote it in Java using the supported ALUI IDK. Although I never could quite put my finger on it, it seemed the problem had something to do with some subtleties about how BEA's XML parser was handing UTF-8 newlines. I'll post the code here just in case anyone has an interest in trying to get it to work. Caveat: this code is untested and currently it fails on the call to GetGroups because of the aforementioned problems.

In app/apis/synchronize_api.rb:

class SynchronizeApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
 api_method :Initialize, :expects =>
[{:NameValuePairs =>
[:string]}], :returns =>
[:integer]
 api_method :GetGroups, :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :GetUsers, :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :GetMembers, :expects =>
[{:GroupID => :string}], :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :Shutdown
end

In app/controllers/synchronize_controller.rb:

class SynchronizeController < ApplicationController
 web_service_dispatching_mode :direct
 wsdl_service_name 'Synchronize'
 web_service_scaffold :invoke

 def Initialize(nameValuePairs)
   session['initialized'] = true
   return 2
 end

 def GetGroups()
   if session['initialized']
     session['initialized'] = false
     groups = Group.find_all
    
     groupNames = Array.new
     for group in groups
       groupNames << "<SecureObject Name=\"#{group.name}\" AuthName=\"#{group.name}\" UniqueName=\"#{group.id}\"/>
" << "<SecureObject Name=\"#{user.login}\" AuthName=\"#{user.login}\" UniqueName=\"#{user.id}\"/>
"
     end
    
     return userNames
   else
     return nil
   end
 end

 def GetMembers(group_id)
   if session['initialized']
     session['initialized'] = false
     users = Membership.find_all_users_in_group(group_id)

     userNames = Array.new
     for user in users
       userNames << "<SecureObject Name=\"#{user.login}\" AuthName=\"#{user.login}\" UniqueName=\"#{user.id}\" GroupUniqueName=\"\"/>
"
     end

     return userNames
   else
     return nil
   end
 end

 def Shutdown()
   return nil
 end
end

Comments

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Nice post, Chris. This is the first time I've seen this done!
Posted by: dmeyer on January 20, 2008 at 4:16 PM

Thank you, David.

I just noticed that part of my sync code was chomped off in the blog post because WordPress was assuming that was actually an opening HTML/XML tag. I made the correction so the above code now accurately reflects what I was testing.

Posted by: bucchere on January 21, 2008 at 1:16 PM

One Portal to Rule Them All

2008-01-17T18:40:00.000-05:00

I won't rehash what's already been said by everyone in the press and the blogosphere -- Oracle is buying BEA. I wrote almost three years ago that this was inevitable, and now it's upon us. I'm hopeful that the BEA/Oracle management crew can take what they learned from the Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline (for BEA) and Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oblix (for Oracle) acquisitions and apply it to the challenges their own merger presents.

Over the past three years, Oracle has acquired dozens of companies. The most notable were probably PeopleSoft (which had just acquired JD Edwards, if I remember correctly), Siebel and Oblix, which gave them a great suite of HR apps, CRM apps and identity management, respectively. These were all enterprise software products that Oracle had, with a modicum of success, built on their own from the ground up, sold and supported as "Oracle Apps."

Of course, with almost every major company they've acquired, Oracle has picked up a portal product. (And with BEA, there's a special bonus -- they get two: WLP and ALI.) So that's going to create a portal soup consisting of at least the following ingredients:

Siebel Portal
JD Edwards Portal
PeopleSoft Portal
Oracle Portal (part of Oracle Fusion Middleware)
WLP
ALI

Now Oracle won't want to endanger existing customer relationships by terminating support for the non-horizontal portals from Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. Besides, the word "portal" really only loosely applies there, because those "portals" are really just web UIs into Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.

But what about the horizontal portals: Oracle, WLP and ALI? The are all playing in the same space. It's already questionable that we need all three in the market now. And three under the same circle-shaped roof that is Oracle? Absurd.

What will Oracle do with this portal quandary? Well, I think they'll do the only thing they can do and support all the products. So that covers legacy customers, but what about future customers? If I'm an Oracle sales rep and my customer wants to buy a portal to front their SOA stack, what on earth do I sell them?

In my opinion, which is just that -- my opinion -- post-merger, there need to be some decisive acts from Oracle regarding the future direction of their portal strategy. And, again, IMO, this is where the ALI portal and the ALUI suite of products (formerly Plumtree) can really shine. Why? Because not only can you front Java, .NET, Rails, PHP and any other web application stack with ALI, but ALI already has integration kits for Siebel, PeopleSoft, JSR-168, WSRP and five different flavors of SSO, including Oblix! (Not to mention the obvious fact that since day one, ALI has run beautifully on Windows and *nix systems using Oracle's bread-and-butter product, their database.) So naturally, if you're an Oracle shop running a clustered Oracle DB for storage, Siebel for CRM, PeopelSoft for HR, Oracle Financials for the books and Oblix Identity Management, no other product under the sun has more pre-packaged, no-brainer integration and integration options than ALI.

It may be a hard, bloody battle to get Oracle to drop it's own beloved portal product in favor of AquaLogic Interaction, but I think it's a battle that needs to be fought. Same goes for WLP. In fact, I think every product acquired by Oracle has to fight for it's life and fight to be the #1 product in the space, retiring the others to "maintenance and support" but focusing all futures on the product that is rightfully #1. And I think -- and hope -- that Oracle has the good sense and the wherewithal to encourage this. It may cause some near term pain, but taking a longer-term view it's the right thing to do.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Interesting post, Chris. Obviously this is something we ALUI consultants have been considering in the past few days. One monkeywrench I have for you: as far as I know, Oracle offers their portal product for free to existing customers, whereas we (obviously) charge for it. I wonder how that kind of business model might change the landscape of how the ALUI portal is distributed/used.
Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 7:02 AM

Funny you should mention the price issue. About two years ago, we had a customer switch from ALI to Oracle portal for that exact reason. Why pay for licenses and support for ALUI products when Oracle gives you the portal for free? That customer still calls on us for ALUI support, so apparently the migration hasn't gone exactly as planned.

Two old adages come to mind here:
1. You get what you pay for.
2. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Regarding #1, the products really don't cover the same feature set -- Oracle portal cannot be the gateway to SOA that we all know ALUI is, so it's really not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Regarding #2, with any free software, whether it's from a large company like Oracle or from the Apache Software Foundation, you always need to think about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If you need to build services integration points in Oracle Portal to talk to all of Oracle's other products, that adds to your TCO. Moreover, if somebody is giving something away, what sort of quality expectations do you have about the product? What happens if you need to request support from Oracle or ask them to develop a patch for you? All of a sudden, the fact that you didn't pay for the software comes back and bites you in the butt. :-)

Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 7:23 AM

I guess I agree with you, since I'm not an Oracle portal consultant (not yet, anyway); but I think the bigger question is how Oracle will assimilate these new portals given its current pricing strategy (aka - the bloody war you speak of). If I were an existing Oracle customer, the first question I'd ask is "how come I can get XYZ portal for free but not ABC portal". And if I'm Oracle product management, I'm thinking about how my current "free portal" strategy has been working out for me versus the ALUI model of charging for it.
Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 8:22 AM

You're right -- the big issue is how will Oracle deal with the portals they're acquiring and will there be a shakedown or more of a graceful assimilation.

There's a similar issue with WLS and Oracle's application server, although I think in that case the answer is a little less complicated. ;-)

Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 8:32 AM

Of course you completely forgot to mention Oracle WebCenter. In spite of your assertions, there are only 2 portal products at Oracle. Oracle Portal and WebCenter. WebCenter is the future "face" of Fusion Applications, so any integration of portal products will move in that direction. IMHO....plumtree is as proprietary as Oracle Portal, and its dead. WLP and the folks on the WebCenter team will need to figure out how to integrate the code bases of those two products since they are the most similar in their support of Web 2.0 futures.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on January 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM

Thanks for the correction about Oracle WebCenter -- I'm not too familiar with Oracle products other than the DB and I should have done more homework before posting this!

However, I still disagree that there are only two portals at Oracle. I'm not too sure about JDE, but I remember with 100% certainty that PeopleSoft and Siebel called their UIs "portals." They're not truly portals in a horizontal sense like Oracle Portal, WebCenter, WLP and ALUI and I don't think they're actually relevant to this discussion, so it's a moot point.

Now, given the four remaining portal products, I challenge your assertion that WebCenter and WLP "support Web 2.0 futures" and I'd like to see some examples that support that claim. As far as I know, the only products coming out of BEA that deserve the "Web 2.0" label are AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. (Note I don't include ALI itself as a Web 2.0 product, despite the fact that ALI 6.5 has some pretty slick social features that might someday earn it that distinction.)

I also take issue with your calling Plumtree/ALUI proprietary and I'm not sure what makes you make that claim. It's written in Java and ported to C#.net, so it runs "natively" on IIS (which no other products from BEA or Oracle can do). Its Java version (from the same source base), runs on WebSphere, WLS, Tomcat and probably JBoss and other app servers and it supports both Oracle and SQL Server, so in terms of how and where you can run it, it's probably the most open and flexible product in the entire 40+ product lineup that BEA boasts.

That's just one side of the proprietary vs. open argument. The other is how well one supports standards for plugging in functionality. In those terms, I think ALUI stands out from the pack as well. It supports portlets over two very well supported standards: HTTP and HTML, which again makes it the most flexible portlet development environment on the market. (You can develop ALI portlets using ANY web server that speaks HTTP and I've personally done so using Java, .NET, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails and even Domino if you can believe that.) It also supports JSR-168 and WSRP. (In reading about WebCenter, all portlet development documentation was Java-centric, so I'm not sure if they support any other kind of portlet development, e.g. .NET. It's crucial that any product which claims to be the "face of SOA" supports at least Java and .NET development and plugins; however, many would argue that you need to support much more -- e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.)

Leaving portlets out of the picture for a moment, consider the other ALUI integration points: AWS, PWS, CWS and SWS. All of them use SOAP, which is a documented open standard. In fact, in my next blog post (which went up last night), I talk about how I integrated a custom MySQL/Ruby on Rails user store with ALI using a Rails-based SOAP-driven web service to interface with ALI's user management system. It just doesn't get any more open than that. At last year's Participate conference, I demonstrated how you could use the ALI "face" to front WLS applications written to run on the WL message bus and communicating with data stores using DSP, proving that you integrate ALUI products with pretty much anything. I would like to see how a WebCenter consultant or a WLS guy would approach integrating Siebel or PeopleSoft, two products now in the Oracle family.

I may make many "assertions" (as you call them), but they're backed up by solid facts. I'm open to continuing this dialog because I want to hear more facts about 1) how you perceive ALUI as a proprietary technology and 2) how WLP and WebCenter claim to support "Web 2.0."

Posted by: bucchere on January 20, 2008 at 6:10 PM

Out of respect of SEC rules, I won't touch the Oracle topic. But as for WebLogic Portal (WLP)...
2) how WLP ... claim to support "Web 2.0."
There are a bunch of features that contribute to the overall Web 2.0 story for WLP. Look at the WLP Groupspace application, for example. Web 2.0 is about publishing social applications that get better the more people use them. Groupspace is such an app. It is first a packaged social app ready to go out of the box, but secondly shows off many of the WLP features in the area of "Web 2.0".
Groupspace doc link (community framework, RSS, Groupnotes (think wiki), discussion forums, shared document repository, calendar, contacts, etc, etc).
Also, read up on Josh Lannin's blog to see what will be out shortly in terms of WLP and REST, more Ajax, more Portlet Publishing (Google Gadgets, RoR, PHP, etc). Lannin's WLP futures
Cheers - PJL

Posted by: plaird on January 21, 2008 at 8:30 PM

More on BEA Participate 2008

2007-12-21T21:46:00.000-05:00

BEA executive Jay Simons just posted more details about Participate 2008 on the en.terpri.se blog and, needless to say, all of us here at bdg are very excited about the event.

Last year's event in Atlanta was a raging success. Over 1000 attendees came to hear BEA employees, customers and partners describe their experiences with AquaLogic User Interaction and AquaLogic BPM. For our part, we had the usual partner/sponsor booth, we gave away a Video iPod and hundreds of fun USB-powered laptop lights. We also presented a very well-received demo showing how to integrate ALI, ALSB and ALDSP.

In 2008 we're upping the ante. BEA has contracted the development team here at bdg to build a suite of social applications for AquaLogic Interaction (formerly known as the Plumtree Portal) that will allow conference attendees to network with one another on iPod Touches that BEA will be providing at the conference.

(BTW, our applications will run in a normal web browser just like every other ALI-powered application, but they'll also be optimized for the iPod Touch form factor.)

They'll be much more info to come on these great ALI-powered applications that we're building for Participate, so watch this space and my dev2dev blog as well. To give you a little taste, think Facebook tuned for the enterprise with the specific goal of conference social networking in mind. Rich user profiles; mini- and aggregate feeds; user, session and group walls; private messaging/poking; tagging and other popular Facebook-like functionality will all be included.

Imagine this: instead of raising your hand to ask a question, use your WiFi-enabled iPod Touch to post the question on the session's wall while the session is in progress. Then, at the end of the session, the presenter can pull up the session's wall on the projector and field the questions. Like the presenter? Ask him or her to be your contact or join one of your groups! Meet an influential C-level executive who's an expert in SOA governance and want to get to know him better? You can poke him or leave a message on his wall.

Leave your business cards at home -- instead use these great bdg built/ALI-powered applications!

This is revolutionary, game-changing stuff. And this is why we're excited about Participate 2008. We hope you are too.

Getting Social at BEA Participate 2008

2007-12-21T19:21:00.001-05:00

This week BEA launched the Participate 2008 blog and revealed more about their plans for what is shaping up to be a great event. Perhaps the most exciting news is that BEA will be using the conference to unveil a suite of social applications running on a soon-to-be-released version of ALI 6.5 and coded by the developers here at bdg.

Jay Simons writes, in this first post on the Participate blog:

Mobile, social experiment: conference attendees will be provided an iPod Touch (more on this later), and we're unveiling a suite of applications (built on the soon-to-be-released version of AquaLogic Interaction by partner BDG) that attendees will be able to interact with through the Touch. The applications will be inherently social, allowing you to engage one another directly at the event, in sessions, in hallways, you name it. Social networking, on a mobile device, powered by AquaLogic User Interaction. That's hot!

Hot is an understatement. Imagine the possibilities. . . .

Instead of raising your hand to ask a question, use your WiFi-enabled iPod Touch to post the question on the session's wall while the session is in progress. Then, at the end of the session, the presenter can pull up the session's wall on the projector and field the questions. Like the presenter? Ask him or her to be your contact or join one of your groups! Meet an influential C-level executive who's an expert in SOA governance and want to get to know him better? You can poke him or leave a message on his wall.

Leave your business cards at home -- instead use these great bdg built/ALI-powered applications!

They'll be much more info to come on this "social experiment," so watch this space in the upcoming weeks and months. To give you a little taste, think Facebook tuned for the enterprise with the specific goal of conference social networking in mind. Rich user profiles; mini- and aggregate feeds; user, session and group walls; private messaging/poking; tagging and other popular Facebook-like functionality will all be included.

This is revolutionary, game-changing stuff. And this is why we're excited about Participate 2008. We hope you are too.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Sounds like you could start a spinoff company just on this product! I bet it would be a fun (and useful) tool at ANY type of conference! Where can I find out more information about the "social applications running on a soon-to-be-released version of ALI 6.5". Any sneak peeks? Are these built upon the Pages/Ensemble/Pathways components or are they new standalone features? Will they be included with upgrades or have any additional cost? Any release date projected? Keep up the good work Chris - you guys inspire us all to want to do more!
Posted by: geoffgarcia on January 17, 2008 at 1:29 PM

Hi again Geoff! Thanks for your kind words. After a hard day of slaving away at code that doesn't work (yet) and then two hours of driving through ice and slush, there's nothing like coming home from work and finding nice comments on my blog. :-)

As for your questions, I don't want to speak out of turn because BEA at this point is probably limited in what they can (and want) to say about ALUI 6.5. But I will answer them as much as I can in a follow-up post, after I seek BEA's approval.

So, long story short, watch this space and there will be much more, including, at some point, screenshots. Of course, if you want to see the The Full Monty, you'll need to register for the conference.

Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:53 PM

Why I. . . .

2007-12-05T14:32:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago I teamed up with college buddy, recent Kellogg grad and former PayPal/eBay product manager Chris Gregory to design and write a fun little Facebook application called WhyI.

He did the design and product management, my wife Allison did the logo design and I wrote the code. After a few weeks of hacking in Ruby on Rails (using RFacebook) and many hours of Skyping between Chris and Chris, I'm very pleased to announce that we're done and the application is live on Facebook!

You can use the app to share five-word WhyI "taglines" about your passions on your profile. You can also ask other people to create taglines by asking them "Why do you?" questions.

If you have any questions or feedback on the application, please comment here or send a note to whyi@thebdgway.com.

meebo launches games!

2007-11-20T16:06:00.000-05:00

meebo, the multi-band, web-based instant messaging site, just rolled out a host of games that you can play with your IM buddies on any network: AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk or ICQ.

Their platform is open too, so, following in the footsteps of companies like Facebook, I expect to see developers flocking to the site to build applications targeting their million+ unique user per day audience.

meebo launched a handful of communication apps (including voice and video chat) a few weeks back when they first opened their API.

Of course feedhaus is also jumping on the embedded widget bandwagon, having released our widget for Facebook over a month ago. We're planning a meebo widget launch one week from today and and an Open Social launch in Q1 of 2008.

Update: Michael Arrington just added his take on the meebo games launch over on Tech Crunch.

Apple's Subtle F.U. to Microsoft

2007-11-02T13:32:00.000-04:00

We've come a long way since 1997, when Microsoft invested $150M in the beleaguered Apple, perhaps so that there would still be a platform on which to run Microsoft's Office for the Mac.

Fast-forward ten years to 2007 -- starting with the eye candy iMacs and then iPods in every shape, size and color, and now with the iPhone, Apple has risen from the ashes in perhaps what is the greatest corporate comeback of all time.

Now, with the release of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) last week, Apple has delivered a fine -- albeit subtle -- slap in the face to Microsoft. The icon for a PC server shows the PC displaying the infamous blue screen of death. As if the "I'm Mac/I'm PC" ads weren't enough. . . .

The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0

2007-10-27T06:45:00.001-04:00

The concepts behind Web 2.0, social networks, and collaboration are now poised to transform your enterprise, providing solutions such as collaborative mashups, expertise discovery and social search to enhance your existing portal.

According to Gartner, Web 2.0 will have a major impact on a broad range of traditional enterprises. Gartner states that "positive business model change will result in unexpected ways, and enterprises must prepare for this transition."

Register to attend this exciting seminar on Wednesday, November 14th, 6:00 pm and hear how BEA's three new products will "two-dot-oh" your company's Web along with other topics that include:

* How Web 2.0 can bring true value to your business
* How to differentiate between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
* How to implement new Web 2.0 concepts like blogging, wikis, tagging and social networking into your business and allow IT governance and control
* How to enhance your existing portal infrastructure

Attendance is limited, so please take a moment to register now. I look forward to meeting you at the event.

Date: Wednesday, November 14th
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Location: Marriott Tyson's Corner

8028 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA, 22182
(703) 734-3200

Directions

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

I'm sorry I missed this! If you have a notification list for events like these please include me, I'd love to hear about future events you guys sponsor. ggarcia@marchofdimes.com Thanks!
Posted by: geoffgarcia on January 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM

Hi Geoff! The event was down here in Tyson's Corner, VA, so we focused on local attendees. I'll make sure to include you next time, even though if my memory serves me correctly, you're up in NY.
Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:47 PM

Oh, I almost forgot. If I can find the time, I'll put together a video podcast of the event. I have the footage; I just haven't had the time to do the editing. :-(
Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:48 PM

The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0

2007-10-26T14:27:00.001-04:00

Please join us for an exclusive seminar:

The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0

Register Now!

The concepts behind Web 2.0, social networks, and collaboration are now poised to transform your enterprise, providing solutions such as collaborative mashups, expertise discovery and social search to enhance your existing portal.

According to Gartner, Web 2.0 will have a major impact on a broad range of traditional enterprises. Gartner states that "positive business model change will result in unexpected ways, and enterprises must prepare for this transition."

Register to attend this exciting seminar on Wednesday, November 14th, 6:00 pm and hear how BEA's three new products will "two-dot-oh" your company's Web along with other topics that include:

How Web 2.0 can bring true value to your business
How to differentiate between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
How to implement new Web 2.0 concepts like blogging, wikis, tagging and social networking into your business and allow IT governance and control
How to enhance your existing portal infrastructure

Enjoy free hors d'oeuvres and an open bar along with presentations that define Web 2.0 and show how BEA's new social computing products Pages, Ensemble and Pathways can deliver true business value from Web 2.0 and bdg's newest products that bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and the enterprise.

Attendance is limited, so please take a moment to register now. I look forward to meeting you at the event.

Date: Wednesday, November 14th
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Location: Marriott Tyson's Corner

8028 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA, 22182
(703) 734-3200

Directions

Register Now!

BEA Participate 2008 Announced

2007-10-24T13:25:00.001-04:00

From an e-mail I just received:

Mark your calendar today to attend a gathering of BEA customers, partners and product experts in Chicago, Illinois from May 12-15th, 2008.

BEAParticipate 2008, is a 2 ½ day event for our user community of innovators, to share experiences and best practices around the adoption of business process management, collaboration, portal and social computing technologies. The event focuses on the technologies and deployment methodologies for:

This coming year will feature more networking opportunities than ever --from industry roundtables, lunches, and evening receptions, to a partner and solution pavilion and product focus groups. This is a sure-fire opportunity to form lasting connections with your peers, and gain valuable insights from shared experiences in a hands-on, energetic setting.

Whether you are just starting out or have a long docket of active projects, this is the best forum to meet with BEA executives, engineering and product leaders, pick up useful tidbits from other innovative customers, and acquire new strategies for optimizing your business, improving knowledge worker productivity and increasing IT efficiency.

Don't miss this interactive and social event! If you are interested in participating, have suggestions for topics, or have any questions, please send an e-mail to Participate.

Save the Date:
BEAParticipate 2008
May 12-15, 2008
Hyatt Regency
151 East Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60601

To learn more about the Hyatt Regency in the heart of Chicago, click here.

Stay tuned for registration information, agenda and pricing details in the coming weeks.

Podcast interview with venture capitalist Kevin Dewalt

2007-10-13T23:41:00.000-04:00

The bdg podcast returns to interview Kevin Dewalt, entrepreneur, technologist and venture capitalist. Kevin's background includes starting Soapbox for The Motley Fool in the late 90s, working for NASD and now working for a strategic VC firm that focuses on advising and investing in technologies that interest the federal government.

We gossip about gadgets, including Kevin's geeked-out mobile phone (the MDA), my equally geeky smartphone (the Treo 750). (Although neither of us admitted it, I think the both of us really wish we had iPhones.) Well, at least I can stream XM radio on my Treo, which means it holds up against the Q.

I immediately start talking about my favorite topic, feedhaus, and about how we were profiled by KillerStartups.com. More on this later. . . .

To kick off a fascinating discussion on life extension and anti-aging, I brought up an article from Kevin's blog on Anna Nicole Smith trumping news about a possible cure for cancer. Kevin goes on to mention famous life-extension expert and author Aubrey de Gray and actuarial escape velocity along with the The Methuselah Foundation.

I suggest that Kevin add some of his favorite life extension news sites and blogs into feedhaus, and so he does, but not before a few jokes about NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" and more about pimping my Treo. Kevin eventually adds a "Fight Aging" feed and tags it.

We walk through a bunch of feedhaus's features and in the process, I talk a bit about what I've been working on lately: switching from Lucene to Sphinx for faster and less resource-intensive search. Finally, we chat about feedhaus's facebook integration and the hilarious story from Valleywag about Googler Marissa Mayer.

All in all, this is a great interview -- give it a listen and feel free to post your feedback here or send a comment to podcast@thebdgway.com.

Oracle and BEA: Wait, Not So Fast

2007-10-13T21:31:00.000-04:00

BEA thinks they're worth more than the $6.7B offered by Oracle. I guess the ball is back in Oracle's court, now. This could get interesting.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Is this really an important posting? I fail to see the value in cluttering the blog with this.
Posted by: ddrucker on October 13, 2007 at 10:27 PM

Well, since it's my blog, I get to decide what's important enough to post and what's not. But as a reader, you get to decide what you read and what you don't.
Posted by: bucchere on October 14, 2007 at 7:57 AM

Nice response Chris. I always enjoy reading your blog entries. Keep on blogging. We are heavily invested in BEA products and are following the Oracle bid closely. Ryan from Chase Paymentech.
Posted by: ryanyoder on October 16, 2007 at 1:58 PM

Thanks for your support, Ryan. There are times when a 2000-word technical manifesto is appropriate and other times where a link and three sentences says it all. I guess that's the beauty of blogging.
Posted by: bucchere on October 18, 2007 at 2:10 PM

Why we need "Enterprise Facebook"

2007-10-12T20:21:00.000-04:00

Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and an outspoken advocate of Enterprise 2.0, wrote this great blog post about why there's real value in "Enterprise Facebook." Now the question is, simply put, who's going to build Facebook-like software with all the auditing, security, performance and stability demanded by the enterprise?

Predictions: Will Oracle Acquire BEA?

2007-10-12T08:35:00.002-04:00

There's been a lot of speculation in response to some press releases from Oracle that a all-cash buyout of BEA may be immanent. More than two years ago, I made an entry on my company's blog that said, effectively, that by acquiring Plumtree, BEA painted a target on itself to be acquired by Oracle. Here's the snippet from my other blog dated August 28, 2005:

Will this deal make BEA even more of an acquisition target for Oracle?

Everyone I know -- myself included -- had a feeling that Plumtree would be acquired some day. But the major questions were 1) when and 2) by whom? Quite some time ago and long before Plumtree had its Java strategy fleshed out, there were rumors of a Microsoft takeover. Then Siebel. Then Peoplesoft. But BEA? I never would have guessed.

I personally thought Oracle would be the suitor, especially after they acquired Oblix, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards. After extending its tentacles into almost every enterprise software market (and proving tremendously incapable of producing any decent software applications other than a database), Oracle snapped up ERP, HR and SSO/Identity Management in the blink of an eye. It seemed reasonable to me that a good portal product that could integrate with all those applications would be a clear next target. Oracle's portal certainly doesn't cut the mustard. In fact, they often offer it up for free only to be beaten out by Plumtree, which is, ahem, a far cry from free.

Now the next pressing question: is Oracle even more likely to acquire Plumtree now that they're a part of BEA? Now they'd get an excellent application server and a cross-platform, industry-leading portal. You know it crossed Larry Ellison's mind when he heard the news. Food for thought.

I also said that BEA would keep the name Plumtree and lo-and-behold, they changed it to AquaLogic. So I wasn't 100% right, but at least I can say that I called this one.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Someone just walked into my office and said, "Hey, since BEA already has a dual portal strategy (ALI and WLP), what will happen if they get acquired by Oracle, which already has their own portal product?"

Two years ago, I predicted a merging of WLP and ALI, with the result being much like ALI with the great developer tools you get from WLP and workshop tacked on to it. Obviously that's not exactly how things played out.

So my prediction this time is that all three portals will "seamlessly" co-exist under one roof, giving consumers plenty of ways to portalize all under the Oracle name. We'll call it the Portal Trifecta -- w00t!

Posted by: bucchere on October 12, 2007 at 10:40 AM

Oracle is going to support SqlServer 2000 & 2005 for Aqualogic? And support .NET? Interesting if they would sell the Aqualogic piece of to to Microsoft. Give MOS a better external portal....?
Posted by: vivekvp on October 12, 2007 at 11:37 AM

Great question, Vivek. I was surprised to see BEA pledge support for ALUI on .NET and SQL Server. I'll be even more surprised to see that happen over at Oracle. Remember though, Oracle runs on Windows!
Posted by: bucchere on October 12, 2007 at 12:08 PM

Chris, don't you mean 4 portal products; ALUI, WLP, Oracle Portal, and WebCenter? The merger makes a lot of sense from my view point, but in all seriousness the one area which will need a lot of help is Portal. IBM has only one WebSphere Portal code base.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on October 16, 2007 at 9:33 PM

It's hard to image that a company maintains three or four full-featured portal products, even a giant like IBM, Oracle or MS.
Posted by: caiwenliang on October 17, 2007 at 5:16 AM

Four portals? Yikes! I just don't want confused consumers to go off and buy Sharepoint or WebSphere portal when I think ALUI and WLP are superior products.
Posted by: bucchere on October 18, 2007 at 2:11 PM

Feedhaus Launches Public Alpha to Deliver Real-time Personalized News, Images and Video

2007-10-09T22:46:00.000-04:00

I'm including a copy of our first Feehaus Press Release (in case you haven't already seen it):

Feedhaus announced today that it has released its social news site into public alpha to deliver real-time news, images and videos that are personally relevant.

Leveraging the power of news feeds and the flexibility of user-generated tags, Feedhaus offers a unique, real-time view of today's hottest digital media including personalized online news items, images and videos. It gives people the ability to tag and follow their favorite RSS or ATOM feeds from news sites or blogs in real-time so that they can be the first to know about breaking news.

Feedhaus is a powerful new real-time social media website that aggregates content from thousands of user-submitted feeds and tags, offering a never-before-seen mashup of social feed aggregation, user-generated tagging, social networking and rich personalization. Following an extensive private alpha, Feedhaus is now available to the general public, providing for the first time a place to filter out and discover "what's hot now" across thousands of content sources and topics of general or personal interest.

"Until now, I couldn't find a good way to keep up with the wealth of news, blogs and other content sources on the internet," said Chris Bucchere, founder, President and CEO at Feedhaus. "Feedhaus gives you the power to tag feed-based content and design your own 'My Feedhaus' pages that deliver specific, personalized news, images and videos to you exactly the way you want them, in real-time."

Invented and developed by a team of enterprise software veterans with deep internet and intranet portal experience, Feedhaus is led by CEO, President and founder Chris Bucchere, formerly Lead Engineer at Plumtree Software, the market-leading enterprise portal software company that was acquired by BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) in 2005.

Privately held and personally funded, Feedhaus was built by a small team of developers in a matter of months using open source Java technologies such as Rome, Lucene and Apache Tomcat along with advanced Javascript libraries to enable real-time publishing of news, images and video via an Ajax-like technology called Comet.

"Ajax has its place in the industry and we use it throughout the site," says Feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. "However, Comet allows developers to provide real-time updates to tags and detail pages without any user intervention, providing a whole new twist to our Rich Internet Application (RIA)."

This real-time updating technology, which Feedhaus has dubbed "ActiveCloud (TM)," shows tags pulsating and growing in size when they're active and shaking and shrinking when activity slows down, giving readers perspective on what topics are currently newsworthy along with a "top story" news ticker to show current breaking news updates. Feedhaus also captures a daily news snapshot, allowing readers to drag a slider bar backwards in time and find out what made the news yesterday, last week, last month or beyond.

Feedhaus also provides a rich set of tools to allow you to click and drag tags to create your own personalized feed-driven news site. Known as "My Feedhaus," this part of the site gives readers the ability to target and follow only the topics in which they are interested.

Feedhaus already offers integration with the popular social networking site Facebook, allowing Feedhaus readers who are also Facebook users to share tag clouds on their Facebook profiles. More social networking features, including the ability to track view and track other people's public ActiveCloud (TM) tag clouds, are being planned for an upcoming release.

About Feedhaus

Feedhaus is a privately-held company dedicated to providing real-time, personalized content from a wide variety of feeds, tagged and filtered down to only "what's hot now" for a set of personalized topics. Feedhaus users engage in an intuitive experience of submitting and tagging feeds and narrowing their interests to only those topics that reflect their passions. Be the first to know at http://www.feedhaus.com or send an email to info@feedhaus.com for more information.

Feedhaus is a trademark of bdg, llc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective holders.

Podcast: Interview with feedhaus Developer Andrew Bays

2007-09-13T09:39:00.000-04:00

The podcast returns (after another six month hiatus) with an interview of feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. If you're interested in the inner workings of feedhaus or in finding out what's coming soon, I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

Here are some notes from the show, which include links to most of the topics we covered. Andrew started by describing his background. He began his programming career as a volunteer developer on the Tsunami Virtual World MUD. (I commented that I was really into a MUD back in the day, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Adventure Game.)

We started talking a bit about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and how this had led bdg to conceive and develop a social news site called feedhaus. He described some nuts and bolts stuff, including how he leveraged Dojo and Comet to build the real-time features in feedhaus. (As an aside, Andrew mentioned how one of our west coast developers, Brendan Budine, ran into Alex Russell at BEA World. Alex was really excited to hear about our use of Comet in feedhaus!)

We talked about other companies who use Comet (or Comet-like functionality involving long-polling or continuations) and meebo came up in the discussion. We continued by going into a discussion about some of the myriad other technologies that make feedhaus possible. Here's a partial list:

We closed the conversation by talking about tag clouds and the feedhaus implementation of the history slider, which was inspired by the Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. This reminded me of another tangentially-related project, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Enjoy the show and post your comments here or send an e-mail to podcast@thebdgway.com.

Feedhaus Launches Private Alpha

2007-08-30T00:56:00.000-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that bdg's social news site and first consumer play, Feedhaus, has entered a private alpha.

Powered by RSS/ATOM feeds, Feedhaus is a community-based, tag-driven social news aggregator that aims to change the way people consume news on the internet.

If you'd like to get invited to the private beta, drop us a line.

Upcoming AquaLogic Training Classes in DC

2007-08-21T19:31:00.000-04:00

bdg is hosting an AquaLogic (Plumtree) Training Class in Washington, DC the week of September 24th.

We'll be sticking with the format we used last time:

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: ALI Administration
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: ALI Portlet Development

Wednesday will be a "double up" day when we do advanced administration for admins and introductory administration for developers.

Training will run 9AM-5PM each day with a break for lunch. The location will be as follows:

Nextec Corporate Headquarters

465 Herndon Parkway, Suite 200

Herndon, VA 20170

Please contact us at training@thebdgway.com to sign up!

ALI Administration (Mon, Tues, Wed)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of all the most commonly used aspects of AquaLogic Interaction (ALI). Students will learn how to install, configure and administer the ALI 6x portal. It is also for the person wanting to understand how to conduct an ALI implementation project. In three days you will implement a portal that can be used as a departmental solution. All aspects of ALI are reviewed including MyPages, Automation Servers, Search, Web Services, Portlets, Communities, Experience Definitions, the Knowledge Directory, and best practices to keep the portal up and running smoothly.

Course Modules

ALI Architecture
Basic Troubleshooting of the ALI Environment
Configuring the Automation Server and Jobs
Performing Routine Portal Maintenance
Creating an Administrative Hierarchy
Configuring Portal Access and Permissions
Implementing Advanced Object Security
Community Fundamentals
Creating a Community
Advanced Community Topics
Building Subportals
Configuring ALI Web Services
Importing Users and Groups
Extending the User Profile
Adding Content to the Portal
Maintaining the Knowledge Directory

Exercises

ALI Enterprise Planning Role Play
Using PTSPY and the Migration Utility
Using the Admin Hierarchy
Creating a Community
Creating a Subportal
Registering an Authentication Source
Registering a Profile Web Service
Managing the Knowledge Directory

After the training, the student should be able to:

Register Automation Servers
Create, run and troubleshoot Jobs
Perform routine Portal maintenance
Use PTSPY and the new Migration Wizard
Create Users and Groups in the Portal Set up Activity Rights for users
Manage permissions using Access Control Lists
Create Communities
Create Projects in Collaboration Server
Create Experience Definitions and understand their use
Configure Web Services
Configure an AD Authentication Web Service
Configure a User Profile Web Service
Understand all of the content management objects in the Portal
Create a Crawler to allow access to external content through the Portal
Maintain Portal content and its search index
Implement Portal best practices

ALI Portlet Development

This course is an all-inclusive portlet development course that will coverbasic through advanced ALI Portlet development concepts. Although there is a small lecture component, the course is primarily exercise-based. Students who meet the prerequisites and who successfully complete all of the exercises will leave the course ready to design and write enterprise class ALI Portlets.

Prerequisites:

Basic understanding of the Plumtree Portal, MPPE & Portlets; proficiency in Java or C#; proficiency in web programming.

Course Modules/Exercises

Introduction to ALI, the MPPE, Portlets & C#/.NET or Java
Demonstration of ALI Portal and Integration Products
Install a Java IDE and come up with an idea for a new Portlet
Design an ALI Portlet and create a associated objects; add to MyPage and Community
HTTPGP/MPPE & the Gateway
Yahoo! Search Portlet: Design a portlet that allows the user to issue a search in Yahoo!
TCP Tracing: Use a free utility to trace TCP activity on port 80 (HTTP); observe CSP in action
Interaction Development Kits
Gateway Specific Configuration
Design an ALI Portlet that uses a Gateway Setting
Introduction to Settings
Change Font Color: Use a Portlet Setting to allow the user to personalize the Portlet with a font color
My Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that displays an end-user customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
Settings Review
Community Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that allows the community manager to set a customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
Introduction to Portlet Frameworks and Database-driven Portlet Design
Database Schema: Design database schema for a Data
Entry and Browse Framework Portlet
Administrative Settings Review
Administrative Settings: Design the Administrative Preferences page for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
Data View/Entry Form: Design Data View/Entry Form for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
Record Browsing: Design Record Browsing for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
Portlet Caching, Performance and Scale-ability
Caching: Add ETAG/IF-NONE-MATCH caching to Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
Enhance Record Browsing with Pagination, Sorting and Filtering
Internationalization/Localization
Create a Localized Portlet

meebo Sells Out

2007-08-20T11:05:00.000-04:00

It has been a long time coming, but meebo has finally succumbed to the pressures of a basic business truth that they've been dutifully ignoring: in order to stay in business, you actually have to make money.

Since their initial $3.5M financing round in December, 2005, they've been very good at two things: spending money and generating buzz around their service offering: free, browser-based multi-band instant messaging that supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk, Jabber and ICQ. New features, including "meebo rooms" and iPhone integration, have also generated a fair amount of hype. But back to dollars and cents . . . .

Their primary investor is Sequoia Capital, which has a great track record that includes companies like Cisco, Yahoo!, Paypall (and Plumtree). From their point of view, investing in meebo in order to flip it to a larger company doesn't seem viable because if any of the big players (Google, AOL, Yahoo! or Microsoft) bought meebo, they would most certainly shut down the other channels, which is one of meebo's most compelling features. So, how does Sequoia intend to monetize meebo?

The team has been fairly tight-lipped about their plans, although co-founder Seth Sternberg has dropped a few hints on their blog including selling ad space, partnering with other providers to provide fee-based SMS or other services, and (my personal favorite) selling virtual goods to "spice up" your IM avatar.

San Jose Mercury News quotes Seth as saying: "There are tons of ways we can make money, but we have to choose our priorities carefully."

When you take the venture capital route, however, choosing the company's priorities involves more than just the management team. Whether it was investor pressure or just common sense, we'll never know, but yesterday meebo finally started devoting some of their copious dead space to advertising. They're calling the new feature "meebo sponsors" which is a euphemism for, ehem, "meebo advertisements."

I have to give the team some credit because the introduction of ads on meebo was tastefully done -- the ad is small, out-of-the-way and you can disable it with a single mouse click. However, if you click on the "try the Talib background" link, the results are quite shocking. Moreover, there's no easy way to stop "trying" the Talib background. You have to navigate into your preferences and reset the background to whatever you had before. (A little "Are you sure?" could have gone a long way here.)

meebo also plans to use the "holy grail" of advertising -- targeting -- to make sure these sponsor messages hit home. From the meebo blog: "We've already got a bunch of ideas to make [the ads] better, including preferences for the types of things you're interested in. We're hoping to figure out how to be selective, so if you indicate that you like movies, but not rap music, future sponsors will reflect that for you."

It's just a matter of time before meebo will be combing through your IM conversations looking for keywords like "BMW" or "Rolex" and using those data points to drive targeted ad campaigns.

Succumbing to financial pressure to allow advertising on your site is a slippery slope. I'm curious to see where this leads and if meebo can continue to provide ads -- and their free service -- without the ads becoming too obtrusive, which will cause their user community to resent them. While I commend them for finally taking a step toward financial responsibility, I worry that it won't be long before the ads on meebo become burdensome enough that the users no longer want to use the service, e.g. AOL pre-welcome screen pop-ups of the late 90s. I'm definitely interested to see how this plays out.

bdg Becomes a BEA VAR

2007-08-03T00:04:00.000-04:00

All of us at bdg are very pleased to announce that we've converted our BEA partner relationship from a "Select Services Partner" to a "Value Added Reseller." We're now authorized to sell any and all of BEA's 40+ products. Now bdg can be your one stop shop for BEA products, top-notch professional services and add-on products such as Project Excelerator. Contact us today at sales@thebdgway.com and find out what we can do for you!

bdg Announces Plans to Launch Social News Site

2007-07-17T17:10:00.000-04:00

Today bdg announced plans to launch a Web 2.0 social news site in Q3 of this calendar year (2007).

This site, which will be called Feedhaus, will combine the power of RSS with the utility of end-user tagging to create an ever-growing and changing folksonomy of news that will keep everyone in the know about "what's hot now."

To read more about bdg's first foray into the consumer web, visit the Feedhaus blog or sign up for the site's private beta at www.feedhaus.com.

BEA Releases Web 2.0 Products

2007-07-10T16:09:00.000-04:00

BEA has released version 1.0 of Pages, Ensemble and Pathways (formerly known as projects Builder, Runner and Graffiti)!

This marks BEA's first foray into Enterprise 2.0. Watch this space for more information about and reviews of these exciting new products!

Chris Bucchere Quoted in BEA Research Brief

2007-06-07T16:52:00.000-04:00

Off The Record Research, a subscription-based Wall Street publication, recently prepared a research brief on BEA that was released to their customers on May 9th. Although I can't post the entire article here (as it's for paying customers only), I will say that I was quoted twice in the research brief. Here's what I said:

"[BEA's] AquaLogic is different from a lot of the products in this space. IBM [Corp.], Microsoft [Corp.] and SAP [AG] require you to buy the whole suite. BEA with AquaLogic is more agnostic. [The other vendors' products] break down [in a heterogeneous environment]."

Later in the article, I mentioned BID's new development efforts, to which those in the know are know calling PEP (for Pages, Ensemble and Pathways):

"[BEA AquaLogic's] Ensemble, Pages and Pathways are going to change the world. BEA is doing it again with Web 2.0, with community-centric software. We need to do this for the enterprise. They are cracking open a whole new market."

bdg gives away a Video iPod

2007-05-23T21:54:00.001-04:00

Here I am on the last day of BEA Participate awarding a Video iPod to Niren Patel, who accepted the winning iPod on behalf of his coworker Karl Cepull. Congratulations!

Chris Bucchere Interviewed by the Sloan (MIT) School of Management

2007-05-13T19:55:00.000-04:00

Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by former Plumtreevian and soon-to-be-graduate of MIT's Sloan School of Management, John Osborne. Following the interview, he submitted this great write-up, which I have posted below. Enjoy!

Background

Chris Bucchere grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied computer science at Stanford University. After graduating from college, he spent five years working for Plumtree Software as a developer and implementation consultant focusing on integration and customization projects at customer sites. In 2002, he founded Bucchere Development Group (BDG), an independent consulting organization focused on helping Plumtree customers with implementation, integration, and training. BDG operates out of the DC Metro Area and San Francisco. This past week, I talked with Chris about how he identified his market and got his company running.

How did you identify the market? And get your first customer?

Chris commented that he didn’t put forth a lot of thought toward identifying the market. He had just quit his job and was moving to Washington, DC. He started calling all customer contacts he had worked with while at Plumtree. Since Plumtree had more consulting work than it could manage, a number of customers asked Chris to fill in the gaps. Chris signed on to do a six month engagement at Merck in the UK.

How did you fund BDG?
Chris leveraged the money he earned consulting for Merck to get BDG officially up and running. He structured the firm as an LLC, hired an operations manager and another consultant. Since that time, BDG has generally been able to fund itself through revenue. In times of greater financing need, Chris has turned to credit cards which—when exploited properly—can offer a low 1% interest rate.

Chris also noted that customer funding is emerging as an interesting source of capital. At the moment, one of his customers is providing the funding for a custom add-on. The customer wants the add-on themselves, but also wants BDG to be able to resell the product to other customers.

What do you do to ensure continued growth?

One of Chris’ major growth opportunities came serendipitously when BEA Systems acquired Plumtree Software. Chris quickly ramped-up on the BEA suite and became a consulting partner. Being a BEA partner opened up more potential customers and projects. Now BDG is a value-added reseller for BEA, a position that provides BDG a new channel for income. At the moment, BDG employs seven full-time staff to meet it customer obligations.

How do you drive new business?

BDG has released a number of small products as open source. This strategy has help generate new consulting engagements and get the firm name out. BDG is also considering developing more closed source add-ons which it can sell to existing customers.

What were the biggest challenges, and what would you do differently now?

Chris identified staffing as his single biggest challenge. He commented, “For me, staffing is harder than selling new business.” Chris struggled to find seasoned consultants. He therefore turned to college campuses. BDG recruits new college graduates and then runs them through its own six month training program, leveraging the same training materials it sells to customers.

Generally, what characteristics make entrepreneurs different?

Chris echoed the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship. In short, folks who want to start new enterprises need to be self-confident and passionate about their work. And, above all, they need to be willing to take risks.

Live from BEA Participate: Mark Carges Keynote

2007-05-07T07:02:00.000-04:00

I already held Mark Carges in very high esteem -- but my respect for him grew immensely this morning when I found out that he wrote the source for Tuxedo some 23 years ago while he was a student at NYU! Very cool . . . .

Mark opened by talking about the reasons that BEA is hosting this conference. Mostly it was a response to the lukewarm feedback about BEA World from ex-Plumtree and ex-Fuego customers who wanted "something more." (You can read some of this feedback on an earlier post on my blog.)

The focus of Participate is three-fold: Portals, BPM and "Social Computing." Clearly that maps to ALUI, ALBPM and PEP (Pages, Ensemble and Pathways), the new AquaLogic product initiatives.

Before getting into the meat of his talk, Mark gave some background on BEA's overall corporate strategy. Their vision entails facilitating the migration from "traditional" applications to "situational" applications. This message is nothing new, but for the benefit of those who are new to the message, I summarized the difference between these two types of application development below:

traditional vs. situational
permanence vs. constant change
silos vs. dynamic, connected solutions
tightly coupled vs. loosely coupled
application function vs. business process
no collaboration vs. built for collaboration
homogeneous vertical integration vs. heterogeneous horizontal integration

Mark then went into a short aside about the way long-tail or "rogue" applications have sprung up throughout the enterprise, facilitated by applications like Lotus Notes, Excel and E-mail/IM. My ears perked up a bit because bdg has identified that e-mail distribution of Excel spreadsheets (and other office documents) is one "business process" that prevails in the enterprise and the one thing upon which we could improve drastically with the right web-based, ECM-driven collaborative tool. Project Excelerator, which is something under active development at bdg, attempts to address this problem in a novel way. You'll be hearing much more about this product as we get closer to a ship date.

More on Mark's description of the overall strategy of BEA: he commented that BEA's focus on business innovation, business and IT agility and technology optimization brings a strong competitive advantage to all of their customers. He gave four examples of this:

AflacAnywhere (highlighting their mobile portal and podcasts)
Goldsmith Williams Solicitors
USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure
The Babcock & Wilcox Company (highlighting ordering parts, project management and using BPM to support the sales process)

At this point, Mark shifted gears and started a segment called "Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise." He highlighted the gap between what you can do at home (consumer web) vs. the enterprise. He then gave several examples of consumer web sites that have compelling use cases for the enterprise. Those examples included digg.com, del.icio.us, Redfin and wikipedia. I'm sure most of you already know what those sites do, so I'll skip right to the part about how, at least thematically, they could be applied to the enterprise.

The culture of collaboration and participation started by digg could be used to rank the best sales tools or the best content and the rest of the enterprise community could benefit from this ranking. del.icio.us highlights the power in implicit connections and makes research about different topics much easier, including finding content and people. At work, you could use a del.icio.us-like tool to view content by group/experts, create organic groups of business organizations and leverage the wisdom of the crowd. The concepts implemented by Redfin, a slick real-estate mashup started by Plumtree founder Glenn Kelman, could be used to show a single view of the customer (where info is stored in different systems) including purchased products, support incidents, account team, etc. Lastly, the "long-tail" economics proven to work beautifully in the world of encyclopedias (with Wikipedia) could be used to track the competition, collectively write about competitors and share competitive knowledge, add RSS feeds, add anecdotes and edit everything collaboratively.

Mark closed his keynote with a brief introduction to BEA's three new products: Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. You'll be hearing much more about these great initiatives as the conference continues, so stay tuned!

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Not to jump ahead, but here is a good site to get an introduction to Pages, Ensemble and Pathways (PEP for short). The site was recently updated to have online demos of Pages and Ensemble.

http://en.terpri.se/

Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:16 PM

BEA Idol: who is the biggest rock star in the Participate speaker lineup?
Alex Toussaint: BEA's most traveled Product Manager? He is a famous alumnus of WLP, which makes him a popular choice in Boulder Colorado.
David Phipps: a long time ALUI engineer, at an ALUI technical conference. Could be a winner....
Or...Mariano Benitez: newest member of the BEA family of the three. A born speaker if there ever was one. I hear he likes to sing during his presentations.

Answer? Count the number of sessions given by each here: Participate Session List

Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:36 PM

But it is an honor to receive this award!! But I don't know if the user community would really embrace my singing career!! Next year I will do the opening song!
Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 8:21 PM

We value your articles here on arch2arch/dev2dev too Mariano!
Posted by: jonmountjoy on May 7, 2007 at 8:50 PM

Mariano - opening song? What, like Gloria Estevan or something like that? Is that popular in Argentina? OK, Steve Ballmer made it work:

Video: STEVE BALLMER is a yelling freak

Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 9:10 PM

hey, I am in better shape than Steve!! Anyway,I would only sing if I get the opening act at BEA World with these other guys! WHAT ABOUT THIS OPENING FOR THE NEXT BEA PARTICIPATE?? I think they are pretty liquid thinkers :)
Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 9:53 PM

BEA Participate Rapidly Approaching

2007-04-22T22:57:00.000-04:00

All of us at bdg are starting to get excited about BEA Participate! As you already know, we're sponsoring this year's ALUI and ALBPM event and I'm giving a demo of some slick integration between ALUI (ALI and ALI Collaboration), ALDSP and ALSB that illustrates how AquaLogic can be used to implement an SOA.

We'll also be giving away some cool -- yet practical -- gizmos that will be sure to brighten your day. Literally.

Be sure to come by the bdg booth, pick up a free gift, and enter to win this year's grand prize -- a 30 Gb Video iPod, in bdg black (of course).

Whether it's at my talk/demo, at the bdg booth or anywhere else, we look forward to seeing you at the conference.

ALUI (Plumtree) Training Postponed

2007-04-08T21:35:00.000-04:00

We had some conflicts, so we postponed the Herndon, VA-based training to next week. It's now 4/16-4/18 for administrators and 4/18-4/20 for developers. We'll be accepting registrations until 4/13, so if you're interested, please send a note to training@thebdgway.com.

Firebug in IE -- No Joke!

2007-04-06T15:37:00.001-04:00

I realize it's close to April Fools' Day, but this is not a joke: you can actually use Firebug in IE. Well, sort of. Joe Hewitt, the author of every developer's favorite Firefox extension, has created a Javascript file that you can drop into your web pages and, voila, you get the debug console. And it works in IE. I realize this isn't quite as good as the full blown Firebug, but it's sure a lot better than the alternative -- <script>alert('this sucks')</script>.

Bringing Web 2.0 to the en.terpri.se

2007-03-31T20:18:00.000-04:00

First, let me establish one thing: I don't work for BEA. Since leaving Plumtree more than four years ago, neither Plumtree nor BEA has paid me a dime. They don't pay me to write in this blog. They're not paying me to speak at BEA Participate in May. Although we have a subcontract agreement in place, we have never actually subcontracted through Plumtree nor through BEA. You get the point: what I write here (or anywhere, for that matter) is not endorsed or sanctioned in any way by BEA. The beauty of that is that I can be BEA's sharpest critic or their most outspoken advocate.

Today, I come to you, dear readers, as the latter. I am here to tell you that I think the latest marketing positioning to come from BID -- in the most apropos form of a "rogue" web site called en.terpri.se -- is perhaps the finest writing I have yet to read on the topic of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise.

This concept -- which many of you already know as "Enterprise 2.0" -- is not a new one. But just as consumer portals were not new in 1997, they were at that time very new to the enterprise. And today blogs, wikis, tagging and other social software have already infiltrated the consumer internet. But, as we have been saying since early this year and as others have been saying for a while now, these concepts are only being embraced by the early adopters in corporate/enterprise computing.

But with projects Builder (Holland), Runner and Graffiti (now known as Pages, Ensemble and Pathways, respectively) nearing general availability, all of that is about to change. If you want to find out exactly how, I encourage you to read and digest all of en.terpri.se and its more traditionally-branded counterpart, www.bea.com/enterprise.

Just as Plumtree took the world of enterprise computing by storm by introducing the concept of the corporate portal, BEA is about to re-revolutionize the enterprise by injecting it with a strong dose of Web 2.0. I won't rehash what they've already spelled out so concisely and intelligently on en.terpri.se; instead, I'll give you my own take on the products based on what I've read there.

Pages (formerly known as Project Builder or Holland)
To call Pages a powerful blogging and wiki tool for the enterprise doesn't really do it justice because it is, well, so much more that that. Imagine if you could use point-and-click/drag-and-drop tools to mash up structured data (RDF/RSS, the output of a SOAP-based web service, or the result of a SQL query) with unstructured, end-user maintainable, version-controlled wiki-like content -- now you're scratching the surface. For those of you already familiar with AquaLogic products, think of how amazing Studio would be if it were somehow married to Publisher (we used to call this "Contudio" before it actually existed) and if Studio could tap into existing resources and then somehow weave published content into the resulting user interface output. Now put all this in the hands of the end-user (to give it that Web 2.0 magic), add a sprinkle of security/governance, auditing and enterprise administration and you've got Pages.

Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner)
This may not be the best way to envision Ensemble, but it works for me: imagine taking all the tasty bits that Pages gives you, but put it in the hands of IT and developers. Instead of dragging-and-dropping, a developer can embed a runner Pagelet XML tag into his or her legacy (or newfangled long-tail/rogue) application, then proxy the application through the runner "gateway" and, out of nowhere, the application can have, say,a collaboration discussion or wiki page embedded in it. Not to mention that other enterprise services such as security, SSO and auditing, can be mixed into the application just because it's running in the Ensemble gateway. With this incredible new product, prettty much anything is possible because it gives developers the tools to provide secure, scalable, audit-able and maintainable mashups of just about anything in the enterprise or consumer web.

Pathways (formerly known as Project Graffiti)
Calling Pathways a next-generation Knowledge Directory may be an easy way to conceptualize it, but again it really doesn't do it justice. Unlike the top-down, "mother knows best" taxonomies of the past, Pathways puts the power to categorize corporate knowledge in the hands of the knowledge consumer. Like del.icio.us and digg, Pathways is BEA's recognition of the "many is smarter than any" principle. Unlike its consumer web counterparts, Pathways uses a page-ranking system that's based on a whole slew of factors, including not just how or how much an entry is tagged, but also how "respected" the tagger is in terms of other entries he or she has tagged. Like the KD of the past, Pathways can import content from file shares, e-mail/groupware systems and even from Sharepoint (gasp) -- think CWSs -- but very much unlike the KD of the past, control over the taxonomy and how well entries get ranked in search is ceded to the end-user, where many argue it belongs.

Needless to say, I'm very exited about these new product initiatives for many reasons, not the least of which being that I've bet my entire company's future on their success. So maybe I am a little biased. That being said, I'm not here to tell you that BEA invented Web 2.0 or even Enterprise 2.0. However, I am saying that -- based on what I've experienced over the past ten years that I've been pushing the enterprise computing envelope -- BEA is poised to execute on the Enterprise 2.0 reality better than any other company right now.

Mark my words: you will watch Pages, Ensemble and Pathways implementations spring up throughout the Fortune-whatever just as quickly as you saw enterprise portals replace intranets in the late 90s. Better yet, in the spirit of Enterprise and Web 2.0, rather than watching this happen, let's participate in it.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment

Are these products built with partners or reskinned? Is that the reason why this isn't this on dev2dev? How long has this been on?
Posted by: logicuser on April 1, 2007 at 1:53 PM

I'm not sure I fully understand your questions, but I think I can comment on them a bit. First off, the products are being built by BID's core engineering team -- many of the same folks who brought you ALUI, ALI Publisher, ALI Collaboration, ALI Studio, etc. I don't know what you mean by "reskinned" but these products are all new initiatives, although they undoubtedly leverage the experience the BID folks have garnered over the past 10 years they've spent building enterprise portals and other enterprise software.

To answer your last question, the marketing documents and web site were only released last week to the public. I think you should expect to see GA for these products some time this summer, but don't quote me on that -- remember, I don't work for BEA.

As for this stuff not being on dev2dev, well, with my blog post, now it is! There's also a lot of the same info located at www.bea.com/enterprise with more traditional BEA branding. I'm sure you'll be seeing more on dev2dev soon.

Posted by: bucchere on April 1, 2007 at 3:48 PM

These products have all been organically developed at BEA. In some cases we have leveraged our existing capabilities and technologies (i.e. our experiences with our search product informed our decisions with the new Pathways product), and in the end these are new products built by BEA.
The http://en.terpri.se micro-site was launched last week, and it is meant to provide a Web 2.0 and Social Computing resource that will grow over time. We will have the blogs on dev2dev and en.terpri.se refer to each other as appropriate.
And, of course the same base product information was also made available concurrently last week at http://www.bea.com/enterprise.
Cheers,
Shane Pearson
BEA Systems, Inc.
VP, Marketing and Product Management

Posted by: spearson on April 3, 2007 at 1:40 PM

Four ALI IDKs at your Disposal -- Fifth One on the Way?

2007-03-21T07:48:00.000-04:00

As most of you already know, there are four IDKs out there in IDK-land. To take a step back, if you're really new to ALUI (formerly Plumtree) development, you can read about how ALUI handles portlets and how an IDK helps you write portlets. So, back to the four IDKs. They are all freely-downloadable from BEA -- I've included links here:

*These two IDKs were written by developers at bdg and then released to the open source community on dev2dev's CodeShare.

edocs warns you in boldface type: always use the IDK. That's sound advice, given that the IDK API isolates you, as a portlet developer, from changes to the underlying protocol that ALUI uses to communicate between the portal and portlets (CSP). However, what if you're not writing a portlet in Java, .NET, Ruby or PHP? As an aside, once upon a time, there were Perl and ColdFusion GDKs (predecessor to the EDK/IDK), but these development kits are no longer maintained by anyone, although I know for a fact that the ColdFusion GDK is still in use by an ALUI customer because it came up during a sales call!

So, back to my "what if" question: how can you write a portlet without an IDK? It's actually not too hard if you're just getting information from the portal. However, it gets challenging when you start setting preferences and then it starts to get really painful when you start dealing with Unicode issues, encrypted settings and some of the other really hairy stuff. So that's why edocs implores you to use an IDK, when one is available.

If you do go down the road of writing a portlet in a language where an IDK isn't available, I highly recommend that you at least abstract out your CSP calls such that they're isolated from the rest of your portlet code. While you're at it, you might as well follow the same API that BEA uses; in other words, write your own IDK (or at least the parts of it that you need to get your portlet done). To get you started, here's how BEA probably implemented one of the IDK methods in Java:

public AggregationMode getAggregationMode() {
   if (!request.isGatewayed()) {
       throw new NotGatewayedException("Request not gatewayed.");
   }

   if (request.getHeader("CSP-Aggregation-Mode").equals("Multiple"))
       return AggregationMode.Multiple;
   } else {
       return AggregationMode.Single;
   }
}

So, go forth and write your own IDK. Or, preferably, ask a bdg-er to write one for you!

On a related note, one of our customers recently asked us to build an IDK for Lotus Notes/Domino in LotusScript. We're trying to figure out if other people might be interested in this IDK so that we can decide if we're going to open source it or do it as a consulting project (or some hybrid of the two). If you are interested in LN/Domino development for ALUI, let us know by commenting on this blog. I always love hearing feedback from users of the PHP and Ruby IDKs as well.

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Hi Chris. We have a couple of remote portlets on web servers running Perl so I looked around for awhile for the original Perl IDK but couldn't locate it, so I've written a Perl module that supports the methods provided by IPortletRequest. They're read-only methods but are really all we needed access to. man-page is here...
http://webdev.co.nz/Perl/IPortletRequest.txt

Is this worth placing in codeshare do you reckon? I don't see a lot of action in the forums concerning Perl use.
Dean Stringer (deans@waikato.ac.nz)

Posted by: deeknow on March 22, 2007 at 2:00 PM

Hello Dean! The original Perl GDK was written so long ago that I'm not sure how much good it would do. It was based on CSP 1.0 and it followed the old GSServices API rather than the new com.plumtree.remote.portlet API.

I'm pretty stoked to find out that someone else has written at least part of an IDK -- that's impressive. Do I think it's worth posting to CodeShare? I haven't heard much talk about ALUI and Perl, but I guess it can't hurt.

Posted by: bucchere on March 22, 2007 at 5:03 PM

Hi, Chris. We would love to have a Lotus Notes/Domino IDK available to us, as we have lots of "legacy" applications in Domino that we want to expose in ALUI, and an IDK would certainly help! Just my nickel's worth... :-)
Posted by: kcepull on March 30, 2007 at 11:21 AM

Thanks for your comment. If you don't mind my asking, would you be willing to pay for such a thing or is it only a nice-to-have that you would download and use if it were opensource, but not pay for it if it were a commercial product?
Posted by: bucchere on March 31, 2007 at 6:07 PM

ALI G6 on Ubuntu?

2007-03-16T20:59:00.001-04:00

Some of you may be familiar with my rants on the bdg blog about how Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. My opinion on that matter has largely changed with the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), which I have been running with minimal hassle on my newish Gateway MP6954 laptop since last summer. It has a tasty coffee-colored UI (mmm), it NEVER crashes, it basically takes care of itself with updates and has equivalent -- or better -- software for pretty much everything you'd ever want to do with Windows or OSX at a great price: free.

Of course ALUI is only officially supported on two Linux plaforms: RHEL and Suse. But Linux is Linux, right? Well, sort of. I had all sorts of "fun" getting ALUI running on Oracle on Fedora. However, with Ubuntu, getting Oracle and ALUI up was a breeze.

First off, unless you call yourself a DBA, you don't want to mess around with a full-blown Oracle instance. Instead, just follow these easy steps to install something called Oracle XE. It has certain limitations -- the most important of which is that you can't create more than one database.

My first -- and really my only -- mistake during this setup process came next (and it's related to this one-database issue). I tried to drop the XE default database (ORACLE_SID=XE) and run the crdb1_oracle_unix.sql script to create the PLUM10 database. This was a bad idea. I poked around on Google a bit and then thought, well, I don't really need my own database. (Had I had this epiphany before starting down that path, I could have saved two hours and had ALUI up and running on Ubuntu in fewer than 30 minutes.) So, instead of running crdb1_oracle_unix.sql, just edit create_tables_oracle.sql and remove any reference to PLUMINDEX, then run the following commands on the XE database:

$sqlplus sys as sysdba
SQL>create user plumtree identified by password
SQL>grant connect, resource, create view to plumtree

This creates the plumtree user on the XE database, which gives ALUI its own schema, which, for our purposes, is just as good as having your own DB. Now you can basically just run the out-of-the-box scripts (keeping in mind the changes I made to create_tables_oracle.sql):

$sqlplus plumtree/password@XE
SQL>@create_tables_oracle.sql
SQL>@load_seed_info_oracle.sql
SQL>@stored_procs_oracle.sql
SQL>@postinst_oracle.sql

At this point, ALUI was ready to rock. I only ran into one small snag. One of the native search libraries complained about a missing LD_LIBRARY_PATH dependency on libstdc++. This was not a showstopper. I did the following:

$ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.7 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

From there I configured the bundled tomcat to host the portal and the imageserver and viola, ALUI 6.0SP1, in all its glory, was up and running on Ubuntu. (BTW, I would have used ALUI 6.1.0.1, but when I wrote this article, the RHEL and Suse versions weren't available yet.)

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I've also successfully installed ALUI 6.1.1 (6.1MP1) on Ubuntu 7.04 (Server). Required one workaround for the LAX installer shared libraries problem (can't find libc.so.6 etc):
```
$cp AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1 AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1.bak
$cat AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1.bak | sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1
```
Posted by: rdouglas on May 7, 2007 at 10:45 AM

hey Chris, appreciate the post! just wanted to give the hint that to change the plumindex on the create_tables script, you can do this in vi: :1,$s/PLUMINDEX/USERS/g
Posted by: jbell on June 2, 2007 at 8:57 PM

Chris, nice post...I referenced this post while trying to get the new ALUI 6.1 quickstart installer to correctly intall the portal on windows xp. I've tried the installer on several xp machines but it is still failing...i think the error has to do with the way the installer is setting up the paths/environmental variables - when i run the diagnostics tool i get an invalid entry point...my paths look correct and i've tried re-installing multiple times on multiple machines...any ideas? Thanks.
Posted by: phil- on September 10, 2007 at 8:41 AM

Well, after some troubleshooting I figured it out...here is the solution...I hope this is helpful to someone in the future...

I needed to rename the icuuc30.dll in C:\WINXP\system32 to icuuc30_from_system32.dll and paste the icuuc30.dll from C:\bea\alui\common\inxight\3.7.6\bin\native into the C:\WINXP\system32 directory before the installation would work.

I did try just moving the INXIGHT_PATH variable so that it is loaded on the PATH before the C:\WINXP\system32 but the error still occured. BTW - icuuc30.dll is a component for Unicode version 3.0
Posted by: phil- on September 12, 2007 at 11:47 AM

Thank you so much for this post, I had the same problem on XP. I'm just curious, how were you able to debug this problem? What pointed you to icuuc30.dll?
Posted by: fhkoetje on December 4, 2007 at 9:31 AM

Chris Bucchere Invited to Speak at BEA Participate

2007-03-13T00:06:00.000-04:00

I am very pleased to announce that BEA has invited me to speak at their first-ever ALUI and ALBPM user conference, BEA Participate.

Here is the title and abstract for my talk:

Portals and SOA: Portals in a Service-Oriented Architecture

Why is a Service-Oriented Architecture important to an IT infrastructure and what are the elements and products needed to build out an SOA? These questions answered, plus a discussion on how portals are the practical starting point to leveraging SOA.

As a BEA customer, fellow systems integrator, or if you're just BEA-curious, I'd love to hear suggestions about what you think I should include in my session. Thus far, it's shaping up to be a demo of a concrete realization of SOA using ALUI, ALESB (Enterprise Services Bus) and ALDSP (Data Services Platform). As those who have heard me speak before -- and listeners of my podcast -- can attest, I'll do my best to avoid "buzzword bingo" and include a lot of rubber-meets-the-road info to describe how SOA actually "gets done" in the real world.

If you're interested in going to BEA Participate, but you're still on the fence about whether or not you should make the investment, here's the kicker. BEA has posted the complete breakout agenda, and it's shaping up to be one killer conference, jam-packed with all the information you wish you would have gotten out of last year's BEA World, but didn't.

P.S.: I always love to meet my blog readers and podcast listeners in person, so feel free to engage me after my talk or stop by the bdg booth at BEA Participate and introduce yourself!

Portals and SOA: Portals in a Service-Oriented Architecture

2007-03-12T22:14:00.001-04:00

I've been invited to give the following talk at BEA Participate: Why is a Service-Oriented Architecture important to an IT infrastructure and what are the elements and products needed to build out an SOA? These questions answered, plus a discussion on how portals are the practical starting point to leveraging SOA.

Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo, but I assure you this talk will be light on the trite -- you won't hear me use the acronym SOA more than once or twice -- and heavy on the real deal, rubber-meets-the-road stuff about how mere mortals/human beings are actually accomplishing the sort of things that SOA evangelists are preaching these days.

So, here's what you can expect: I'll talk a bit about some of the challenges of building integrated user experiences in today's enormously complex and heterogeneous IT environment and show how a software developer -- without superpowers -- can piece together an integrated true-to-the-principals-of-SOA application using ALUI, ALDSP (Data Services Platform) and ALESB (Enterprise Service Bus). This will culminate in an actual, real-life demo. (I will of course make sure to sacrifice a chicken to the Almighty Goddess of Demos or do whatever else I have to do to make sure my demo doesn't crash. Scratch that, I'll just run it on Linux and everything will be fine.)

So, all joking aside, if you have any ideas for items you'd like me to include in (or exclude from) my talk, please post your comments here. I'll be sure to give anyone who makes a good suggestion a "shout out" during my presentation. They're actually giving me a whole hour this time, so they'll be room for plenty of tomfoolery, geekspeak, silly anecdotes and still time to answer your insightful questions at the end. As one of my good friends and business partners said following my talk at last year's BEA World, "you never know what to expect during one of [Chris Bucchere's] talks." I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but of course I took it as a compliment.

In closing, while we're on the subject of BEA Participate, I just wanted to say thanks to Christine "Obi" Wan for giving me the opportunity to present and, more importantly, for putting together such a great-looking agenda, which you can review if you like, because now it's posted on the BEA Participate site.

In the meantime, do your best to convince the powers that be at your company/organization that they will finally discover the secret to "leveraging SOA" if they send you to this conference. Also, please don't mention that every past Odyssey has had several open bars. And you thought SOA stood for Service Oriented Architecture -- ha! You'll soon find out that it actually stands for "Supporting Obsessive Alcoholism." After all, I've always had the most enlightening architecture discussions after throwing down a few cold ones. . . .

See you at the conference!

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Working with Aqualogic we all know how it's easy to plug in our portlet into Aqualogic. We don't need Aqualogic portal running on our own computer to do this, we don't need special IDE, we don't need upload wars into portal. It took time to explain this to my experience J2EE collegaes that got some experience with IBM Websphere. Here what they do there:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0410_barcia/0410_barcia.html
A lot of steps pretty much the some but have a look at step 11. Here is the core difference. So at least one benifit of SOA is that we don't need to do step 11.
Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:03 AM

>Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an >invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo True, I have the some issue. In my article (for russian development network) I want to stress SOA architecture of Aqualogic, but I don't want to use SOA word. Audience is pretty techical so they all pretty much feed up of this word. Hmm, may be I will end up with this:
Avoid nightmare of step number eleven !
At least, "what the hell this guy talking about?" will be more predict reaction. :-)
Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:25 AM

Hi Dmitri! Thanks for your insightful comments.

As I'm building the demo for my talk, I've noticed that these SOA tools encourage you to loosely-couple everything. And that's a good thing. As you pointed out, ALUI fits into this nicely with its loosely-coupled portlet architecture. The evil "Step 11" (too bad it wasn't "Step 13") is: "Select the Browse button and navigate to the WAR file for your portlet, then select Next (Figure 17)." Step 11 has some pretty awful implications for the enterprise. First off, it assumes that everything is Java, which, as much as I love Java, is just wrong wrong wrong in the heterogeneous enterprise. Secondly, it tightly couples your portlets to your portal, which is contrary to SOA.

As an aside, I was listening to some Web 2.0 podcasts in the car the other day, and this guy who worked on Google Maps talked about "seams" in an architecture. To paraphrase, he basically said that everyone misuses the word "seamless." Seams, just like in the textile industry, are critical to enterprise architecture. Just as seams hold swaths of fabric together and separate one bit of fabric from another, they also help define boundaries in the enterprise architecture that are equally critical to SOA. Without seams, everything must be homogeneous -- applications must be bought from the same vendor, run on the same OS, be written in the same language, etc. -- and this is completely contrary to the reality of enterprise software and systems and completely anti-SOA.

To illustrate how not being "seamless" is actually a good thing, I've designed a demo system that involves bits of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), bits of Java, bits of .NET and bits of Adobe Flash all held together with seams built with ALDSP, ALESB and ALUI. I'm still working on the technical side of things, but the use case is simple: a sales rep wants to quote his customer. Behind the scenes, his company is running a LAMP CRM server, a Flash/SQLServer product database, a .NET portal, and a Java-based Collaboration Server. Using a hybrid of ALDSP, ALESB and Java and .NET web services, the user experience is easy and seamless, but behind the scenes, it's the powerful seams supported by ALDSP and ALESB that make this not only possible, but fairly straightforward.

If you're interested in hearing more, register for BEA Participate and [shameless plug]come to my talk[/shameless plug]! By the way, I'm co-presenting with Joseph Stanko, the BEA Engineering Manager responsible for the development of Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner) -- he will run several slides to help you understand the theory behind SOA and I will show the reality of how the AquaLogic stack truly enables SOA in the enterprise.

Posted by: bucchere on April 14, 2007 at 6:07 AM

Alas, I've finally finished my demo. I had some configuration issues with ALSB, but ultimately they boiled down to the interface between the keyboard and the chair, i.e. human error. I had the proxy service calling the business service, which, in turn, called the proxy service again. You should have seen the utter wasteland this little tidbit of mutual recursion made of my machine. Actually, I was impressed -- Java would spit out a JVM_Bind error once it exceeded some internal maximum, but ALSB (running on WLS 9.2) would actually keep running. Nice.

Anyway, now that I'm past all that, I have a ALDSP layer over two disparate data sources (one MySQL DB containing CRM info and one HSQL DB containing product info) exposing data through netui/beehive to a single ALI portlet. (The nifty little portlet uses script.aculo.us to show an interesting new take on the age-old concept of master-detail.) I also included an Adobe Flex-driven portlet. The two portlets use some client-side IPC (inter-portlet communication) to exchange info and then they call a proxy service on ALSB that takes info from both sources and creates a Word document (in the form of a sales quote). The business service also uploads this document to ALI Collaboration so that people can work on it collaboratively before sending it to the customer. (I may replace this last little bit with a .NET web service, just to show that Java and .NET are both acceptable alternatives for writing the "glue" or "seams" in a true service-oriented architecture.)

Lastly, the event coordinators have locked in a time slot for us: Monday, May 7th at 4:30 PM in the Technical/Developer Track.

If you're "participating" it would great to see you at our talk or at the bdg booth. This year we have a cool -- yet practical -- giveway that will definitely brighten your day. Looking forward to the conference!

Posted by: bucchere on April 22, 2007 at 7:52 PM

bdg Sponsorship of BEA Participate 2007 Confirmed

2007-03-12T15:57:00.000-04:00

Here's some more shameless self-promotion (isn't that what blogging is all about?) -- we've just been confirmed as a sponsor for BEA Participate 2007.

Look for more details about our role in the upcoming conference here.

Hope to see you there!

What is Enterprise 2.0?

2007-03-10T00:31:00.000-05:00

The bdg Plumtree podcast returns with a nice little segment on Enterprise 2.0 and, specifically, how it relates to BEA and bdg.

So, if you're wondering what all this Web 2.0 hubbub is about and how it actually fits into the corporate/enterprise world, give Episode 6 a listen. Let us know what you think at podcast@thebdgway.com.

Upcoming ALUI (Plumtree) Training -- April 9th, 2007

2007-03-09T11:09:00.000-05:00

We're very pleased to announce that we've finalized the date for our next ALUI/Plumtree training course, scheduled for the week of April 9th, 2007.

We're changing the lineup a tad to provide three days of ALUI administration training followed by three days of developer training, but all in a five day week. So how do we plan to pack six days of training into five? The answer is "super Wednesday," which will be a day when we teach administration for developers. In other words, it's the last day for the administrators (advanced administration) and the first day for the developers.

Bottom line: to sign up for either class (or the whole week), send an email to training@thebdgway.com.

BEA Announces ALUI/ALBPM User Conference

2007-02-11T21:42:00.000-05:00

This just in: BEA has announced that they will be hosting a user conference for ALUI and ALBPM customers and prospects. This conference is called "BEA Participate" and all the details can be found at http://www.bea.com/participate. As of this posting, there's not much more than a "Save the Date," which, BTW, is May 6th-9th, 2007. Seeing as how BID's new products (Runner, Builder and Graffiti) will be nearing General Availability at that time, I would expect to see some very cool demos.

Watch this space for more info about bdg's role in the conference!

BEA Participate

2007-02-11T18:37:00.000-05:00

A quiet little announcement was made last week: BEA plans to host an ALUI (formerly Plumtree) and ALBPM (formerly Fuego) user conference! Suprisingly, I don't see any references on BEA's web site, on dev2dev or really anywhere else about it, so I thought I would take a minute to promote the conference here.

Could this be a response to some customer and integrator concerns that there weren't enough AL* breakout sessions at BEA World 2006? Possibly. Could this be the final nail in the coffin that was once called the "Unified Portal Roadmap." I'm not sure.

Regardless, you can bet that I'll be there along with several other folks from bdg. Stayed tuned for more information here about how we'll be involved as an event sponsor, exhibitor and perhaps even as a presenter. I expect that we'll have a lot of fun, share a great deal of what we know about ALUI and learn a great deal more from ALUI customers and other BEA partners.

The full extent of the information that currently exists about this conference can be found at http://www.bea.com/participate. We'll be watching that space for more info and also posting several more times about our specific role in the conference. I suggest you do the same.

One obvious question any customer or partner should ask is: if I'm getting my budget together for 2007 conferences, should I attend BEA World or BEA Participate? If you're a current ALUI or ALBPM customer, it's a no brainer: attend BEA Participate. But what if you're a prospect who is considering a portal or SOA solution from BEA? If you can afford it, I would say attend both!

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Now I'm officially confused. Very weird that these are separate unless they're using BEA World as a venue for "technical building blocks" and "Participate" to sell business collaboration / process solutions - that's the only way I can see this.

I have to be careful how I word this, so if the tone comes across in any way negative, well... that's not my intention. IMO I would not attend BEA World again if it's a repeat of last year's.

I loved Odyssey - it was well organized, had _great_ sessions targeted toward user education and productivity, and was all about the customer - sharing best practices, discussing common problems, and engaging in one-on-one w/ engineers and product managers. Sessions were focused on empowering the customer and making sure they were just a bit better at their jobs when they left. It was always worthwhile and our entire team (repeatedly) came away saying "glad we went." Awesome stuff all around and did a lot to let the customers sell the solutions to other customers (always a better way to go).

In attending BEA World last year I got the constant nagging sensation that it was a big (overt) sales conference and not really about the user and how to better utilize tools. ALUI was barely even on the map (which really bothers me). I didn't have the sense that my needs were being addressed as much as in previous years and I really didn't come away with anything "tangible" I could take back to justify the fee. The customer keynotes were cool, but beyond that we struggled to find value.

Doing something with a "Participate" focus thing is a _great_ idea on the part of BEA if it's about targeting the customer and helping understand how to succeed with the tools (and make friends along the way ;). Keywords: using the tools to succeed in business. That, IMO, was always the point to me in attending.

Obi-wan - hear me. This should really be incorporated into BEA World for the benefit of your current and prospective customers. It will really boost the value of BEA World and do something to hammer home the fact that BEA and Plumtree are one company with one comprehensive suite (something Jay Simons' web conference last year did a great job of explaining). Separating things like this ... well... I get it, but it does imply a continued level of separation that customers expressed concern with last year.

That said - and I sincerely hope that didn't come across as negative - I'm excited to see what 2007 brings for the new products. Seeing a bit of what they're cooking up, it's nice to users finally getting past a lot of the geekware bits and into things they can build and use w/o IT bottlenecks. Very cool. Buy three :)
Posted by: ewwhitley on February 12, 2007 at 7:28 AM

It's not Obi-wan here, but Christine Wan and we're definitely listening! BEA organized Participate to directly address the needs of business and IT users working with ALUI and ALBPM products. This is very much a forum for customers to gather and share best practices, to go deep with product managers and engineers and to hear the latest on new product developments.

And it is an important complement to BEAWorld, providing much richer detail on these two specific product lines and more focus on bringing these specific users together in a forum where they can share experiences and ideas. The announcement last week was just a Save-the-Date. Stayed tuned, you'll see a lot more information to come on the bea.com homepage and bea.com/participate.
Posted by: cwan on February 12, 2007 at 2:09 PM

Hi, Christine :) Very cool - I'm glad to hear this. We loved the "interactive" and focused nature of the Odyssey sessions. You guys did such a good job on that I think we just kinda got spoiled and expected something on that order for BEA World last year. That's what happens when you make us too happy year after year ;)
Posted by: ewwhitley on February 12, 2007 at 7:51 PM

I know that many customers I spoke with during and after BEAWorld echoed the same sentiment of being "underwhelmed" simply from being spoiled by Odysseys past. Along those same lines, an Advanced Developer Conference either as part of Particpate, an extension to it or separate from it would be awesome as well. I know that may be hard to do as part of this initial effort but it would be great at some point. We are definitely excited about it and all of this just builds anticipation until May.
Posted by: kurtanderson on February 15, 2007 at 10:05 PM

Happy Birthday, bdg!

2007-01-13T05:00:00.000-05:00

bdg just turned four! To celebrate the beginning of year five, we've launched a new web site. It's all about how bdg, given our background of providing high-end Plumtree/ALUI consulting, development and training, is now ready to take on Enterprise 2.0.

There's also a new slogan to go with our new web site and blog: the bdg way.

For the geeks who are reading this, we built our new web site in Ruby on Rails, which explains the elegant friendly URLs. We also built a simple Rails-driven CMS behind the site, so you should see updates more often now that it's easy breezy to make changes.

Meet the new bdg and read all about enterprise 2.0, the bdg way on www.thebdgway.com.