Node.js client for Status Dashboard

Status Dashboard is an awesome node.js monitoring application developed by @obazoud. I recently sent some pull requests to Olivier to improve the IRC plugin and then I though that even if I am always connected to IRC, jabber or whatever, I also have a Terminal opened most of the time. So the question was: How can I get my services status pushed to my laptop in realtime?
Socket.IO is the candidate: It does not provide only server and browser modules, there is also the socket.io-client module which can be used in your node runtime, on the client side in exactly the same way you use Socket.IO in your HTML pages. Since Socket.IO is already used in Status Dashboard to push status to the browser, we have the right solution.

I created a simple node.js client application called statusdashboard-client which connect to a status dashboard instance using Socket.IO. Once data is pushed by the server to the client, it is displayed with some basic code colors on the terminal:

It is totally fun to see what we can do without any node.js expertise. I just start looking at it but I already have many ideas, especially for platform monitoring.

BPEL support in Petals DSB

As promised in the last article about my talk at OW2Con 2011 last week, here is a video on something I was not able to show due to some low resolution problems. The video is a bit long but shows several things (in the right order):

1. The DSB Manager Web application is used to manage the Distributed Service Bus. It uses the DSB Web service API to interact with node instances running somewhere…
2. The DSB Manager is used to bind business services to the DSB (let’s forget JBI, the user does not care about it…). DSB services are also exposed. Every DSB node provides the same business API with the help of the distributed endpoint registry it uses.
3. The DSB Manager uses the DSB BPEL API to deploy BPEL processes to the DSB. Up to the DSB to use the right internal endpoint when the process is executed. Services can be hosted on any node, it is the role of the DSB to route messages to the right endpoint on the right node. The BPEL process is exposed as Web service and can be invoked by any Web service client. Here I just use SOAPUI client.
4. We can monitor what happens when invoking a service! For now the DSB Manager uses Web service notification to subscribe to some monitoring topic hosted on the DSB node. When a message is exchanged between the client and the services involved in the process execution, notification are automatically published to the DSB Manager which has just subscribed. The monitoring uses Web sockets for live display in the browser…
5. Last thing is just a test to show more monitoring data when many calls are exchanged between consumers and providers.

Let’s go one step further… The BPEL engine we use in the DSB is our own (PetalsLink) BPEL engine we developed from scratch. This allows us to have a complete control on it and to be able to extend it and embed it as we want without any constraint. In the current case, the BPEL Engine is hosted on a dedicated DSB component. It means that we do not have an external thing which talk with services through some exposed services. This is really important to notice that by doing such thing we can really base process execution on a Service Oriented Architecture. When developing the BPEL process with the Petals Studio, or when creating a BPM process (more details in a future post), you do not have to care about service endpoints. You just have to say to the process that you want to call operation X of service Y or interface Z. It is up to the DSB hosting the BPEL engine to resolve endpoints at runtime. By using this approach we can really do interesting things, just because the DSB is Distributed: services can be hosted on any nodes, can be replicated, can move, can be updated without any impact on the process itself: Oh wait this is SOA!

Related articles

• Back From OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)
• Some Play Framework, Service Bus, WS Notification and Web Sockets… (chamerling.org)
• Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)

Back From OW2Con 2011

I was in Paris last week for the OW2 annual conference and I gave a talk called « Petals BPM and the Cloud » during the Open Cloud Summit Session (wow what a name!). This talk was about showing that we have things running and ready to be published in the Cloud. As I said during my talk, difficulty is not to provide the SaaS layer, pushing a Web app to the Cloud is not so hard (and not so interesting). The interesting part is about building the PaaS layer. In the current case, the PaaS will provide « Integration as a Service », or how we can use Petals Service Bus, to provide ways to integrate, orchestrate, manage and monitoring business services.

My son is an open source fan

So let’s go back on my talk, where I planned to show things working… Unfortunately, I was not able to show anything due to some low resolution problems and this was really a shame; next time I will prepare a video in case of something like that happens. I am going to record these videos this week to show that we have interesting things under development : We can create business processes with Petals BPM and deploy them on the service bus in order to execute and monitor the process itself in a distributed way.

While waiting these videos, here are the slides of my talk. There are sort of ‘zen’ slides so the talk I gave was really important to understand all… So come and see me next time, or just send me comments.

For the other parts of the conference, as usual, there were really interesting presentations and discussions around OW2, open source and Cloud. One fun thing which I learnt was that OW2-Jonas is used in MS Azure Cloud solution as support of J2EE apps (can I also inform that Microsoft was a big sponsor of OW2Con? Yes, really, they gave money for an open source conference, that’s fun). Well, there were so many interesting things and I can not list all here. But open source is really something companies should have a look if they do not did it already, they will be surprised to see how active and professional is the community behind it.

Related articles

• Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)

Petals BPM

Petals BPM (previously Geasy BPMN Editor) is an open source, web-based BPMN 2.0 editor developped with GWT.

Petals BPM

Tout est dit en une seule phrase… Petals BPM est un des produits que nous sommes en train de développer activement au Labs. Cette Web application open source, développée en GWT permet de créer et d’éditer des process BPMN 2.0, d’importer et d’exporter en BPMN 2.0, XPDL, mais aussi exporter vers un fichier BPEL 2.0.

Beaucoup de choses à venir autour de ce produit, j’espère assez rapidement. Ca sera bien sur décrit ici.