S-RAMP v1.0 Specification submitted into the OASIS Review Process

[announcement]
Today the S-RAMP v1.0 specification was submitted for review by OASIS. You can download your own copy of the two spec documents from a public link on from OASIS. Randall Hauch, Eric Wittmann and yours truly worked on both the specification as well as on an implementation of the spec at the same time.

[plug for our project]
The open source S-RAMP implementation is under developement under the umbrella of the Overlord project and ships under the Apache v2 License. We hope that it will become the S-RAMP Reference Implementation (S-RAMP-RI). You can download the S-RAMP implementation from our downloads page. The source code is hosted on Github. Our implementation uses RESTEasy for the Atom based REST APIs and on the back-end it uses ModeShape (JCR) and Infinispan (persistence) for massive performance and scalability. Well that's what the ModeShape guys tell us anyway, someone should test it out! We are currently about 75% complete and -to speak in building a bridge terminology- we are 'out of the water  now': The foundations are finished and everything we are doing now is in full view. If you are interested in contributing please let us know, there is still lots to be done.

[your chance to get famous]
One area we are really looking for help is for someone who can help us develop some best practice governance scenarios: for example project workflows, with supporting document templates for approval etc.

Cheers,

--Kurt

Release S-RAMP-0.1.1 adds Governance Workflow

I'm proud to announce release 0.1.1 of the S-RAMP project. The S-RAMP project implements the OASIS SOA Repository Artifact Model and Protocol. Two of the developers (Eric Wittmann and yours truly) are members of the Technical Committee.  The spec is nearly complete and it will be submitted to OASIS for review in a matter of one to two weeks.

On the S-RAMP project we have implemented about 75% of the spec and we've layered governance features on top of that. The objective is to have a functional set of features before implementing features we do not need right away. Things are working now, but may not always be 100% compliant (think about things like error handling etc).

Some major features we have working now

• Working S-RAMP repo - sitting on top of JCR (ModeShape by default) and using RESTEasy for the S-RAMP Atom binding.
  
• Maven integration, so developers can release artifacts into the S-RAMP repository or they can reference artifacts in their builds as dependencies.
• S-RAMP ATOM Binding, anything that can consume a atom feed can interact with the repo.
• S-RAMP GWT based browser
• S-RAMP cmdline shell, so you interact by typing, or you can script interactions
• Governance Workflow - Integration with a BPMN2 engine (jBPM by default)
• custom REST-Based BPMN2 services to deploy artifacts from S-RAMP to runtime
• customer notification service (email + templates)
• custom S-RAMP interaction service to classify artifacts as they move through their life cycle.
•  Advanced XPATH-2 query capability into the S-RAMP repository.

Some things we are working on at the moment

• Security - we need SSO across the board. We are trying to use Picketlink IDM & OAuth, sticking point is that RESTEasy 3 supports it but SOA-P 6 wants to stick with 2.3.*. Maybe we can get Bill to back port.
  
• Governance console to manage workflow configuration and to embed Task Forms (right now we direct you to the jbpm-console)
• Add Documentation - We developed a kick ass process to push Asciidoc github wiki to docbook into the regular doc stream (https://github.com/Governance/s-ramp/wiki/GuideReadme). Now all we need is more content and demos.
  
• Implement all features an end2end for some interesting Switchyard use cases.
  
• Add more out of the box best practices governance workflow.
• RHQ and JBossAS7 domain model deployment integrations.
• Support for SLA and policies in general.
• Auditing of what goes in and out of the repo.

If you are interested check out the workflow demo, download the distro and come contribute so you can be crowned and become one of Overlords.

Cheers,

--Kurt

S-RAMP-0.1.1 Governance Workflow Demo

With the recent S-RAMP-0.1.1 release we added Governance Workflow capability to the S-RAMP repository. This release can be download from http://www.jboss.org/overlord/downloads/sramp. In the demo below we show how a mvn deploy of a Switchyard application to the S-RAMP repository kicks of a Simple Release Process as shown in Figure 1.

Fig 1. Simple Release Process, click to enlarge

This BPMN2 process runs on jBPM (default BPMN Engine) and calls deployment and notification services that ship with the S-RAMP Governance application. For more details on the SOA Governance configuration see the SOA Governance Wiki.

Fig 2. Click to start the demo.

Call Trace capability available as part of BAM M3

The Overlord team are pleased to announce the third milestone of the new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) sub-project.

The new features include:

1) Call Trace capability, which is demonstrated in the following webcast: https://vimeo.com/54642223

2) Simplified the approach for defining and enforcing policies within SwitchYard: https://vimeo.com/54790975

3) Framework for deriving correlation identifiers and properties from activity content

This release works with SwitchYard 0.7.0.Final.

If you have an interest in business activity monitoring capabilities for your project, then we would love to hear from you! Our user forum is located here, or alternatively please raise feature requests in our jira system.

Define and Enforce a Policy

This demo provides an indepth view of how a policy can be defined and enforced within the Overlord Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) infrastructure.

The demonstration shows how requests to a SwitchYard application can be blocked, if a customer has been suspended, due to decisions made within a business policy that is outside the scope of the SwitchYard application. This enables business policies to be changed without impacting the application.

Call Trace Capability

This video provides a preview of the call trace capability that will be available shortly within milestone 3 of the Overlord Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) project.

The call trace can be used to visualise the call hierarchy that represents the service invocations across a Service Oriented Architecture. Contained within each call node in the trace will be represented any activities that occurred within the scope of that call.

This facility enables users to understand how the business transaction instance executed, as well as the duration it spent within each call, thus allowing performance bottlenecks to be identified.

Service Dependency Graph and Policy Enforcement demo in BAM milestone 2

The Overlord team are pleased to announce the second milestone of the new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) sub-project. A webcast showing some of the new features can be found here: https://vimeo.com/51539146

The new features include:

1) Definition of a service interaction (or dependency) graph, showing colour coding based on a configurable algorithm. The user can hover over services, operations and links to view statistics, and also hover over the situation markers to see a summary of situations that are affecting the specific service or operation. The service overview information represents a rolling window based on recent activity, and therefore reflects an up-to-date view of the activity associated with the system being observed.

2) Situations gadget and associated infrastructure. It is now possible for a user to create rules to detect 'situations of interest'. These situations will then be managed by the BAM infrastructure, providing the details through a REST service for display in the 'situations' gadget, as well as being reported via JMX. A "SLA Violation" example demonstrates how this mechanism can be used.

3) Service definitions active map (available via a REST service) - provides information about the available services and their operations, as well as metrics.

4) Policy enforcement demo, showing how the analysis of activity information can be used to apply business policies, defined outside the scope of the application, which in this case enables further purchases by a customer to be suspended until they make a payment.

5) Many internal improvements to help support the functionality described above.


If you have an interest in business activity monitoring capabilities for your project, then we would love to hear from you! Our user forum is located here, or alternatively please raise feature requests in our jira system.