With SnapStore, the company’s open framework allows anyone to build an extension and profit from it.

“So if you have expertise in SAP, you can easily build an API and check it into the SnapStore,” said Gaurav Dhillon, SnapLogic’s CEO. “If somebody wants to use that application, they just buy it from the SnapStore.”

SnapLogic has approached data integration with a product that it says will deploy in just about any environment. It is when more advanced integration is needed - like getting legacy systems to interface with Facebook - that custom tooling needs to be done. Dhillon’s hope is that a developer community will arise to address compatibility with the “jungle of application types” that exists today.

“Windows Azure’s planned support for VMs with administrative access is a big step forward,” said David Chappell, principal of the Chapell and Associates consulting firm. “It addresses a concern that many customers have.”

Chappell said it was also a good move for Microsoft to provide access to public domain information with Dallas, like Amazon does with its Public Data Sets.

In the months leading up to the PDC, cloud computing consultancy LTech had a number of clients testing their own databases out in Azure. Ed Laczynski, the company’s CTO, said feedback has been mixed.

“The platform looks viable for small to mid-size applications,” said Laczynski. “But we’re still standing up Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server instances on EC2 despite the availability of Azure.”

Where a development team is building an application from scratch or undergoing a complete rebuild is where Laczynski said the early traction would likely be. But for larger enterprises to see the value, he believes the data architecture in Azure will have to get closer to matching the features of something like SQL Server Enterprise.

This week Complex Event Processing (CEP) software house Aleri Inc. announced that Swedbank had selected Aleri’s Liquidity Risk Manager (LRM) as its liquidity risk management tool. Such tools have continued to flourish despite - or perhaps because of - a worldwide economic slowdown. Earlier this year, Aleri merged with former CEP competitor Coral8.

Aleri is promoting the notion of ”Continuous Intelligence” as it spreads the CEP gospel. The contention is that having continual feedback on operations helps executives make faster, better decisions.

With at least a small rebound apparently underway, Aleri says it is seeing greater use of CEP outside of its home bed of finance. For example, the company has partnered with Integral Analytics, a provider and consultancy for smart energy grid systems, to develop real-time energy grid management applications for power and utility companies. Aleri also has partnered with Web analytics consulting firm Semphonic CEP to make solutions that allow organizations with online commerce to monitor customer behavior and buying patterns as they occur.

“What we do is provide a high-level authoring environ to express your business logic,” said Jeff Wootton, vice president of product strategy, Aleri.

“CEP got its start in tech markets where it’s all about responding quickly to changing conditions,” he continued. “Now we see the awareness spread to other industries. We believe it has wide applicability.”

Indications are that CEP efforts are increasingly complementing existing online analytical processing (OLAP), data warehouse and data reporting efforts. With CEP today, you define patterns, you set up systems to monitor streams of messages, and you report the outcomes. Besides reporting, you can set up systems to respond automatically after discerning certain patterns in data sets. The main difference from this and OLAP is that things happen much faster.

“The big technical challenge with using Web services for integration today typically is that you have a number of applications that don’t support Web services,” says Mark Hansen, head of start-up Proxisoft, formerly known as AgileIT. Hansen has created software that, once installed in a Java EE environment, allows you to point and click on classes and methods to create Web services.

Hansen is the author of “SOA Using Java Web Services”. In previous stints Hanson founded database tools company QDB Solutions and e-commerce integrator Kinderhook Systems.

In Hansen’s view, this is not a developer’s tool for programming Web services, but rather an architect or analyst tool for adding services to active applications.

The name of the software is Netrifex 1.0, and it is a framework clearly dedicated to streamlining creation of Web services for existing Java applications. Hansen said it has built-in intelligence for dealing with popular Java Struts and Spring Frameworks. Netrifex can in effect read a Struts design, discern forms and classes and convert that “in a meaningful way” into Web services, he said.

Some ideas embodied in Netrifex 1.0 come out of Hansen’s original work on “SOA Using Java Web Services.” A trial version of Netrifex is available.

Microsoft said it will purchase Teamprise, a company that has developed add-ons for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server (TFS). Notably, Teamprise supports Eclipse add-ins, an area that Microsoft has largely ignored.

The Teamprise Client Suite will be integrated into VS2010, allowing developers using the Eclipse IDE or non-Windows platforms to build applications in TFS. Microsoft will offer Teamprise Client Suite as a joint purchase alongside VS2010. The suite includes:

• Teamprise plug-in for Eclipse - allows developers to perform source control, bug tracking, build and reporting operations in Eclipse and Eclipse-based IDEs;
• Teamprise Explorer - puts the functionality of the Eclipse plug-in in a stand-alone GUI for team members working outside the IDE;
• Teamprise command-line client - provides command-line access to TFS for users who prefer it.

Just two weeks ago, Microsoft disclosed plans to re-package its Visual Studio product line. While still supporting Team Foundation Server, the company was going to discard the ”Visual Studio Team System” moniker.

The company, which for many years eschewed the IBM-originated (but now open-source) Eclipse tool backplane, showed some added openness to Eclipse of late. It said open-source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec would work on various plug-ins and add-ons to bring users of Eclipse into its Azure cloud computing platform.

“The same core team of developers behind Teamprise is moving to Microsoft to carry on what was going to be Teamprise 4.0,” said Martin Woodward, now program manager for Teamprise at Microsoft, in a blog post.

We talked recently with Bill Wilkins, who together with others has founded Adjoovo to address these kind of metadata issues. Adjoovo contends project failure is often rooted in the fact that underlying metadata assets are ignored as an organization builds new services. The company is building out a more inclusive metadata repository, or framework. It sees limits that exist with some current SOA-style repositories.

Wilkins says that the mismanagement of what exists “leads to architectural fragmentation and much higher levels of complexity.” Wilkins comes to these considerations after experience with Sun Microsystems in its SOA, WOA and ESB efforts. Naturally, Java artifacts are among the artifacts Adjoovo will look to register.

“We are trying to provide a framework that can handle diverse artifacts,” he told SearchSOA.com.

The company recently fielded its first downloadable sample software in the form of an Adjoovo Spaces community edition, and is looking for interested users to try it out and provide feedback.

The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Though Oracle has lately worked to quell concerns that it might dump support for Sun Microsystem’s GlassFish application server and NetBeans IDE, many still feel doubtful that any legitimate resources will back the open source tools.

In a discussion on TheServerSide.com, some saw Oracle’s message as perhaps a small comfort rather than a great reassurance.

“I think that in the short period, it would be difficult for Oracle to suspend any big activity by Sun,” wrote Francesco Ladanza, “as it would lose part of the splendid open source community that is one of the best values that Sun has earned in these years.”

Oracle will want to get as much value from the Sun acquisition as possible and it is tough to ignore the open source community that GlassFish has developed. Bill Wilkins wrote that the fact that GlassFish V3 is built on an OSGi core may also make it attractive to the company’s app server strategy.

That being considered, GlassFish would be competing with the Oracle WebLogic Server and Netbeans with JDeveloper and Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. Those are more internally-competing products than Oracle may be able to justify in the mid-term, Wilkins wrote.

The jury is out on whether Oracle will condense these pieces of Sun’s legacy into existing products or allow them to develop in tandem. But Jens Eckels was not exactly reassured.

“It’s hard not to notice they never said they were committing to monetarily supporting NetBeans strategically, or that they see it as a viable entity,” said Eckels. “They specifically talk about throwing money at other Sun products, and then carefully tread around NetBeans with “committed to choice” and “complement” language.”

“If anything, we’re going to invest more in MySQL,” Ellison said at the conference keynote. “Not less.”

Furthering these sentiments, Oracle has released a number of statements and, recently, a FAQ stating the company’s position across many of its major divisions and aquisitions.

In the FAQ, Oracle said Sun’s open-source Java application server, Glassfish, is far from in any danger.

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

 

 

 

 

As for NetBeans, the company reaffirmed both JDeveloper’s position as Fusion Middleware’s main development tool and the open source tool’s availability should customers prefer it.

Also in the FAQ, Oracle stated its position on MySQL in the same Vein as its chief.

“Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now,” the FAQ stated.

The company also said it plans to add open-source MySQL to its existing suite of database products.

Virtualization, services and ever cheaper hardware paved the way from grid to cloud. It may be too early to say, but cloud does seem to be a bit of a better play for a wider variety of jobs. Part of the reason grid didn’t get too far off the mark was that its poster stories were usually scientific applications…something of a niche.

Still, it is interesting to conjecture on how science  -  both big and small science – will be done on the cloud. Relational data bases are a tried and true way of dealing with data, scientific and other. The cloud at this point is highly influenced by Google’s flatter MapReduce/Hadoop ways of handling data. Still, Amazon just augmented its SimpleDB with a straightahead RDB (MySQL).

Some view on the nature of that possible transformation of science data and cloud this we comes via Michael Schatz.  For the biology community, moving to MapReduce/Hadoop-style architecture would be a challenging undertaking. SOAP and XML made some serious inroads there. Schatz is working on adapting important bioinformatics tools to the cloud paradigm. He has discussed the issues on SourceForge where he documents some project work. Check out Haddop for Computational Biology.