Some blog postings for year end

We don't really celebrate Christmas here, but it is the end of the year, and we need to finish our vacation days, and since our colleagues from overseas are now in vacation,  it is a good time to do it, so it is a good time to do catch up on things that are not part of the regular work.   Looking at some recent Blogs,  I borrowed the above picture from Scot Fingerhut's Blog entitled:  " How Santa Uses CEP - Elf Productivity, Real-time Naughty And Nice Rating" .    BTW - I found another Christmas related postings in OMG facts claiming that Jesus was not really borne in December,  

Back to the professional Blogs, my IBM Haifa Research Lab colleague Yishai Feldman started a Blog entitled "The Dusty Deck"  with punched card on the top -  I belong to the generation who really punched cards, I guess that today punched card belongs to museums along with typewriter and sliding rule. 

Yishai is a local software engineering guru,  who deals with analysis of programs, so I'll follow his Blog with interest.

More in the Blogland,;

The Prova Blog reports on a new version of the Prova open source event processing system that was released this week. 

Colin Clark brings us predictions about 2011.   About event processing he predicts that it will become part of a larger horizontal offering.  I think it is already happening,  as I stated before there is still a niche for the "stand-alone" event processing,  the major market is in having event processing capabilities pervasive over computing offerings.

Last but not least, Rainer von Ammon summarized the workshop he organized recently in conjunction with ServiceWare 2010.   

On automatic translation

A known urban legend about automatic translation is that an automatic translation program got as an input the phrase "the spirit is willing but the flesh is week" and translated it from English to Russian and then back to English, the end result was "the vodka is good but the steak is lousy", there are some translation pearls collected all over the Web. I am using automatic translations from time to time, mainly since my good friend Rainer von Ammon has a habit of forwarding me Emails and documents in German, the automatic translation programs I can find on the web are not that good, but I can understand more or less what is written. However, last night I had my moment of loud laughing. While searching the Web for something using the almighty Google search, I came across a webpage written in Hebrew, I realize that most of the Blog readers don't read Hebrew so I'll summarize the reading experience: first -- it looks like a collection of words in the wrong order and syntax that does not make any sense, second --- looking closer I realized that I actually wrote it, well - it is not that I forgot how to write in Hebrew, on the contrary, my Hebrew is still much better than my English, but it seems that it is supposed to be a translation to Hebrew of a Blog posting I have written in English in January 2009. Trying to get to the bottom of it, I've found that there is a site called the "Unix and Linux form" which copied some of my Blog posting (not sure in what context) using some crawler that is called "Linux Bot", it seems that it did not just copy it, but also translated it to Hebrew. Since Hebrew is not the most popular language in the universe, I wonder to how many other languages it is translated, and if somebody is making any quality control. Funny.

On downloadables

Among all topics that I mentioned in my previous "catching up" posting, I chose to talk about downloadables. The Forrester report mentioned "free downloadable" as a criterion, and one of the authors defended this criterion in a short article. Paul Vincent has written about his impressions from the summer school he participated in that some of the academic people like to use open source, so they can play with the implementation code.

There are two issues here: whether downloadable is a criterion in product evaluation, and whether for academic reasons one should use open source or commercial product downloadable ?

As for the first question: the Forrester report stated that event processing is moving from being niche technology to being part of mainstream computing. An enterprise can chose in using a specific product, either because it is being sold through some solution / application, and in this case the line of business owning the application, may select this application and get the product behind it as a by-product, this is exactly niche technology kind of behavior. Getting it as part of mainstream computing, mealing that this product is being used in enterprise architecture, and being endorsed by the IT side of the enterprise. I have spent 8 years in my life in an IT shop of a big enterprise, and from this angle, the world seems somewhat different, decisions (if not constrained by force majors) are being determined after the IT developers have studied the products from all angles. Big enterprises don't typically have problems to get any software for free evaluaton; however, where free downloadable may help is for people who want to explore products by their own initiative, whether they are developers in organizations that have not decided (yet) that they want to do formal evaluation, or by students, who are the future generation of developers. Investment in students is considered a good investment and thus many vendors provide free software for academic purposes. As I have written in the past, the publisher of the EPIA book we are writing is very keen on providing downloadable software for the reader. Since we told him that there are multiple approaches and we don't want to restrict the reader to a single approach, we have approached several vendors, who agreed to: a). provide free downloadable; b). provide a solution of (at least a subset) of the "Fast Flower Delivery" example that accompanies this book. Currently we have several vendors that already agreed to work with us on this: Aleri (representing the Stream programming style), Rulecore (representing the ECA rules programming style), Apama (representing the script programming style). We also got agreement from Esper (which is already an open source) to provide the solution of the case study in ESPER. I hope that other vendors will follow. I am sure that the readers will be benefited by this exercise (we'll put all solutions in an appendix to the book, and point at the soft copy of the solution, and downloadable from the book's website).

Now, to the question of downloadable vs. open source in teaching. I am giving students two types of programming assignments (depends on the course) -- one is to write some application using a product, the other is to write a subset of an event processing engine.

For the first type of assignment, both product downloadable and open source can be used. In the database area, I guess that the majority of the basic database courses are using My SQL, however, in the event processing area we don't have a standard language yet, and typically products are more advanced than open source.

For the second part -- writing a subset of an event processing engine -- one can take an open source as a basis and extend it, which may be one approach (common in operating systems course), my personal preference is to let students build such system from scratch, the reason is that again, due to lack of standard, the use of open source will restrict the student to use the approach taken by that open source, alas, the approach in which I am teaching event processing is somewhat different. I also think that students have to think about how to implement concepts rather than to ruminant on other food. More on teaching considerations -- later as I am prepared to teach an event processing course twice in the two semesters for two different populations, in the Information Systems Engineering program at the Technion, where I'll ask the students to use products, and in the Computer Science program, where I'll ask the students to write a mini-product.

A comment: I am moderating comments after some spam attack in the past, recently I am getting everyday a comment to this Blog in a charachter set which may be Chinese or Japanese.
I wanted to respond: לא הבנתי מה רצית ממני, but as this Blog is being handled in English, I will not post comments in other languages, I don't even know whether they are spam or real comments.
I also don't post comments from people who don't identify themselves.

Last but not least, a reminder: The EPTS 5th event processing symposium is getting closer, if you wish to participate, and have not registered yet, please do it on the conference site, the reason we need this registration ASAP is that there are quite a few of requests to register from non EPTS members, and since we limit the number of participants, we want to make sure that we are within these limits. BTW - the program on the site is not up-to-date. The updated program will hopefully be published next week.

Some footnotes to recent blogs

Today's experience relates to the remote control which opens the doors of my car (well - mine does not have a panic button), for some strange reason I have noticed that it resides on the floor of my office decomposed to basic components, one screw has broken or something... I picked up all parts, held them tightly together and went straight to the contact person of the leasing company in IBM Haifa Labs, he looked at the broken device and said -- these days we are not allowed to replace them if they work, so he took the following working tools (see below) -

and now I have a remote control with cello tape around it, it turns out that the atmosphere of "reducing expenses" in our leasing company gets to the tiny details.... I also heard that some almost forgotten professions like shoemaker who knows how to fix shoes got alive these days...

Anyway today I am in reactive mode -- since several of the recent Blogs deserve some footnotes:

A footnote to the Blog with the provocative title: SOA is dead; long live services
by Anne Thomas Mannes (along with the many other responses)- I once heard a good talk about the many interpretations of SOA, which means different things to different persons, so it may be dead for some, and alive for others... anyway, good ideas live more than marketing TLAs that come and go with fashions. As an analog, The TLA CEP may survive or change with other fashionable term that will have some other blend of technologies, however, the more interesting thing is not the marketing term, but the substance behind it. If it solid and have value to customers, it will survive and prosper, and I believe that event processing (as a discipline - see: my previous posting on EP as a discipline) is one.

A footnote to Mark Palmer's Blog -
Speaking on event processing - it was interesting to read Streambase's report by Mark Palmer stating that Q4 was the best quarter ever for Streambase, which is a pure play event processing vendor. While this may or may not be an indication for a more general phenomenon, as I've started this posting, everybody is trying to reduce costs these days, and one of the ways to do it , automate processes that are event-driven by nature (e.g.automated exception detection and handling), getting alerts on cases where there is a potential expenses leakage (auditing), compliance with regulations that corporates see as "tax" on their operations, and would like to invest as little resources as they can, straight through processing and other activities associated with cost reduction are event-driven in nature, and thus can benefit from use event processing technologies, thus, the positive correlation between troubled times and growth in the use of event processing software may not be surprising, again, this may or may not explain Streambase's report, I am not familiar with the details.

A foontnote to Marc Adler's Blog - Marc cites a study about the influence of Blogs on purchasing. I am amazed every time to see the power of Blogs... from my personal experience, I am getting a lot of private communication based on my Blog, including some surprising offers, will write about it one day; one the RFPs that I got from our sales team to advice on, was traced by them to be copied from one of the area Blogs... customers started to see Blogs as authority, and this can be of course dangerous since not everybody who Blogs about something is really an authority on the area he or she Blogs on and get into the trap --- that's all for now -more alter.