ApacheCon NA 2011 - Geeky Paradise!

ApacheCon NA this year was in beautiful Vancouver, BC. This conference, besides being my first ApacheCon, was really different from my usual trips since it was in my home country :) No customs and crazy exchange rates FTW! I think there were over 400 attendees so it was a pretty good turnout IMO. Lots of geeky chats, hacking and beverages made for a great time. The sessions were great too of course. I wanted to blog about my trip not because anyone finds my travels interesting :) but because the topics are really cool and are probably not widely known.

Fuse Fabric + Apache ZooKeeper

I want to start off with my colleague Guillaume Nodet who spoke about how Fuse Fabric is created on top of Apache ZooKeeper and allows you to provision ActiveMQ, CXF, and Camel applications into a cloud of ServiceMix or Karaf instances. Very cool presentation overall but I was really quite excited by the prospect of upgrading a whole cluster of ServiceMix or Karaf instances to a new version of Camel. Right now, to upgrade at runtime you have to either update every bundle of Camel separately or uninstall + reinstall the new version (not very pretty).

Fabric also has an super fast implementation of Distributed OSGi, which allows you to invoke OSGi services hosted in remote nodes. When on the same machine it can run at 25,000 MPS on pretty minimal hardware!

This wasn't in the talk (cause it is closed source), but I also heard that Fuse IDE has a nice GUI for interacting with Fabric now too :)

Apache TomEE

I heard a bit about the TomEE project recently and thought it would be good to hear from the main guy David Blevins what it is all about. In short, at the Apache TomEE project they are creating a Java EE 6 certified server based on Apache Tomcat. They are doing this because they think that the EE spec is actually not bloated as people say (yeah, its just an API after-all) and that the bloatedness comes from the implementation of various vendors. So, they wanted to make a lean mean EE server. The other main point about TomEE is that it is built on top of Apache Tomcat, which is the most widely used web app server.

On the bit about it being lean, apparently to run the entire EE TCK (that is the certification tests), TomEE only needed the default heap size of 64MB... now, I wonder what the other EE app servers required?

Apache ACE

Jean-Baptiste Onofre gave a great demo of Apache ACE in action. Essentially ACE allows you to provision your OSGi packaged apps into Karaf or ServiceMix instances. I thought it has a pretty slick web interface where you can centrally manage what Karaf nodes have what bundles, etc. Very cool stuff!

Apache ServiceMix + Camel

The ServiceMix project came up numerous times in presentations and offline talks. In short ServiceMix 5 will bring large changes to ServiceMix. Not as large as the gap from version 3 to 4 (where we switched from JBI to OSGi) but still big changes. Some include:

- Removal of JBI layer

- Instead of the NMR as the central solution for routing, use Camel

- Move some NMR features to Camel (audit, events, tracing, etc...)

- Add CXF console shell

- and the many many new features coming with Karaf 3...

Version 5 is especially exciting for me because of the implications for Camel. Right now, Camel hasn't changed its architecture much lately IMO; it just keeps getting faster, more stable, and with an ever growing number of components - the best changes for a widely used framework. There haven't been as many improvements to Camel operating at the container level though. We are kinda limited by what the Camel project guidelines are; Camel is a framework, not an ESB. So ServiceMix has no such restriction (it is an ESB!) so version 5 has the major goal of being the best home for your Camel applications and as such will have many improvements for running Camel. Nothing is 100% decided yet so if you have ideas, let the ServiceMix community know before version 5 development starts :)

OK, so there were many more talks as well but these were the ones I wanted to talk about :) Overall ApacheCon was one of the coolest conferences I've been too. Very happy to have hung out with some old friends and met some "IRC friends" that I've been wanting to meet for years.

Oh yeah, and the next ApacheCon will be November 2012 in Germany... sounds fun already!

Free open source talks this October

There are a few things happening in October that'd I'd like to draw your attention to.

October 11th

We're cohosting a Fuse community day with Skills Matter in London, England. Rob, James, and Claus will be giving several talks on Apache Camel, ServiceMix, Karaf, and ActiveMQ. They'll also talk about some of the products that have come out at FuseSource this year like Fuse IDE and Fuse Fabric. As usual with Fuse community days, several customers will be joining to tell how they use these open source projects in real world applications, which IMHO is usually the most interesting :) Logica and Apex Networks will be talking at this event.

More details about this are here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/soa-rest/fusesource-community-day-2011/js-2735

October 13th

This Fuse community day is in Paris, France. Much the same talks as at the London event with Atos Worldline and Capgemini joining to share their expereince using Apache and FuseSource open source software in real world applications.

More details here: http://tiny.cc/noqh1

October 18th

Last but not least ;) I'll be presenting a webinar on how to get started with Apache ServiceMix. In this webinar I'll take a tour of the many features shipped with ServiceMix. I'll stick with the getting started theme here too - it won't be a deep dive into anything so hopefully it won't go over anyone's heads :) For most of the talk though I'll head to the IDE and see how to build out a ServiceMix application that takes advantage of the main compoenents like: integration flows with Apache Camel, web services with Apache CXF, and reliable messaging with Apache ActiveMQ.

If you are interested, you can register here: https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=716654083&Sourceid=web

Open Source Integration with Apache Camel and How Fuse IDE Can Help

I've been meaning for a while to update an old but popular article I wrote about using Apache Camel. People are still reading it but the Camel version is 1.6 IIRC - we're current thinking of releasing 2.8 so Camel 1.6 is quite dated.

I also wanted to load up that example in some cool Camel GUI tooling that James created at FuseSource.

The new article is Open Source Integration with Apache Camel and How Fuse IDE Can Help. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Speaking at CamelOne and Security BSides

I'm heading out to do a couple of talks on Apache Camel in the coming months and figured I should get the word out! First off, is CamelOne:

CamelOne - May 24-26

So I'm really excited about CamelOne. It is a conference put off by FuseSource for users of Apache open source integration and messaging projects. So there will be lots of talks on Apache Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and CXF by the folks who created those projects and also users who push the limits of what the software can do. Great stuff.

Gregor Hohpe, author of Enterprise Integration Patterns, will also be giving a keynote about the Past, Present and Future of Enterprise Integration Patterns.

Given most of the time I see folks running Camel applications on top of ServiceMix or Karaf, I will be giving a talk entitled: Getting the most out of your ServiceMix deployment of Camel. A brief description of the talk:

Apache Camel was designed to be deployable nearly anywhere; you have your choice of standalone in a JVM, Tomcat, J2EE, ActiveMQ, Spring, OSGi, and more. One particularly suitable deployment option is an OSGi container like Apache ServiceMix. In this session, Jon will show you how to take advantage of the many features that ServiceMix brings to the table and also how to best design your Camel applications to get the most out of OSGi.

I urge anyone who uses Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ or CXF and can afford the trip to attend CamelOne. It's going to be a blast and it would really be great to chat with fellow community members about these projects.

Security BSides - June 10

Security BSides is an "unconference" style gathering here in St. John's. A brief description from the official site:

An eclectic gathering of infosec people to hear awesome talks and have outrageously fun discussions! Our mission is to provide an inclusive, open environment for the sharing and collaborative discourse on topics that most interest you.

I'm going be giving a talk on How to Secure your Apache Camel Deployment. A brief abstract of the talk:

Apache Camel is an open source Java framework that focuses on making integration easier and more accessible to developers. It does this by providing: concrete implementations of all the widely used Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs), connectivity to a great variety of transports and APIs, and an easy to use Domain Specific Language (DSL) to wire EIPs and transports together to form routes.

Interacting with secure services and also hosting secure services is essential in most integration projects. In this session, Jon will go over the four categories of security features in Camel, which include securing: routes, message payload, endpoints, and configuration.

If you are in the area, please drop by - also, registration is free :)

Team Programming Competition Results

On Friday I sponsored a team programming competition at Memorial University here in St. John's. Like the previous competition this year, I presented a signed copy of Camel in Action to each of the 1st place winners. Congratulations to Melissa Reid and Ken Collingwood for winning!

Full results of the competition were posted on Jamie's blog.

Programming Competitions on the Rock

This past Friday I sponsored a programming competition at Memorial University here in St. John's. Was a great turn out - much more than I can remember back in the day when I competed in these things... Jamie posted the full results since he helped organize the event.

On behalf of FuseSource I presented a prize to the 1st place winner, Robert Robere. Robert, of course, won a signed copy of Camel in Action - what else? :)

Looking forward to the next one in 3 weeks!

Seminar on Time Series Novelty Detection

Just got this email in my inbox, feel free to stop by and see my talk. There is no mention of middleware or opensource I promise :)

GRADUATE STUDENT SEMINAR

JONATHAN S. ANSTEY
WILL GIVE A TALK ON

“TIME SERIES NOVELTY DETECTION WITH APPLICATION TO PRODUCTION SENSOR SYSTEMS”

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2010
9:00 A.M.
EN-4002

MR. ANSTEY IS A GRADUATE STUDENT
IN THE M.ENG. PROGRAM
UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. D. PETERS

ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME

I'm not sure either why this is all in CAPS :) For those interested, the full abstract of the work is:

Modern fiber manufacturing plants rely heavily on the use of automation. Automated facilities use sensors to measure fiber state and react to data patterns, which correspond to physical events. Many patterns can be predefined either by careful analysis or by domain experts. Instances of these patterns can then be discovered through techniques such as pattern recognition. However, pattern recognition will fail to detect events that have not been predefined, potentially causing expensive production errors. A solution to this dilemma, novelty detection, allows for the identification of interesting data patterns embedded in otherwise normal data. In this thesis we investigate some of the aspects of implementing novelty detection in a fiber manufacturing system. Specifically, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of currently available feature extraction and novelty detection techniques on data from a real fiber manufacturing system.

Our results show that piecewise linear approximation (PLA) methods produce the highest quality features for fiber property datasets. Motivated by this fact, we introduced a new PLA algorithm called improved bottom up segmentation (IBUS). This new algorithm produced the highest quality features and considerably more data reduction than all currently available feature extraction techniques for our application.

Further empirical results from several leading time series novelty detection techniques revealed two conclusions. A simple Euclidean distance based technique is the best overall when no feature extraction is used. However, when feature extraction is used the Tarzan technique performs best.