OpenSpan – Workflow automization on the presentation layer

Today was the first day of CloudSlam. There have been a few nice presentations, but one of them really kicked it off: OpenSpan. Francis Carden showed a very cool demo of how to do application and workflow integration on the presentation layer. With a few mouse clicks he created an application that integrates a legacy Windows app with the FedEx Website; then he showed how to build an application that leverages the Salesforce API in combination with a legacy “MiniCRM”. Francis explained that OpenSpan is not just screen scraping but an intelligent combination of reverse-engineered operating system functions and usage of openly available APIs. Thereby, OpenSpan allows to integrate applications that otherwise would be costly to glue together. It reminded me a bit of Yahoo! Pipes, except that it is much cooler because it provides way better capabilities of creating and accessing external APIs / system processes. Have a look for yourself!

Cazoodle Dives into the Deep Web

Cazoodle, a spin-off from University of Illinois (famous for technology innovation such as Mosaic, Netscape, PayPal and YouTube), is dedicated to exploring both the surface Web and the depths of the Deep Web. Using technology developed in the research group of Prof. Kevin Chang at UIUC, Cazoodle provides vertical search services, i.e. domain-specific search engines (Apartment Search, Event Search, Shopping Search).

Similar to companies such as hakia, PowerSet or ontoprise (a spin-off from Karlsruhe University), Cazoodle leverages the large and growing amount of structured data within specific knowledge domains. With Semantic search accross multiple Web sources, Cazoodle’s search engines enable vast coverage of available information. In combination with deep information integration these large data volumes can be explored through a clear user interface. In fact, Cazoodle provides search results that are valuable because they can be compared in a consistent manner. Thumbs up.

CloudDebug – Distributed Logging with log4j and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Debugging in the Cloud

Debugging and logging is a crucial part in the successful development, roll-out and operation of IT systems. Systems that run in a distributed environment pose additional obstacles to application engineers who need to identify and fix system misbehavior in a timely manner. In such an environment, intelligent logging is indispensable.

In a short tutorial I demonstrate how to debug a distributed application with state-of-the-art technology as well as with a novel approach using Amazon Simple Queue Service, respectively. In a cost analysis I show that this approach is not only a fun technology challenge, but also a cheap way to implement logging for distributed applications.

Here is the prliminary document:

CloudDebug Version 0.1

(Updated versions will appear in the Pages section in the upper right corner of this Website)

Android Market Europe

Apparently, Android Market will be available for consumers and developers in Europe, soon. Just got this E-Mail.

Hello,

I’m writing to let you know that priced apps are now available to users in Germany and Austria. You can target your priced apps to these users by selecting the “Germany,” “Austria,” or “All Current and Future Countries with Payment” location options in the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish. If you select “All Current and Future Countries with Payment,” then your priced apps will automatically appear to users in all countries where priced apps are available.

Also, I am pleased to let you know that free applications will become available in Italy over the next few weeks. Italy will join the other countries where users currently can download free applications: US, UK, Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, and Singapore. You can make your free apps available to Italian users by selecting “All Current and Future Locations”. We will add the option to target these countries individually when we add the ability to add French and Italian application descriptions in the publisher website, which we expect to be complete in the coming weeks.

Finally, I want to let you know that we are hard at work to enable developers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain to offer priced applications in the coming weeks. Once merchant support for priced apps are live in these countries, we will announce our plans for launching support for developers in additional geographies.

Thanks for your support, and we look forward to continue working with you on Android Market.

Eric Chu,
Android Market

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA  94043

Control the Cloud: Licensing LongJump

License to Kill Build Enterprise Apps

Last week I had a talk with LongJump’s CEO Pankaj Malviya about the company’s most recent innovation: Enabling third-parties to license LongJump Business Application Platform.

Target Groups: Enterprise and ISV

The offering targets two different types of customers: the LongJump platform can be licensed for use within an enterprise’s data center or licensed by independent software vendors to build and host their own high performance, scalable, multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

Now, enterprises can install the LongJump platform in own datacenters to build applications in the cloud, while avoiding risks to expose critical data to outsiders. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance, information security and compliance are paramount and keeping local control of their information is an absolute necessity.

ISVs and service providers, on the other hand, can create end-user applications running on the LongJump platform without the risk of being hooked on a third-party platform (with respect to pricing, service levels, and so on).

Cloud Computing for Control Freaks

Enterprise and ISVs now have control and have a choice to take a proven application platform and install it internally, within their corporate firewall or private cloud, without worrying about compliance, security, or confidentially issues.

• Control of Delivery Options

Companies have broad flexibility to decide how to deploy their licensed LongJump platform; they could opt to deploy a private, behind-the-firewall instance, or use a virtualized hosting provider like Amazon EC2. Companies can choose to outsource infrastructure or use existing internal infrastructure.

• Control of Multi-Tenancy

LongJump provides several multi-tenancy configuration options: Multi-Tenant/Single Database, Multi-Tenant/Multiple Database, and Mixed-Tenancy, supporting both models simultaneously.

• Control of Application Portability

Move business applications from one cloud to another cloud or infrastructure.

• Control of Release Management

Develop, test and release in the Cloud: the LongJump platform enables companies to create development, staging and production instances, and assign different development roles to each instance.

During my talk with Pankaj I had a few difficulties understanding what’s so novel about LongJump platform and how the new offering is different from known platforms, such as Force.com, Zoho and Bunge Connect. Well, now I can see it: Cloud + Control.

Eucalyptus+AppScale=AWS+AppEngine

The UCSB EC2-cloud-clone-architecture Eucalyptus has given birth to additional overlay layer: AppScale. Like Eucalyptus simulates EC2 interfaces and functionality, AppScale simulates Google’s App Engine. Now it is possible to build an infrastructure that integrates well with both Amazon Web Services and App Engine. Nice…

AWS Eclipse Plug-in

Amazon published a cool Eclipse plug-in for Amazon Web Service development & deployment. The tool is well-documented and allows developers to manage, deploy and debug Java applications running on EC2 from within the Eclipse IDE. Thank you, Amazon!

There are 4 Eclipse views that help you manage your EC2 account: EC2 AMIs, EC2 Elastic Block Storage, EC2 Instances and EC2 Security Groups.

Moreover, now it is possible to set up a Tomcat cluster and deploy your application to it just like with a local Tomcat installation from within Eclipse. Set breakpoints in the code and debug it. (The Tomcat ports on the instance are automatically opened) Of course, there have been similar tools and Eclipse plug-ins before, but this one seems to be really useful and handy. For example: you have easy shell access to remote instances from within Eclipse. This is cool. I am looking forward to extensions for other services, such as SQS, S3, SimpleDB and CloudFront.

For more information, have a look at the step-by-step tutorial.

PS: I followed the example a bit too blindly and ran into an error that left me confused for a minute. I had forgotten to specify an entry page for my HelloEC2World application and ended up with a 404 when trying to view it. So, just create an index.html in the WebContent folder of the application.

Keyboardr

Today I came across a cool Web application that fellow students of University Karlsruhe developed: keyboardr. The major feature is to quickly navigate Google search results with your keyboard. My first impression was very positive; obviously the core developer Julius Eckert knows how to code proper Ajax. Besides the neat technical implementation, I can clearly see the value of a faster, better search interface.

Also: Check out the great developer blog of Julius Eckert.

Linked Data

On the occasion of 20 years www, Tim Berners-Lee gave an interesting presentation in a TED talk. Tim retells the story of how he invented the World Wide Web, an idea — “vague but exciting” his boss remarked with a pencil on the side of Tim’s memo — that entirely changed the way in which people around the world exchange and access information. The big challenge of our days is, to extend the Web to a source of knowledge, where not only documents are linked, but all kinds of data, a concept Tim refers to as “Linked Data”.

Although the Semantic Web has not become a reality, yet, the idea of Linked Data is gaining momentum. People begin to realize that in many cases it makes no sense to “lock up data” and with Web Services and REST it has become easier to make internal data accessible to external users. The main problem today is, that, while on the one hand data providers make data accessible via APIs, on the other hand they build walled gardens since they monetize on user-generated content. I am not sure how this problem can be overcome, but licensing seems to be a possible way. Data providers could charge money on a per-use basis for data to be used in a different commercial context or give it away for free if it is used for non-profit. Apache 3.0 for Linked Data?

Google App Engine – Free Lunch is Over

Apparently, Google App Engine costs money now – at least if you are over the free quotas (which are about to drop). This is the billing page that I can see on my App Engine account. More important, however, Google Checkout seems to be available for developers in more countries than just the United States and UK, soon. This means that you can easily commercialise your GAE applications other than with advertisement.

GAE Billing Status