MIT System Design and Management Program Hosts Experts on Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

The MIT System Design and Management (SDM) summer 2010 business trip kicked off at the Faculty Club with a keynote address on entrepreneurship and leadership by Mamoon Yunus (MIT Mechanical Engineering, 1993 and 1995), President and CEO of Crosscheck Networks.

Yunus, who was introduced by Unatek CTO Charles Iheagwara (SDM 2010) after an opening statement by SDM director Pat Hale, saw a "gap" in the cloud computing movement and in 2004 founded Crosscheck to build technology that would scrub XML traffic in the cloud. Seeing gaps, said Yunus, is key to success.

"You can’t innovate in a vacuum," Yunus said. For example, after speaking at Harvard Business School he was approached by several MBA students who asked him, "‘How does one generate ideas? We know business, but are looking for ideas where we can apply our business skills."

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Building SOA using Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 provides one of the leading edge web services-aware Database. It is easy to install and configure and can rapidly expose a stored procedure as a web services WSDL operation. With an integrated HTTP stack, MS SQL Server 2005 does not require a separate web server like IIS.

For an overview of SQL Server SOA capabilities, see Jerry Dixon's article:

SQL Server and SODA
— Over the past year, I've been discussing some of the various technologies found inside SQL Server 2005. Three of these technologies are CLR integration, HTTP endpoints, and Service Broker. (Articles on these topics were published, respectively, in the November 2005, March 2006, and November 2006 editions of the DNDJ.) Each of these is a powerful tool in its own right, and can be used to great effect in almost any SQL installation. When used together, however, they become much more powerful.

For tutorial on setting up endpoints and exposing a stored procedure as web services operations, see Peter DeBetta's article:

New HTTP Endpoints Create SQL Server 2005 Web Services.

SOA Testing Microsoft SQL Server is simple. The WSDL generated is WS-I BP compliant and can easily be loaded into testing tools such as Crosscheck Networks SOAPSonar for Functional, Performance, Interoperability and Vulnerability Testing of the exposed endpoints.

SOA World Editorial - Getting on the Grid

On Jan 14, 2007, Dr. Dobbs published an article titled Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo that highlights the convergence of SOA and Utility Computing. This article highlights a move towards Hardware as a Service (HaaS) and the merits of dynamically provisioned hardware based on crossing pre-set resource thresholds (CPU, Memory, TCP Connections, etc). Excerpts from this article are as follows:

Web services-based SOA has fundamentally changed how applications integrate. Add on top of that Amazon EC2 to host your business operations, and you get a potent combination. The significant, yet unnoticed breakthrough of Amazon EC2 is in its ability to spawn up a server instance by a mere web-service call. In addition to a command line interface, EC2 provides a detailed provisioning WSDL that can be used by any web-services application to dynamically control (e.g., run, terminate, authorize) Linux instances within the Amazon Cloud.... components which run business applications can also control dynamic provisioning and maintenance of the very physical infrastructure that they are deployed on. With Amazon EC2, for the first time, SOA components are aware of and in control of their host machines and can clone new instances of themselves based on environmental factors such as user load, available resources and cost.

On March 7, 2007, Ajax World Magazine Sean Rhody, Editor-in-Chief of SOA World Magazine, echoed our sentiments with a superb piece, SOA World Editorial — Getting on the Grid. It is always gratifying to see industry luminaries such as Sean see things in the same light. I liked the new term Sean uses, SOI: Service Oriented Infrastructure. Here are some excerpts from the article, it's a must read:

Grid computing, with the ability to bring capacity on line and to bear on a problem as needed provides another stunning opportunity to move from traditional means of operation to a service platform. Bringing CPUs to bear on a problem in a dynamic fashion, assigning additional network capacity to deal with peak loads, and allocating private connections on the fly in response to security needs are just a few of the capabilities that infrastructure vendors are building into their hardware and operating software.

Great minds do think alike - Kudos to Sean for appreciating and writing about the inevitable convergence of SOA & Utility computing and its impact on SOA Testing.

Mashup Camp, MIT

I enjoyed attending a few sessions at Mashup Camp. Overall, there is significant innovation and electricity around what the Mashup community is putting together. I enjoyed Jinesh Varia's (Amazon) presentation on building your own YouTube (iTube!). The use case involved uploading-> storing(S3)-> queuing(SQS)-> processing(EC2)-> hosting(ECS)-> Filtering(MTurk)-> Searching(perhaps Hadoop on EC2) video/images. The use case was intriguing since it logically and convincingly utilized parts of the Amazon Infrastructure. This highlights the point in my earlier blog that the cost of innovation is dramatically lower and even when scalability is required, the cost will align with specific computation & storage needs.

I also enjoyed looking at Mashups developed by LignUp, VOIP-SOA company. LignUp provides a comprehensive platform for controlling and integrating VOIP traffic within an enterprise network. The use case that I found most intriguing is having voice tied into CRM systems. This would give a fuller picture on communication between a company and its customers beyond just email archives.

I bumped into Julio Burgo from Carmun, a web portal for students to share and store academic research papers. I love their tag line: "Students of the world Unite!"

For a list of all the attendees, see Mashup Attendees.

Web Services Testing SugarCRM

SugarCRM is cost-effective, powerful and flexible open source CRM system built on PHP and MySQL Database. Its a great CRM system for cost-conscious companies that need a solid CRM platform. At $40/user/month for a hosted On-Demand offering, its priced for the frugal.

Besides its great CRM functionality and reasonable pricing, what I really like about SugarCRM is its extensive web services API. This enables the SugarCRM platform to be easily integrated with the IT ecosystem that is increasingly becoming web services aware.

If you a have a web site portal that captures customer registration information, and you'd like to integrate that with a Leads Capture Mechanism, I highly recommend that you consider SugarCRM. Its SOAP API makes the integration process between your web portal and the SugarCRM Leads Module simple. The fields in the Leads Module are highly customizable and all your customized fields are available via the SOAP API as well.

For a Quick Start on SugarCRM Web Services Functionality, see the following article:

Getting Started with SugarCRM Web Services using SOAPSonar

Oracle BPEL Process Manager

The following article published in SOA Web Services Journal provides a good glimpse into interoperability issues between Microsoft .NET WCF and Oracle BPEL Process manager. It highlights a couple of interesting items:

1. WS-Addressing is required for endpoint representation especially for long running transactions where the server invokes a callback to the client for sending the response once the processing is complete. Oracle BPEL Process Manager supports a different version on WS-Addressing than Microsoft .NET WCF. So out-of-the-box, the WS-Addressing will not work. Luckily, Oracle BPEL Process Manager supports WS-BPEL extensions (bpelx:headerVariable) that provides the BPEL process access to header information sent by the client. With a handle on header information, the BPEL process manager can manipulate WS-Addressing information and ensure that the the Process executes and that the call-back is compliant with what the .NET WCF client is expecting.

2. When a server is WS-Security enabled and is expecting a User Name Token, an X.509 token, or a SAML assertion in the SOAP Header, the BPEL Process Manager can again use WS-BPEL extensions such as (bplex:inputHeaderVariable) to stuff SOAP Headers with tokens before invoking an endpoint that expects this information.

Really Cool Stuff!

Web Services and SOA
— People sometimes ask what a service-oriented architecture enables today that could not have been done with the older, proprietary integration stacks of the past 5 to 15 years, such as those from Tibco, IBM, or Vitria. One such ability is the greater degree of interoperability between heterogeneous technology stacks that is made possible by the standards SOA is built on, such as Web services and BPEL. Although interoperability is only one facet of the SOA value proposition, it is one that has become increasingly more important, due in large part to the evolving IT environment, merger and acquisition activity, and increased partner connectivity.