FuseSource Tour in Brazil

I had the pleasure to spend a week in Brazil doing a FuseSource Tour in two of the major cities... Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It's pretty clear that the Open Source community is growing really fast and the integration and messaging opportunities are hot.

Unfortunately, I couldn't visit all of the prospective partners and customers that had contacted us because we couldn't find a single empty spot on the agenda but I think the tour was an amazing experience and I'm pretty I'll back in the near future for more fun with the techies.

Some of the things I realized while traveling throughout Brazil is that the traffic is really crazy and made me remember some other cities like Los Angeles or Mexico City... You have to be really creative in terms of logistics to be able to meet more than two customers in the same day especially in Sao Paulo.

Food was a big surprise and it was pretty good either in Sao Paulo or Rio and I met nice and friendly people all over the place... Gotta keep up on the workout front to shed some extra pounds!

On the business side, I've met mostly customers in the financial sector and partners that already use Apache technologies like ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF and ServiceMix and I was able to have a good tech talk with them while discussing some architectural aspects as well as development techniques.

While talking to a couple of big banks in Sao Paulo, it sounded to me that companies are realizing the value and maturity of, for example, Apache ActiveMQ where their are not only reducing licensing costs but also exploring features that other messaging products don't offer at this point.

Of course, the reliability and extensibility as well as high performance are key factors for all of these organizations and ActiveMQ is/is going to be part of their architecture.

Sao Paulo Subway System

Then, on the second part of the week (more precisely in Rio de Janeiro), I visited a telecom company who's using ServiceMix as part of their core engineering systems and I was happy to discuss patterns and features they are using and also some things they can do to improve it in the next rollout.

Rio de Janeiro's Sugar Loaf

Interesting enough, all of the developers and architects I had the pleasure to talk to were really amazed with Apache Camel and there are tons of use cases where they see possibilities of writing a couple lines using either Java DSL or Spring XML Configuration rather than several lines of code where they need to manage everything from the connection to the business logic. What everybody really liked during the Camel demos is the abstraction layer that Camel provides where you concentrate on the business logic and not on the details of the implementation. Gotta a comment that we're now "High-tech plumbers" connecting all of the enterprise applications with the simplicity and power of Camel, ActiveMQ, CXF and ServiceMix. 

But, the best moment was when I did an Apache ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF and ServiceMix overview presentation in one of the largest companies in the country for 100 developers and technical folks. I was really impressed on how excited they got after the talk and Q&A and they are really looking forward to apply the discussed topics on their projects right away. The same presentation should be the core of a webinar that I'm planning to do in December... a quick overview about the technology and how FuseSource has been helping customer/partners to successfully work with those Apache projects from conception to deployment.

To celebrate the successful talk, next morning I went for a run at Ipanema's beach where I ended up with the view below... Simply amazing...

Ipanema's Beach

Well, I'm really looking forward to continue to work with organizations in Latin America and come back soon...

Desktop Events with OpenSpan and Oracle CEP - Part 3

Having started the Oracle CEP successfully was the goal for the second part of this tutorial. Now, we're going to start building a sample OpenSpan automation to send messages through the JMS interface we created previously and push events from the desktop application to Oracle CEP.


28. Go to OpenSpan Studio (or MS-Visual Studio with OpenSpan plug-in installed) and create a new project. Select OpenSpan Project and name it OpenSpan_OCEP_Tutorial

29. Add a new Windows Form. Add a label, text box and button to your recently created Windows Form. You should have something similar to the following picture:

30. Go to Automation1 (Add a new Automation if you don't have one) and drag a MessagePublisher component from the Toolbox (Add the component to the Toolbox if it's not available for you). Make sure it's set to Global.
31. Highlight the messagePublisher1 component and go to the Properties panel. Select the MessageVendorType and set the Message Connection Properties to connect to the Oracle WebLogic instance we configured on the Part 1 of this tutorial.

You have to provide the following information:


Host: localhost
Port: 7001
Connection Factory Name: osevents_queue_cf
Queue Name: osevents_SampleQ1
Queue Type: Queue
Username: (your username to Oracle WebLogic)
Password: (your password to Oracle WebLogic)
Session Mode: AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE
Make sure you update the connection information to Oracle WebLogic if you haven't followed the tutorial and changed that information along the course of it.


32. Let's initialize the messageProducer1 component when we start the project. To do that, add an OpenSpan.Runtime.RuntimeHost/ProjectStarted Event component from the Toolbox.

33. Next, add the messagePublisher1 (Start Method) to the Automation1 and then connect OpenSpan.Runtime.RuntimeHost/ProjectStarted to the messagePublisher1. You should end up with something similar to the following:

34. Add the submit button click event, the text box value and messageProducer1 (Send Method) to the Automation1 canvas. Create the message workflow connecting submit button click to the message producer. Set the text of the message connecting the text box value to the msgText variable on the message producer. Your automation should look like this:

35. Run the project, type something on the text box of the Windows form and click Publish.

36. When you click Publish on the Windows form , a JMS message is dispatched from the OpenSpan Runtime to the Oracle WebLogic JMS provider, that message is stored on the osevents_SampleQ1 queue until it's consumed by the listener on the Oracle CEP project configured on Part 2 of this tutorial. The message content is then displayed on the Oracle CEP console.

37. That message is displayed on the Oracle CEP Console because the query running against the events is simply selecting all events sent to the helloInputChannel.

The HelloWorldBean then gets the text of the message's body and print it.

Feel free to modify the query running against the events published to this Oracle CEP project or the bean printing the messages to experiment different behaviors.

This concludes the Desktop Events with OpenSpan and Oracle CEP. I hope you could follow along and this tutorial could give you a good start point to work with OpenSpan and CEP engines. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments.

UPDATE: The source code of this project is available at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10511857/OCEP_OpenSpan_Tutorial.zip