A short list of companies at the JavaOne Pavilion that look interesting to me:

Krugle is a source code search engine. It spiders your organizations source code repositories and lets you track code definitions. For instance, when you fix a bug in a well used, and shared, code library Krugle shows the other projects that use the same bug-laden code.

Style Intelligence has 101+ dashboards, reports, scorecards, and other visualizations of data.

Skyway Software makes an open-source application development environment. You build everything in their Eclipse plug-in. It's wonderfully well design user interface makes construction of apps very easy. I'm going to look into this one with the hope that I can build a bunch of sample code for PushToTest TestMaker users quickly.

Determyne is an open-source transaction-level performance monitoring solution for JEE applications. I'll be investigating this to incorporate into TestMaker.

-Frank

JavaOne 2008 struggles to retain its importance. Read my full report at:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49332

-Frank

Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con interviewed me at the AjaxWorld conference last month. He asked me about trends I am seeing in Web 2.0 and Ajax development at enterprise IT shops. I also talk about what its like for software developers and testers to work in Ajax environments.

http://www.sys-con.tv/read/540772.htm

-Frank

I am planning to attend the Redmonk Unconference at CommunityOne on Monday. The Unconference is at Moscone Center in San Francisco on May 5, 2008. I will propose myself to talk about data-driven Ajax performance testing using Selenium and PushToTest.

Last year's Unconference was terrific.  Instead of going to another track planned by Sun to hear from their marketing folks or a JavaOne conference sponsor, the Unconference topics are proposed by attendees and the selection is made by a democratic vote at the beginning of the day. The Unconference worked out splendidly. I am very much looking forward to the Unconference!

Please join me and I will be happy to take you around and introduce you to everyone I know.

-Frank

Java developers and QA testers are challenged to develop automated tests in a time when Ajax, REST, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web application development is expanding greatly. Open Source Test Automation has emerged as a more affordable and flexible option to the traditional vendors.

Open Source Test Automation vendors Eviware (maker of soapUI)  and PushToTest (maker of TestMaker) will have some exiciting news to announce at the JavaOne conference. The announcement will leverage our abilities to deliver SOA testing best practices using open source tools and methods.

I am finding that customers are increasingly turning to Open Source solutions for their testing needs. We recently wont such large customers as AMD, Amazon, Ford, The Jackson Laboratory and TVGuide. With 160,000 users, PushToTest delivers a single affordable platform to accomplish functional testing, load and performance testing, and business service monitoring. PushToTest integrates soapUI for fast and easy authoring of Web service test suites to run on a set of distributed PushToTest load test injector TestNodes.

PushToTest and Eviware will be exhibiting in the SOA Village in the JavaOne Exhibition Hall in booth 425.

I am available to meet you on Wed., May 7 or Thurs., May 8 at the show.  Please let me know.

-Frank

I'll be giving a keynote talk on SOA Development In The Real World at TIBCO's user conference next week. This will be based on the work PushToTest did to surface the developer productivity and performance differences between TIBCO, BEA, Oracle, and IBM platforms for SOA development. All of the research is available under a free open-source license at http://soakit.pushtotest.com.

If you are attending TUCON then please let me know and I will be glad to meet with you personally.

-Frank

Here are the details:

BPEL Basics for Java Developers Webinar

WHEN: Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 2pm EDT, 11am PDT, 18:00 GMT

WHERE: Online web meeting. Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/316860522

WHO: Ron Romano, Principal Consulting Architect, Active Endpoints, Inc.

WHAT: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Basics for Java Developers. This free, educational webinar is being presented as a service to the Java development community and will introduce developers to the concepts and techniques they need to understand in order to effectively create a new generation of applications based on web services. BPEL for Java Developers maps common Java techniques to their equivalent concepts in BPEL, enabling developers to transition to orchestrating web-services quickly and easily.

WHY: Java is an imperfect development language for creating SOA-based applications. BPEL has been developed as an open standard to address the need for a robust environment to create services-based applications. This webinar introduces Java developers to SOA-based service orchestrations developers by discussing BPEL in terms that Java developers already understand.

Luc Castera blogged about my talk at AjaxWorld. His review is at:

http://dambalah.com/2008/04/13/ajax-world-conference-day-3/

-Frank

This week I was the speaker at SkillsMatter.com in London. I gave a talk on the PushToTest test methodology and free open-source test automation tools to check Web applications, Web services, and Ajax applications for function, scalability, and performance. SkillsMatter is the new European partner to PushToTest to offer training on our products. In June I am back in London teaching our popular Open-Source Test Automation Bootcamp.

Harry Wood attended my talk and posted a blog entry about his experience at http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2008/04/11/unit-testing-soa-and-mule-talks

-Frank

Mule makes an open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and SOA development platform. Held at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco over 2 days, Mulecon attracted approximately 400 delegates, including Mule staff. I was very glad to go as the conference let me talk to several Mule ESB users. I had to do a fair amount of begging to get an invitation since PushToTest is the author of the SOA Knowledge Kit, a TIBCO commissioned comparison of commercial SOA/ESB development platforms. (PushToTest will be an exhibitor at TUCON later this month, and I might be in their keynote session.) Maybe someday I will be appointed an ambassador to something. :-)

The presentations varied between Mule staff talking about Mule and the product roadmap and customers talking about their use of Mule. The Mule staff seemed to be singing from the same songbook: Mule claims 13,000 deployments of Mule ESB, Mule 2.0 is not compatible with 1.4 but the migration should not be too difficult as the concepts are the same, Mule Enterprise Edition, Saturn and Mule HQ releases coming late this year.

A Room Full of Architects

It did not take long for me to realize that Mulecon delegates are mostly software architects. Typical questions I heard goes like this:

"Your company inherits a big bank and needs to decide between JMS and Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) for a universal protocol for your bank. Which would you pick?"

and

"How do you empirically come to a model that will let you uncover the performance characteristics and measurements?"

These are the kinds of discussions that make my wife immediately yawn and roll her eyes! Geeks, there's a lot of 'em in this room.

ESB, Grid, AMQP Approaches

Conversations about hub-and-spoke, virtual circuits, and bus architecture seem to be over. Just about everyone I met expects a heterogeneous architecture where parts of a system are hub-and-spoke and others are bus-based. Easy service interfaces now exist between each type of architecture using daemons and local brokers. Jahan Moreh, VP of Engineering at U1, had a very basic message "Provided the underlying products are good you won't have a problem."

Jahan was more sanguine about guaranteed deliver and performance. In essence "performance and guaranteed delivery are in conflict." Choose one but don't expect both. I very much want to do primary research to determine a standards way to profile performance in a guaranteed delivery setting. Hopefully one of our customers will commission a PushToTest study. (hint, hint.)

I learn about AMQP at Mulecon. AMQP is a protocol-level standards initiative to provide a messaging infrastructure. Jahan told me "AMQP tries to do something very important but may not be attainable. Because they are at the protocol level they may wind up being extensions on the side. I would bet on the JMS side."

POJOs Rule, But Where Is BPM?

Eugene Ciurana of LeapFrog gave a talk about LeapFrog's use of Mule. I just saw Eugene at TheServerSide.com Java Symposium in Las Vegas last week. Boy does Eugene get around!

LeapFrog is marketing a child's toy that features downloadable content – not bad for products that must cost less than a few dollars to manufacture! The backend system to support this effort uses ESB technology to provide flexibility to LeapFrog's software developers and reliability in operating the service and applications.

Many of the question-and-answer sessions at Mulecon include a question on Business Process Management (BPM) such as: "What are you doing for BPM in your architecture?" Eugene took one of these.

This question echoes what I had learned in Las Vegas: Java architects and developers are frustrated looking for Business Process Management (BPM) standards and tools. Brian Sletten's talk at TSSJS was titled "Avoiding ESBs" but could have been better described as "I'm sick and tired of waiting for vendors to give me a decent Business Process Management (BPM) platform!"

At Mulecon, Rory dela Pax of Biogen Idec, told me that "Mule is good at doing some workflow. But, all of us are struggling with BPM. We do a separation of skills strategy rather than overloading the ESB with these tasks."

Over the years I have seen most of the platform vendors try to provide the Java development community with set of products, best practices, framework, and code to implement applications that deliver business flows. I am specifically remembering the failures of JBI, JEMs, BPEL, SCA, and WS-*. None have come together to offer a standard. I sense a lot of anger and disappointment at all the failed attempts. Mostly disappointment from me.

Eugene answered the BPM question by telling the delegates that LeapFrog pushes all of its development to Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs.) They actively separate every application from each other. LeapFrog then uses Mule routers to define the inputs and outputs. Eugene said "We are not doing any transactional data at Leapfrog. Our support is for the toy devices." He added that Leapfrog has a separate side of the IT house for Oracle tools and BPEL.

Mule and Clustering

Rory dela Pax of Biogen Idec gave a brief talk on their migration from BEA WebLogic Integration (WLI) to Mule. The migration came about like many companies adopting an open-source project: A developer mentioned it during a water break conversation. The environment was ripe: Biogen Idec found WLI to be "a bit on the heavy side, unstable, and has not scaled well." They were also leery of the rumors of the Oracle buy-out since late 2006. They found that Mule has a one-for-one match in capabilities, plus they see Mule as lightweight, stable, and scalable.

I can understand lightweight and stable, but the scalability claim seemed to need some proof. Rory tells me they achieve scalability by using WebLogic Server (WLS) 8.1 SP6's clustering. They deploy their Mule application as a WAR file in a cluster of JVMs in WLS. There are no separate JVMs in their environment. I imagine the gaul the WLI product manager must feel at being swapped out. :-)

Still, there is a lot that Biogen Idec needs to learn about clustering. They still need to define the best way to cluster. Rory told the delegates "We don't know how to do that." They would like to define clustering methods in environments where message sizes grow larger. Right now their application uses simple verb+link combinations. The incoming request is to approve an invoice and the response contains a link to bring the user's browser into the application.

Rory told me some of the downsides to using this WLS clustering approach. For example, they use Quartz as a scheduler. In this WLS clustering set-up changing the Quartz schedules means redeploying the application to the cluster.

Moving Up To Mule 2.0

Mule 1.4 uses DTDs to define pretty much everything – settings, configuration, deployments. Mule 2.0 delivers XML Schema based configuration that leverages Spring's "Extensible XML Authoring." The result is less cumbersome class names because of namespace support. They are updating their Eclipse support to provide auto-completion and context-specific help. Mule 2.0 features transport-specific endpoints and connectors and now everything is done through typed properties. There is a lot of extensibility because each module/transport comes with its own schema. Mule 2.0 lets you implemtn your own schema too.

Some additional changes in Mule 2.0: CXF supercedes XFire (XFire is still available,) there is a new expression evaluator framework, streaming improvements, auto-transformation, and lots of bug fixes. Plus, Mule 2.0 has 30% more unit tests over 1.4. Mule uses Spring to implement Beans. Mule uses session and entity (data) beans inside the Mule container or through proxies to external data services.

Mulecon left me a few questions:

1. How important was the Spring-based approach to building services to Mule's popularity and success?
2. Is anyone, I mean anyone on Earth, using OpenESB from Sun? None of the Mule users had any experience with it.
3. How are Mule and Mule users testing Mule for scalability and performance? Mule 2 provides hundreds of unit tests but apparently no performance tests, at least none that I could find.
4. What are the tradeoffs of an ESB versus Gigispaces, Tangosol and other grid environments?

Mulecon impressed me with its quality presentations and delegates. I will keep it in mind when PushToTest does its first user conference, PTTCon, or PushCon, of TestCon, or who knows!?

-Frank

HTMLUnit is an open-source library that implements APIs that act like a modern JavaScript-enabled browser. It is ideal for building unit tests of browser-based Ajax-style applications. We use HTMLUnit in PushToTest to test Ajax, Web, and JavaScript in browser-based applications. PushToTest turns HTMLUnit's functional tests of a Web site into a load and performance test and a Business Service Monitor (BSM.)

I'm happy to spread the news that the HTMLUnit team release version 2.0 today!

The Change Log notes many improvements and bug fixes, including migration to Java 5, implementation of org.w3c.dom.*, better support for incorrect html code, large improvements in JavaScript support (GWT 1.4 tests now pass, and a bunch of bug fixes.

I opened an enhancement ticket to upgrade PushToTest to HTMLUnit 2.0.

Congratulations HTMLUnit team!

-Frank

I recently received an email asking:

"Is it possible to use PushtoTest to build a test of a 

Web Application that uses Flash?"

It is possible to test Flash applications using PushToTest. We are currently helping FordDirect.com do this. It does not come without some extra work. For instance, by itself there is no record/playback capability to build tests of Flash animations. However, there is a programmatic way to discover the content of ActionScript variables and to activate functions by doing the equivalent of pressing a button or using Flash controls. PushToTest professional support services will instruct you on the approach, how to instrument your Flash animations for testing, and teach our test methodology and testing platform.

-Frank

The session is free and I will be happy to answer your questions. For details and directions

see: http://www.skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/the-next-step-in-unit-testing-and-java

Over the past year PushToTest observed a trend among the 160,000 people in our open-source community: Software developers, QA testers, and IT managers are looking for a better way to develop, orchestrate, deploy, and manage services. The Composition Approach to Building Large-Scale SOA introduces a new service composition approach to building SOA services, explains composition, and provides a methodology and test kit to evaluate today's tools for developer productivity and ease of deployment/management.

Last week, TIBCO hosted me on a Webcast to talk about Service Virtualization, Service Composition, and the SOA Knowledge Kit. The Webcast is now available at:

http://media.tibco.com/video/tibco_031808/index.html

 

-Frank

The Selenium founders are organizing a user meeting at Google's Mountain View, California office on Monday, February 25. Among other things they will be describing the push to release Selenium 1.0 and the roadmap and internals of Selenium 2.0.

Details on the Selenium user meeting are at

http://selenium.openqa.org/meetup.jsp

-Frank

This morning I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms.

The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

PushToTest looked below the surface-level marketing claims to understand the skill sets, domain expertise, and specialization that it takes to be successful. We discovered a wide variety of experiences: some highly successful and others rife with challenges. We measured the amount of developer effort to implement an SOA use case and summarize the findings in the following total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison chart.

This morning we opened the doors on a new center within the PushToTest Web site for you to learn more about SOA, learn about the new composition approach to SOA development and deployment, and download the kits.

SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit

-Frank

Last year PushToTest built a test runner for soapUI and bundled soapUI in the PushToTest version 5 distribution. The advantage to Java developers is three fold:

1) soapUI test suites run in a distributed PushToTest test environment - a grid of test machines each turning out SOAP requests to your application.

2) The PushToTest environment dynamically provides operational data to the soapUI test suites. For instance, the data could be sign-in information or product part numbers. The data production libraries (DPLs) get data from a relational database, from a comma-separated-value file, and from service calls dynamically.

3) PushToTest provides a results analysis engine and performance comparison utility to identify problem test suite performance and problem service calls. Additionally, while the test suites operate the PushToTest Monitor watches CPU, Network, and Memory utilization of the test machines and the target hosting the application and correlates these back to the test suite operation to surface the problem datacenter components.

We increasingly see upper management at our customers look at consumer hits like Facebook, Flikr, Google Maps, and tell their engineers "We want that!" At the same time Java developers in 2008 have good tools to service enable their classes. The interface may be SOAP, or any number of others including REST, Ajax, JMS to a message queue, RMI, etc.

We are seeing customers use PushToTest in service environments. They tend to start service enabling a few classes and wind-up with a grid of interconnected services. While soapUI by itself is a terrific tool for working with individual services, the nature of service enabling Java classes means most organizations need a test methodology, patterns, and tools that work in a grid of services.

Customer success at testing in a grid environment is the motivation behind a new partnership that eviware and PushToTest announced this week. Java developers benefit when two open-source 100% Java projects partner to solve service testing challenges and help us test in a grid environment.

-Frank

We are getting very close to the PushToTest 5.1 release - hopefully this week! New datasheet and white paper downloads are available to explain PushToTest and open-source test automation:

PushToTest 2-Page DataSheet

PushToTest White Paper: The Importance of Test Automation

Both are in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

-Frank

A lot of QA testers are coming to the realization that testing applications built on Java, Database, and Application Server tools can't get them from here-to-there when using the old-and-trusted record/playback test tools. The problem often starts when a database instance needs to service client Web interfaces with dynamic data at the same time as the middle tier is serving Ajax (XML, String, and JSON) data for rich browser interfaces, and REST and SOAP interfaces with transactional data.

New tools have emerged over the past year - such as soapUI, Selenium, and PushToTest - that are designed for Web application, Web service, and Ajax testing. Pulling these tools and platforms together into something that the average database developer, application engineer, and tester can use requires a lot of effort.

To meet this need, PushToTest is now offering a Bootcamp to train technical folks how to leverage soapUI, Selenium, and PushToTest. Details are found at http://bootcamp.pushtotest.com

-Frank

PushToTest celebrates its 6th year of operation in 2008! It has been very pleasing to see the renewed interest at medium and large enterprises for software testing. A lot of credit to this interest is due to the experts, on-line communities, and media/editors that are following software test automation. From time-to-time PushToTest users (and customers) ask where they can look for information on software test automation.

I put together a list of the people I turn to to get the word out about PushToTest. I am publishing this list starting today at:

http://www.pushtotest.com/Docs/software-test-automation-media-list

The list is by no means complete. For instance, Google Analytics credits visits to our Web site from 245 referring sites! If there is someone you know that deserves to be on the list then please let me know.

-Frank