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Any2Any
Technology
This
is the weakness link: the any2any technology landscape has not been
plotted. Anyhow, we will try here to project the requirements of
an any2any ePlatform and how current and emerging technologies
are actually meeting these needs, and if not, why not. In the original
design of the 4th Party Logistics ePlatform, we took the
underlying system architecture as a message-oriented web service
driven design. That was around early 2003. Using that development,
we will discuss the technological considerations in the design of
the any2any ePlatform. The design must be able to provide:
1) identity-driven participant actualization, 2) virtual any-to-any
channels for communications and information sharing, and 3) process
mapping and linkage facilitator. The platform can be viewed as a
portal and each function can be implemented as JSP pages or Portlets.
Portlets have restrictions that may not be suitable but yet could
be better than applet or JSP/servlet technology. We will explore
Portlets as a separate topic.
It
will take time to map out the landscape, but we will start with
these four areas:
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Any business process description language out there? BPEL
with WSDL in the SOA domain? What else is there? BPML?
BPQL? WSCDL?
What about SCOR?
SCOR stands for Supply Chain Operations Reference-model
and the website is at www.supply-chain.org.
See our notes
on SCOR.
ebXML
This is the very first process-oriented
standard that we have looked at and benefited from their
discussion on partnetship mapping (CPP and CPA). The idea
of 'collaborative partnership' remains a viable community-oriented
business practice. Dynamic collaborative partnership is
a norm on the any2any ePlatform rather than an rarity -
or alliances are rare or not competitive. What is missing
is the plug-and-sync (similar to plug-and-play) nature of
the business processes remain undefined or what is a 'connector'
should be to facilitate such on-demand connectivity at the
process level.
Thinkmap
Using Thinkmap 
to create an understanding of the any-2-any connectivity.
We have done an example with the purposes and user names
to remain anonymous.
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Rich
Internet Applications (RIA)/Thin-Thick Client/AJAX
One
design of the platform is to facilitate instant communications
among online participants. As the platform is message-driven,
an Internet client must be able to 'listen.' It was reported
in the Datamonitor site ("The
Safa of Rich Internet Clients"), that there are
frameworks such as MS Avalon, Macromedia Flex and open source
Lazlo for deployment of richer clients. Further, in an Oracle
blog, others such as AJAX,
XUL
and Applets are also RIA solutions that are now available.
We like to investigate further how this technology can help
in realizing anywhere any2nay communication via a common
tool, e.g., the Java-enabled web browser. This will help
us understand more and choose the right capabilities with
respect to the design and development of e-Platform's interactivity
trait.
Messaging Services (JMS Servers)/ESB
From some discussions on
JMS Server software, the volume of messages and the speed
in which messages are handled are on the mind of users.
Not one implementation of JMS services among those listed
met the requirement - whether the software is of commercial
or open source nature. We have tried at the outset with
the commercial product SonicMQ ,
then moved on to open source JORAM and
OpenJMS ;
and eventually with ActiveMQ now.
The buzz word now is Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in architectural
consideration.
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A2A JSP Tags - Any2Any (see some of the simple tags in development
here
[January 1, 2008])
AOLA JSP Tags - Author-Once-Learn-Anywhere
TOSA JSP Tags - Tag-Once-Synchronize-Anywhere
[basic JSTL usage examples]
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JSON Versu XML
 [jan.20.2007]
What about RDF and
OWL ?
A 'ontology of mathematics content' would help to diminish
the impacts of various development efforts when sharing of
these ME (Mathematics Education) contents is expected. Would
there be a RDF for ME contents? Is it out there? |
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Technology |
The choices were limited as any Window-based
technology was ruled out (not a choice but simply a lack of
the domain knowledge). So, how many spins can you do with
Java-based technologies? Actually, there are a lot that we
can handle. The original development (i.e., the ePlatform
of Cyber Logistics) used JSP and Applets. JSP was used to
present instance information dynamically, but when the instance
must be real-time, we used Applets to fill that gap. Yet,
Applets are difficult to develop, test and deploy, and we
are not sure the performance of client's JVM in handling multiple
applets in the same session, even with WebStart. Then, the
portlet technology was brought into the picture. Would portlet
resolve some of the concerns, but yet manifest new contextual
issues (e.g., refreshing of one portlet trigger refresh for
all - as refreshing is crucial with the dynamic nature of
logistics services and of RFID event-triggered data generation.)
At this point, portlet technology should be used for the information
portal, while Java EE technology is used for real-time transactional
activities.
We will provide some discussion on Portlets later [posted
May 1, 2007].
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Adopted Open Source Technology |
| Adopted |
to be adopted |
Developed |
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Servlets |
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AJAX |
lucene
v2.3.0
(latest
is 2.3.1 as of May 4, 2008) |
JSPTags |
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| dojo |
Apache Batik |
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Technology developement can be viewed from the
following chart (Figure 1). From this chart, we can see the development
progresses according to our view of the Web, from the Reactive Web
Era to the Interactive Web Era, and to the current Integrative Web
Era [Chu, et. al, 2007].
The Integrative Era does not enforce the any2any requirement as
weak as here - it is a stronger version now as commercial values
remain to be seen.
Figure 1. Technology as They Are Introduced.
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