SCI-Flex goes live !!!

Greetings everyone...
After reaching successful completion, Project SCI-Flex is going through its last days as a Final Year Project of the University. Today (28th January), the SCI-Flex team successfully completed the final project Presentations to the panel of University Staff from the Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering.

The final presentation is embedded below..

The team will be running through the final demonstrations tomorrow! This then, may be the end of the final year project for the team, but we have no doubt that this will NOT be the end for SCI-Flex. It is a project standing upon successful completion, and we look towards integration of SCI-Flex into real world applications presently.

Project SCI-Flex

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: soa cep)

Registry Integration of SCI-Flex mediator

The SCI-Flex mediator supports static configuration of XML as well as AXIOM message reception and mediation through Esper CEP system as of today. Obviously, the mediator requires some bits of configuration that it needs in order to make proper use of Esper and the routing of messages through Synapse. Classically, the mediator is backed with a configuration XML object which is embedded in the Synapse configuration (synapse.xml) used by the Synapse ESB. According to how Synapse is implemented, the configuration is statically loaded and the ESB continues to use the same bits of information through out an active lifetime.

By analyzing the nature of the configuration information provided to the Synapse-Esper mediator, we discovered that whilst certain portions of the configuration seems static and used over and over, certain portions need not necessarily be so. Thus, it was obviously needed to have some way that one could dynamically configure the mediator according to his/her requirement.

Synapse facilitates the option of dynamically configuring parameters of the ESB by the use of a remote back-end Registry. The WSO2ESB uses this model of Synapse and provides two models of back-end Registries, the ESB Registry and the WSO2 Registry (using the WSO2 Registry project).

We have made it possible for a user of SCI-Flex to be able to dynamically configure the endpoint to which the responses should be delivered as well as, provide the EPL queries through either of the back-end Registries implemented by the WSO2 ESB.

More information on how to use the SCI-Flex interface to store EPL queries, and endpoints on a back-end Registry will be added shortly.

SCI-Flex and Open Source

When planning SCI-Flex, we had to decide on one major factor. That is the development model that we are going to use. We chose Open Source as we believe that it would benefit a larger audience. The SOA and CEP combination being a novel idea is another fact that we believe Open Source will be the best possible way to unleash it's true potential.

The level of research we are expecting to put into this project is immense. However, this doesn't guarantee that the SOA+CEP combination is a true success and does not confirm whether it meets the requirements of a potential user. The Open Source approach gives the SCI-Flex project the ability to be used and utilized in an efficient manner to uncover the true power of CEP systems in the presence of a well organized SOA environment.

Still at the beginning of the project, we have not yet planned about distributions and deployment alternates. Thus, the prime focus remains still in rather What should be done? rather than How should it be done?. As a starting point we've made the source code for SCI-Flex available @ Google Code. You are free to go ahead and give it a try. Further involvement with the project development activities are made possible through the project's mailing lists. Discussions are welcome on the SCI-Flex developer mailing list.

Several Open Source projects such as Apache HTTP Server, Linux Kernel, and Mozilla Firefox have made it the forefront as globally renowned software. We the SCI-Flex project team would like to see someday, our project being a globally renowned software in the SOA+CEP sphere.

Role of a CEP System in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a concept in where various services are made available through a cloud ( a network of resources which is a part of the internet), to users, without any knowledge, control, or privileged access to the underlying infrastructure that provides services. The services are necessarily IT related business applications that are more or less extensions to the traditional computing systems.

Clouds that provide services are backed by huge infrastructures of resources and handle large number of clients or users to which it provides services. The number of clients serviced by a particular cloud at any given instance can be in the magnitude of millions to billions depending on the type of service provided. This gives rise to the importance of a proper event management system in order to track usage and assist workflows.

Complex Event Processing Systems are vested with the capability of handling large streams of events and identifying useful patterns and trigger events based on them. Thus, it is clearly evident that a CEP system is perhaps the ultimate event manager or synchronizer demanded by a cloud. But, the biggest question is how to integrate a CEP system to the cloud with minimal effort.

SCI-Flex is a good example of how one could leverage the capabilities of a CEP system in event management in cloud computing. The infrastructure provided by SCI-Flex easily blends to the infrastructure of a cloud that provides services. The system can in fact be positioned as a central hub or a cluster of nodes and still have the same experience due to the way in which it being implemented.

We are hoping to add more information on integrating SCI-Flex to your cloud. Join the SCI-Flex developer list to learn more.

Internet Relay Chat Discussion Channel

SCI-Flex being an Open Source project from its inception works primarily around a developer mailing list. However, in order to speed up the development activities and to have real time chat between developers, we decided that it would be better to have a public discussion channel on our behalf. Do to the immense popularity and guaranteed stability and 24/7 service found in the freenode IRC network we decided that it would be great to host the SCI-Flex discussion channel on freenode.

Since SCI-Flex is an Open Source project and since we need to reveal all forms of communication and important project related discussions to all the members of the community, it would invariably be good to have the channel publicly logged and also available to anyone interested in seeing it. Due to limitations we experience, so far there isn't a public chat log in place. We are at present working on this feature and expect to have this in place by the end of August 2008.

We invite all those who are interested in SCI-Flex to join ##sci-flex @ chat.freenode.net. More information on freenode can be found here. You can learn about IRC in here. Pidgin and Mibbit (web based) are some of the IRC clients I use.

SCI-Flex introduced in webinar By Paul

SCI-Flex was featured on "Complex Event Processing with Esper and WSO2 ESB" - Webinar by Paul Fremantle which was held on 29th July 2008. Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder and CTO of WSO2, spoke about Complex Event processing capabilities of the WSO2 ESB, in the fourth and final part of the webinar series on the WSO2 ESB. WSO2 ESB is a enterprise grade lightweight ESB based on the popular Apache Synapse ESB, and is presently at version 1.7.

Paul discussed about how the WSO2 ESB can easily be configured to listen and monitor various events flowing through the WSO2 ESB using the Esper open source complex event processing system, and identify patterns and useful events. As a mechanism of integrating Esper into the WSO2 ESB, Paul introduced SCI-Flex which is project focused on maximizing the use of Complex Event Processing in the field of Service Oriented Architecture through a flexible integration.

The SCI-Flex team is now working on further improving the Synapse-Esper mediator which serves as the primary medium for connecting Synapse and Esper which can infact be used with the WSO2 ESB as well. We are very much thankful to Paul for mentioning about SCI-Flex in his discussion. More information on the webinar and subject matter can be found here.

SCI-Flex Milestone 1 Plan

The SCI-Flex team is at present working on the 1st milestone of SCI-Flex due in early September 2008. The development of SCI-Flex was broken down in to several parts so that basic functionality will be made available from early stages of development. It was decided that we would primarily focus on the development of the Synapse-Esper mediator at the beginning and focus on other aspects afterwards.

The requirements for the 1st Milestone as agreed by our team can be expressed as,

1. Make it possible for Synapse to talk to Esper. All messages that go through Synapse will be routed to Esper during this stage of our research. By achieving this, we need not worry about what messages would go to the CEP and what wouldn't.
2. Attach registry support to our SOA+CEP infrastructure. We will be making it possible for someone to store a CEP query, EQL/EPL in a back-end registry, which will then be fetched by Synapse by default and then applied upon the event stream that will be flushed through the CEP. We will not worry about how we will be fetching various queries, or fetching a particular query on demand for this milestone.
3. Make it possible for someone to specify a Endpoint Reference (EPR) along with the query, so that Synapse will redirect the response obtained through the CEP to the specified EPR. The EPR will also be made available through the registry.

The development activities related to Milestone 1, is carried on the SCI-Flex M1 branch. We'll be merging it to the trunk once we've finished work, most probably in early September.

Introducing SCI-Flex

Welcome all.

The project SCI-Flex is an attempt to combine the power of a Complex Event Processing system with a Service Oriented Architecture of another. Our attempt is focused mainly in making the CEP experience truly parallel and distributed.

We have already started with some initial research into combining Apache Synapse and Espertech Esper, and the project is located in Google Code at [1]. We also do have a mailing list which is focused towards pre-development discussions. Feel free to join the effort at [2].

As of present the development team includes,

1. Paul Fremantle
2. Harsha Halgaswatte
3. Senaka Fernando
4. Madhumal Gunetileke

The project is as of present just started, and we are hoping to achieve completion in January 2008.

Instructions for downloading source code is found at [1], however, the location should read as, http://sci-flex.googlecode.com/svn/ instead of http://sci-flex.googlecode.com/svn/trunk.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/sci-flex
[2] sci-flex-dev AT googlegroups DOT com

Regards,
Senaka