BISSA: Empowering Web gadget Communication with Tuple Spaces

Following is a talk I did at the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grids, Clouds and e-Science (co located with Super Computing 2010 at New Orleans). The research paper with the same title can be found at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1890809.

The paper presents Biassa, a scalable tuple space implementation on top of a Distributed Hash Table, and its application as an inter gadget communication medium. This is the outcome of a University of Moratuwa final year project done by Pradeep Fernando, Charith Wickramarachchi, Dulanjanie Sumanasena, and Udayanga Wickramasinghe and supervised by Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana  and myself. I am elated that MRT final year projects can go this far!

BISSA: Empowering Web gadget Communication with Tuple Spaces

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An Scaling pattern: Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion

The paper “Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion” provides an inserting a scaling pattern to cope without transactions for very large scale.

The idea can be described using three things: entities, activities, and using workflows instead of transactions.

• entity is a single collection of data that lives within a single scope of serializability (e.g. cluster). Each entity has a unique key, and transactions cannot expand multiple entities.
• Activity is a relationship between two entities (holds all state about such a relationship).
• Finally, the key idea is that entities cope by not doing transactions with each other, but handling the uncertainty rise out of lack of transactions through a workflow. 
• The author makes an interesting observation that normal world does not have transactions, but cope with uncertainties through time limits, compensations, cancellations etc., or in other words cope through a workflow. So he argues that activities should be carried out with tentative message, confirmation or cancellation model.

So does that scale? Yes, handling stabilizability within one entity is very much possible, and rest is data partition, which is well understood. Only key decider is that can we model uncertainties that arise from lack of transactions through workflows. My gut feeling is most of the time we can, but there certainly are exceptions.

SC keynote: How to Create New Growth Businesses in a Risk-Minimizing Environment

Clayton M. Christensen (author of The Innovator's Dilemma) talked about descriptive technology. This is new product which simplify and drastically change the user experience which go on to kill big players.

Discussed DEC as a example, how Apple PC, and then PC killed all mainframe players. Stressed that  at start PC looked like a joke, none of the users thought that PC is useful. So listening to users did  not helped the companies at all. Manager did all the right things (from business school point of view), but did not worked. Other examples, Steel (integrated plants-> Mini plants), Vacuum Tubes->transistors

Point is listening to your customers does not going to help you. Because they do not understand the process they are following and nor they understand how to improve it. Instead try to understand what he is actually trying to do and improve it. Argued that understanding should be done based in function, emotions, and social aspects of the product.

Also stressed that going for only things that let you maximize profit and outsourcing can let other players enter the market and topple you (big player eventually). It is more or less local vs. global (short term vs. long term) optimization argument. Gave dell and Azure as an example.

Apparently IBM is one of the companies that has been able to make through from main frame era to PC era and beyond. Argued  that they did so by shutting down business units and letting new business units to take over so that in overall the company can survive.

Final note, on a survey, 93% of entrepreneur succeeded on a different idea than that what they started, which suggests success depends on ability to understand and reposition themselves.

Computational Thinking

Interesting post Exploring Computational Thinking on the subject.

You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance?

There is a very nice post on http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/.

One complications to that argument is replication implemented with group communication, which is a reasonable approximation to a system with both availability and consistency. (Just thinking aloud, as these stuff needs lots of thinking to be sure). Now what happen in group communication is that if a node fails, it creates a new group excluding failed node, and although the system operation has to wait till new group is defined (rather repair the existing node ), after the repair, things will work fine given that you have enough replicas left. So does group communication contradict or works around above assertion?

NBQSA 2010 - Overall Gold award goes to WSO2 ESB

Copied from Ruwan's Blog, NBQSA 2010 - Overall Gold award goes to WSO2 ESB: "

NBQSA (National Best Quality Software Award) is an annual award ceremony held in Sri Lanka to evaluate and award the Software developedin the country. This is hosted by BCSSL (British Computer Society - Sri Lanka)

WSO2 marketing team decided to submit 3 of our products to this award evaluation, it was just few days we had to prepare for this presentation. I initially objected to submitting WSO2 ESB (the product that I am responsible of in WSO2) for this so quickly, as my intention was to win the first price if we are to submit. Kushlani from our marketing team together with Asanka has been driving this and motivated us a lot to submit for this.

Well, we spent few hours and Miyuru, Kasun and few others get together with me and prepared a plan to execute with a presentation script and demonstration. Miyuru did the first round

presentation and we got through to the second round easily. Hiranya took it over and we delivered the second presentation, to which we got a very good response from the judges.

Then, we were waiting to see the results and we had to app

arently wait till, day before yesterday (1st of October 2010) for that.

From WSo2 8 of us got invited and we all went on time with a lot of enthusiasm as all 3 of our products were on the wining cycle. The award ceremony got started and the first

to get an award from the 3 products was the WSO2 Gadget Server which got the Silver award under the RnD software category.

Then I was so waiting till the Infrastructure and Tools category to be awarded since both the WSO2 Data Services and WSO2 ESB was on that category.

They had only 2 awards on that category and one Bronze and a Gold. When it is announced that WSO2 DS as the bronze award I knew that ESB is getting the Gold award. I was not that excited, to be frank, I sort of knew that we are going to get it on our category :-) I was expecting the overall gold award. ;-)

Then they came to announcing the final overall awards, before which they have given out some special awards, but ESB was no where on those special awards. I was waitin

g and waiting and waiting... so does all of us from WSO2.

Finally they have announced the Bronze and Silver awards and those are the folks who won some special awards and I was 90% sure about my expectation now. And they finally announced WSo2 ESB as the Overall Gold winner at NBQSA 2010. I was so excited to accept the best award on that ceremony as the product manager of WSO2 ESB. I got down from the stage holding the most valuable award of the nite as the most proud man on that nite, though I must say that this price is for the whole WSO2 team including the past members of our team.

All of us who participated for the event from Left, Samisa, Asanka, Kushlani, Miyuru (holding the Gadget Server silver award), Me (holding the overall gold for ESB), Hiranya (holding the ESB Gold award on Infrastructure and Tools category), Sumedha (holding Data Service Server bronze award) and Azeez.

Now we are about to head towards APICTA in next week at Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. Will update on that as well. :-)

"

Doing Enterprise Business with Processes & Rules

Following is the slides for my WSO2Con talk.

Doing Enterprise Business with Processes & Rules

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