William Vambenepe's blog

Anyone interested in application manageability and/or management integration should read about Jean-Francois Denise’s prototype for RESTful Access to JMX Instrumentation. Not (at least for now) as something to make use of, but to force us to think pragmatically about the pros and cons of the WS-* stack when used for management integration.

The interesting question is: which of these two interfaces (the WS-Management-based interface being standardized or the HTTP-centric interface that Jean-Francois prototyped) makes it easier to write a cross-platform management application such as the poker-cheating demo at JavaOne 2008?

Some may say that he cheated in that demo by using the Microsoft-provided WinRM implementation of WS-Management on the VBScript side. Without it, it would have clearly been a lot harder to implement the WS-Management based protocol in VBScript than the REST approach. True, but that’s the exact point of standards, that they allow such libraries to be made available to assist implementers. The question is whether such a library is available for your platform/language, how good and interoperable that library is (it could actually hinder rather than help) and what is the cost to the project of depending on it. Which is why the question is hard to answer in absolute. I suspect that, even with WinRM, the simple use case demonstrated at JavaOne would have been easier to implement using straight HTTP but that things change quickly when you run into more demanding use cases (e.g. event notification with filters, sequencing of large responses into an enumeration…). Which is why I still think that the sweetspot would be a simplified WS-Management specification (freed of the WS-Addressing crud for example) that makes it easy (almost as easy as the HTTP-based interface) to implement simple use cases (like a GET) by hand but is still SOAP-based, which lets it seamlessly enter library-driven territory when more advanced features are added (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Enumeration…). Rather than the current situation in which there is a protocol-level disconnect between the HTTP interface (easy to implement by hand) and the WS-Management interface (for which manually implementation is a cruel - and hopefully unusual - punishment).

So, Jean-Francois, where is this JMX-REST work going now?

While you’re on Jean-Francois’ blog, another must-read is his account of the use of Wiseman and Metro in the WS Connector for JMX Agent RI.

As a side note (that runs all the way to the end of this post), Jean-Francois’ blog is a perfect illustration of the kind of blogs I like to subscribe to. He doesn’t feel the need to post all the time. But when he does (only four entries so far this year, three of them “must read”), he provides a lot of insight on a topic he really understands. That’s the magic of RSS/Atom. There is zero cost to me in keeping his feed in my reader (it doesn’t even appear until he posts something). The opposite of what used to be conventional knowledge (that you need to post often to “keep your readers engaged” as the HP guidelines for bloggers used to say). Leaving the technology aside (there is nothing to RSS/Atom technologically other than the fact that they happen to be agreed upon formats), my biggest hope for these specifications is that they promote that more thoughtful (and occasional) style of web publishing. In my grumpy days (are there others?), a “I can’t believe United lost my luggage again” or “look at the nice flowers in my backyard” post is an almost-automatic cause for unsubscribing (the “no country for old IT guys” series gets a free pass though).

And Jean-Francois even manages to repress his Frenchness enough to not take snipes at people just for the fun of it. Another thing I need to learn from him. For example, look at this paragraph from the post that describes his use of Wiseman and Metro:

“The JAX-WS Endpoint we developed is a Provider<SOAPMessage>. Simply annotating with @WebService was not possible. WS-Addressing makes intensive use of SOAP headers to convey part of the protocol information. To access to such headers, we need full access to the SOAP Message. After some redesigning of the existing code we extracted a WSManAgent Class that is accessible from a JAX-WS Endpoint or a Servlet.”

In one paragraph he describes how to do something that IBM has been claiming for years can’t be done (implement WS-Management on top of JAX-WS). And he doesn’t even rub it in. Is he a saint? Good think I am here to do the dirty work for him.

BTW, did anyone notice the irony that this diatribe (which, by now, is taking as much space as the original topic of the post) is an example of the kind of text that I am glad Jean-Francois doesn’t post? You can take the man out of standards, but you can’t take the double standard out of the man.

[UPDATED 2008/6/3: Jean-Francois now has a second post to continue his exploration of marrying the Zen philosophy with the JMX technology.]

With the IBM/Microsoft/Intel/HP WSDM/WS-Management convergence now implicitly (if not yet officially) dead, it will be interesting to see what IBM is going to do with WSRF. WSRF is being used today, rarely explicitly but rather in an embedded fashion. People who use WSDM use it, people who use CDDLM use it, people who use the Globus Toolkit use it, etc. IBM could write off the convergence work (WS-ResourceTransfer, which was published as a draft, and WS-ResourceEnumeration and WS-EventNotification which were never published) and stick to using the existing WSRF specifications when they need the corresponding functionality. That’s what I hope they do.

Alternatively, they could decide to get the forceps out of the drawer. They can create a new, IBM-friendly (e.g. Fujitsu, CA, Cisco…) private consortium to take over the unfinished drafts (if the IBM/Microsoft/Intel/HP legal agreement allows this) or start new ones. Or they could go directly to W3C, OASIS or OGF and push for a new working group to do the work in the open (and since no-one else would really care about this work IBM should have relatively free hands there, the way Microsoft did in DMTF when IBM chose to boycott WS-Management). Why W3C would care and why OASIS or OGF would want to start commitees to obsolete their existing work is a separate question.

While I hope that IBM doesn’t try to push another pile of WS-* resouce management specifications on an industry that already has too many, if they do I hope that at least they’ll do it right. And that means doing away with the approach embedded in WS-ResourceTransfer. Having personally been involved in many iterations on this problem, I hope to have some insight to contribute.

Along the lines of the age-old parental advice “don’t do it but if you are going to do it then use a condom”, here is my advice to anyone thinking of doing another iteration on the WSRF question: don’t do it but if you are going to do it then be specific about what problem you are addressing.

First, let’s separate three scenarios.

Database query

WS-ResourceTransfer should not be seen as a way to query an XML database. Use XQuery for this.

REST

While architecturally it should be possible to build RESTful applications on top of WS-Transfer’s operations, this is simply not what is happening. WS-Transfer is being used either by CIM people (who get to it via WS-Management) or by big-SOA people (who get is as part of the whole WS-* stack) and neither of them is doing anything remotely RESTful. So just leave that aside and don’t see WS-ResourceTransfer as a way to do “fine-grained REST”. No REST user is loosing sleep over WS-ResourceTransfer being in limbo.

A flexible way to interact with a complex system

This is the use case that you should focus on. You have a system made up of many parts (e.g. a composite application or a server that is made of many components) that you can represent as an XML document. The XML repesentation contains some important information about the system, but it isn’t the system. There are identified resources within the system that have lifecycles, management capabilities and internal parameters. Not everything relevant is captured in the XML model. This is why it is different from an XML database.

In general, I don’t think that XML is the best way to represent complex IT systems. It has plenty of complications that are not relevant to IT management and it doesn’t elegantly support the representation of graphs, often the most natural way to represent such a system (more on this here). CMDBf, with its graph-oriented approach, is a better choice in general. But there are plenty of areas (especially smaller, well-defined, sub-systems) in which XML formats have been defined to represent systems. SCA and SML for example.

In the case where you are dealing with such an XML-described system, then there is value in standard ways to simplify interactions with the system and its parts. But here too, we need to distinguished different patterns rather than trying to handle them all in the same way.

Filtering/sequencing of returned data

Complex IT systems can generate a lot of configuration and/or monitoring data and often you only care for a small subset. For example, an asset record has dozens of elements (lease terms, owner, assigned user…) but you may only care to retrieve the date the lease expires. When you do a GET on the record, you want to qualify it by specifying that only that date needs to be returned. That’s what WS-RP, WS-RT and the WS-Management wsman:TransferFragment header allow. In a variation of this, you want all the data but you don’t want it in one go, you want to pull it piece by piece. That’s what WS-Enumeration gives you. The problem with all these specifications is that they only offer that feature when you are retrieving the resource representation (a WS-Transfer GET or equivalent), not for other operations. But how is this different from invoking an AirlineBooking operation and saying that you only want to be sent the confirmation code, not the full itinerary, equipment type, assigned seat, etc? Bundling this inside WS-RT (or equivalent) is not helpful. A generic SOAP header that can go on any message would be more appropriate (the definition of this header would need to pay special attention to security considerations, especially if the response is signed, because it could be abused to trick the server into sending, and signing, specifically-crafted messages).

Interacting with a sub-element of the system

If you have a handle to a computer system resource and you know that it has one CPU and that this CPU is represented by the /comp:CPU element of the system, why would you need to use some out-of-band discovery mechanism to interact with that CPU? It’s right there, you can see it, you can point to it. Surely there must be a way to address operations to it directly, right? WS-Management tries to do it with its wsman:Selector mechanism, but the selectors are not tied to the model and require, effectively, a separate out-of-band agreement for addressing. There shouldn’t be a need for such an additional agreement once an agreement has already been reached on the model.

What is needed is a way, for systems that have a known XML model, to address message to subpart by using the model itself to support that addressing. Call it SOAPy mashup if you want to feel like you are part of the cool kids. I described such a mechanism a while ago. In effect, it is an improvement on wsman:Selector that an eventual new iteration of WSRF should at least consider.

In some cases, namely when the operation is a WS-Transfer GET, this capability overlaps with the “filtering of returned data” capability. One way to look at it is that you are doing a GET at the level of the overall computer system and filtering the results down to the part that represents the CPU. Another way to look at it is that you are pinpointing the message to a subset of the model (the CPU part) and doing an unmodified GET on it. It doesn’t matter how you choose to think about it. In my proposal, these two ways produce the same message. Like the wave view and particle view of a photon, that in the end, describe the same physical entity with each being the best representation for a set of situations.

The problem with WS-RT and its predecessors is that it doesn’t recognise that this is just the intersection of two orthogonal concerns (filering of output versus addressing of sub-elements) and only handles that intersection.

Interacting with a set of resources as a set

The same kind of expression (typically XPath) that lets you point at a sub-element inside of a system also lets you point at a set of such sub-elements. But even though from an XPath perspective there isn’t much of a different (the first one just happens to return a nodeset that contains only one node), from an architectural perspective it is a very different use case. If you want to support such a use case then you have handle it as such and define all the associated semantics (sequential/parallel execution, fault handling, partial completion, resource-specific permissions…). You can’t just cross your fingers and assume that you get such features “for free” just because XPath can return a nodeset.

I know that this post illustrates a way of giving free advice that virtually ensures that it gets ignored. Similar (if you’ll allow the big stretch) to the way Chirac and Villepin were arguing againt an Iraq invasion in ways that probably reinforced the Bush administration’s determination to do it. When will the world finally learn to appreciate the oh-so-slightly obnoxious undertone that is inherently French (because, let me tell you, we’re not about to loose it)? At least, when my grandchildren ask me “where were you when IBM invented WS-ManagementHammer?” I can point to this post and say “I tried to stop it, I tried”.

[UPDATED 2008/5/15: How timely! Just after publishing this I find, via Coté, what looks like another example of French abrasiveness in the systems management world: the attitude, name and the way Jeff ends with a French-language quote make it quite likely that the "Jacques" person discounting the fact that his company's SNMP agent is broken is indeed a compatriot. French obnoxiousness aside, and despite my respect for standards, my advice to Jeff is that if a given SNMP agent works with HP, IBM, BMC and CA you will probably save yourself time in the long run by finding a way to support it (even if it is not spec-compliant) rather than getting the vendor to change. There are lots of sites out there that work fine with Firefox and IE but are not compliant with Web standards. Good luck getting them all fixed.]

[UPDATED 2008/7/14: I don't really plan to turn this post into a ongoing set of updates about "French attitude" but since today is Bastille Day I'll point to this map of the world as seen from Paris. If I wasn't on strike right now, I'd explain why the commenter is wrong to assert that "French self-deprecating humour" is rare.]

I missed this good review of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) by eWeek’s Cameron Sturdevant that came out almost two months ago. It is “good” in the sense that it is well researched and well written but it is also “good” in the sense that it is a very positive review. The only drawback listed is the price of some of the features. But you have to evaluate these numbers in comparison to productivity gains of your IT management staff. Or, even more compellingly, in comparison to the cost of business disruption that can result from insufficient management insight into the applications.

I got to this review through this very nice blog post in which my colleague Chung Wu (a director of product management for OEM) describes step by step the key role that OEM plays in effectively managing Oracle technologies and in allowing a smooth and controlled evolution of the deployed portfolio.

I was hoping that by the time MMS was over there would be more clarity about the “Cross Platform Extension” to System Center that Microsoft announced there. But most of the comments I have seen have focused on two non-technical aspects: Microsoft is interested in heterogeneous management and Microsoft makes use of open source. That’s also the focus of Coté’s coverage.

So what? Is it still that exciting, in 2008, to learn that Microsoft recognizes that Linux and OSS are major players in enterprise computing? If Steve Ballmer eventually gets hold of Yahoo, do you think his first priority will be to move all the servers to Windows or to build up its search and advertising audience? It’s been now 10 years since the Halloween documents came out. They can be seen as the start of Microsoft’s realization that Linux/OSS are here for good. It is not surprising to see that one of their main authors is now the driving force behind WS-Management, an effort that illustrates the acceptance of heterogeneity and the need to deal with it (on Microsoft’s terms if possible, of course). The WS-Management effort started years ago and it was a clear sign that Microsoft knew it had to tackle heterogeneous management (despite the reassuring talk that “it’s all about making Windows the most manageable platform” to HP and others). Basically, Microsoft is using WS-Management to support heterogeneity without having to do too much work: by creating an industry standard that everyone writes to and that Microsoft uses internally. Heterogeneous management is intrinsic to DSI if DSI is to be anything more than a demo.

But all of this was known before MMS 2008 to anyone who was paying attention. Instead of all this Microsoft/OSS/heterogeneous talk, I am a lot more interested in the technical aspects of the “Cross Platform Extension”.

OpenPegasus has been around for a long time, as a C++ CIMOM with a bunch of associated providers and CIM-XML interoperability over HTTP with CIM clients. I don’t know where WS-Management support was on the OpenPegasus development timeline, but even without Microsoft getting involved it would have eventually happened. And this should have been sufficient for System Center to access the CIMOM (BTW, does System Center not support CIM-XML when WS-Management is not present and if it does then what is different in practice with WS-Management?).

I can see how Microsoft would bring some extra (and much welcome) development resources for the WS-Management implementation (BTW the guys at Intel already have an open-source C implementation of WS-Management) as well as some extra marketing/visibility/distribution. Nice, but not earth-shattering. Do they bring anything else to OpenPegasus?

And what else is in the “Cross Platform Extension” in addition to an OpenPegasus WS-Management-capable CIMOM? Is there any extra modeling capability beyond CIM? Any Microsoft-specific classes? Any discovery/reconciliation capability? How much actual configuration management versus just monitoring? Security? Health models? Desired state management? Or is it just a WS-Management CIMOM? Any pointer to specific information is welcome.

Of course the underlying question is whether others than Microsoft can manage resources that have an OpenPegasus-based System Center management pack on them. The Open Management Consortium guys have talked about an open management agent. Could, against all expectations, Microsoft be the one delivering it?

In the IT management world, there are the big 4 (HP, BMC, CA and IBM), the little 4 (Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks and openQRM) and the mighty 3 (Oracle, Microsoft and EMC). Sorry John, I am reclaiming the use of the “mighty” term: your “mighty 2″ (or 2.5) are really still the “little 2″ (or 2.5). At least for now.

The interesting thing is that in that industry configuration there are topics on which the little ones and the mighty ones share common interests. For example, the big 4 have a lot more management packs for all kinds of resources, built up over the years. Some standard-based mechanism that partially resets the stage helps the little ones and the mighty ones better compete against the big 4. Even better if it has an attractive (and extensible) implementation ready in the form of an agent. But let’s be clear that it takes more than a CIMOM to make a management pack. You need domains-specific expertise in the form of health models, deployment/configuration scripts and/or descriptors, configuration validation, role management etc. Thus my questions about what else (beyond CIM over WS-Management) Microsoft is bringing to the table. SML and CML are supposed to address this space, but I didn’t hear them mentioned once in the MMS coverage.

[UPDATED on 2008/5/7: Another perspective on Microsoft and open source: Microsoft Ex-Pats Developing Open Source Software Outside of Redmond]

[UPDATED 2008/5/7: I got an answer to the question about System Center support for CIM-XML: it doesn't have it. So indeed it's either WS-Management of WMI. If you're a Linux box, that means it's WS-Management.]

SpringSource has made some recent announcements, in an effort to build up its commercial offering on top of the open source Spring framework. There is now a SpringSource Enterprise subscription which gives you access to an “enterprise” edition of the framework, some support and the SpringSource Performance Suite.

The first two components (enterprise edition and support) are common approaches to commercial open source.

The performance suite is a new product, comprised of the Tool Suite (for development), an Advanced Pack for Oracle (for better use of Oracle RAC features) and the Application Management Suite (AMS). Application and middleware management is what I care most about, so AMS is the part of the announcement that caught my attention.

The only publicly-accessible source of meaningful information about AMS that I could find is this blog post by Jennifer Hickey. AMS is built on Hyperic. The monitoring is based on collecting, through instrumentation, entry and exit times for monitored methods. The agents then reports this to a server. Add to this some discovery capabilities and the console can then report observed metrics on the discovered/selected resources.

The blog post ends by saying that “we’d like to make it as powerful and easy to use as possible for both Developers and Operations staff”. At this stage, I think it’s a lot more likely to be used for development than for operations. The instrumentation overhead is supposed to be “very slight” but, as always with monitoring, this warrants more precise data. Also, it is not clear if/how AMS can integrate with other management tools.

In any case, it’s encouraging to see an open source application development framework which doesn’t entirely focus on ease of development but also acknowledges the full lifecycle of an application (and concerns such as monitoring, as addressed here, but also configuration management, governance, business activity management…). That’s the difference between “the best framework to create an application” and “the best framework to create an application that is expected to be used”. Before open source became a business strategy, a defining characteristic was that the developers where also users of the product. Which naturally meant that it was heavily biased towards developers and development tasks.

From an operations perspective, the AMS team should focus its efforts on application modeling, metric collection and management integration rather than the dashboard. A simple specialized console is great for application developers. The ability to discover, model, configure and monitor applications in conjunction with the other elements of the IT system (e.g. underlying infrastructure, end user experience, business processes and other forms of application integration, etc) is what operators really need.

In any case, it will be interesting to test the practical value of “Spring-aware” application management, above and beyond generic Java application management.

Bonus question: the enterprise edition of the Spring framework is “warranted to be virus-free”. Since the enterprise version includes the base framework, to the extent that the enterprise version is virus-free then mustn’t the base logically be “virus-free” as well? And what does “virus-free” mean anyway?

If you care about exposing or accessing MBeans via WS-Management, now is a good time to read the public review draft of the JSR262 spec.

JSR262 is very much on the “manageability” side of the “manageability vs. management integration” chasm, which is not the most exciting side to me. But more commonality in manageability protocols is good, I guess, and this falls inside the WS-Management window of opportunity so it may help tip the balance.

There is also a nice white paper which does a nice job of retracing the history from JMX to JMX Remote API to JSR 262 and the different efforts along the way to provide access to the JMX API from outside of the local JVM. The white paper is actually too accurate for its own good: it explains well that models and protocols should be orthogonal (there is a section titled “The Holy Grail of Management: Model, Data and Protocol Independence”) which only highlights the shortcomings of JSR262 in that regard.

In a what looks from the outside like a wonderful exercise of “when you have a hammer” (and also “when you work in a hammer factory” like the JCP), this whole Java app management effort has been API-driven rather than model-driven. What we don’t get out of all this is a clearly defined metamodel and a set of model elements for Java apps with an XML serialization that can be queried and updated. What we do get is a mapping of “WS-Management protocol operations to MBean and MBean server operations” that “exposes JMX technology MBeans as WS-Management resources”.

Yes it now goes over HTTP so it can more easily fool firewalls, but I am yet to see such a need in manageability scenarios (other than from hackers who I am sure are very encouraged by the development). Yes it is easier for a non-Java endpoint to interact with a JSR262 endpoint than before but this is an incremental improvement above the previous JMX over RMI over IIOP because the messages involved still reflect the underlying API.

Maybe that’s all ok. There may very well not be much management integration possible at the level of details provided by JMX APIs. Management integration is probably better served at the SCA and OSGi levels anyway. Having JSR262 just provide incremental progress towards easier Java manageability by HP OVO and the like may be all we should ask of it. I told some of the JSR262 guys, back when they were creating their own XML over HTTP protocol to skirt the WS-Management vs. WSDM debate, that they should build on WS-Management and I am glad they took that route (no idea how much influence my opinion had on this). I just can’t get really excited about the whole thing.

All the details on the current status of JSR262 on Jean-Francois Denise’s blog.

David Linthicum from ZapThink (the world’s most prolific purveyor of analyst quotes for SOA-related press releases) recently wrote an article explaining that “Enterprise Architects Must Plan for SaaS“. A nice, succinct overview. I assume there is a lot more content in the keynote presentation that the article is based on.

The most interesting part from a management perspective is the paragraph before last:

“Third, get in the mindset of SaaS-delivered systems being enterprise applications, knowing they have to be managed as such. In many instances, enterprise architects are in a state of denial when it comes to SaaS, despite the fact that these SaaS-delivered systems are becoming mission-critical. If you don’t believe that, just see what happens if Salesforce.com has an outage.”

I very much agree with this view and the resulting requirements for us vendors of IT management tools. It is of course not entirely new and in many respect it is just a variant of the existing challenges of managing distributed applications, that SOA practices have been designed to help address. I wrote a slightly more specific description of this requirement in an earlier post:

“If my business application calls a mix of internal services, SaaS-type services and possibly some business partner services, managing SLAs and doing impact/root cause analysis works a lot better if you get some management information from these other services. Whether it is offered by the service owner directly, by a proxy/adapter that you put on your end or by a neutral third party in charge of measuring/enforcing SLAs. There are aspects of this that are ‘regular’ SOA management challenges (i.e. that apply whenever you compose services, whether you host them yourself or not) and there are aspects (security, billing, SLA, compliance, selection of partners, negotiation) that are handled differently in the situation where the service is consumed from a third party.”

With regards to the first two “tricks” listed in David’s article, people should take a look at what the Oracle AIA Foundation Pack and Industry Reference Models have to offer. They address application integration in general, not specifically SaaS scenarios but most of the semantics/interface/process concerns are not specific to SaaS. For example, the Siebel CRM On Demand Integration Pack for E-Business Suite (catchy name, isn’t it) provides integration between a hosted application (Siebel CRM On Demand) and an on-premises application (Oracle E-Business Suite). Efficiently managing such integrated systems (whether you bought, built or rent the applications and the integration) is critical.

We can find on the Register site a Microsoft-sponsored report by Freeform Dynamics on the daily frustrations of IT management work. The results are introduced as “surprising and interesting” but I don’t see where the surprise comes from. The main take-away is that the tools and systems that support IT management are fragmented and that better integration is needed. This is very true but hardly qualifies as a surprise unless you’ve been living in a PowerPoint world (where the boxes are always nicely layered and connected - after all there even are built-in functions in PowerPoint to polish this lie by ensuring that objects look well distributed and aligned). But the report is still an interesting short read.

I see that WSO2 has just released version 1.0 of their Mashup Server. Congratulations to Jonathan and the rest of the team. I haven’t played with the earlier betas of the Mashup Server but I have read enough about it to be interested. Now that it’s been released, it might be a good time to invest a few hours to look into it (I just downloaded it and I filled a small documentation bug already). I know (and like) many of the WSO2 guys (Jonathan, but also Sanjiva and Glen) from the early days of the W3C WSDL working group. Plus, you have to give credit to a company that offers visibility on its web site not just to its board and management team but also to its engineers.

But the Mashup Server is not interesting to me just because I know some of its authors. There are tow more important reasons. One is that it is the integration product in WSO2’s portfolio that is the most different in its approach from the many integration products in Oracle Fusion Middleware. We want Oracle Enterprise Manager to do an outstanding job at managing Oracle Fusion Middleware, but we also want it to manage other integrations approaches as well (we manage Tomcat for example). At this point there is of course no market demand for managing WSO2’s Mashup Server, but from an architectural perspective it’s a good alternative to keep in mind along with the BPEL, ESB, ODI, etc that are already in heavy use. I am always interested in perspectives that help make sure that the most abstract application/service management concepts remain suitably abstracted, so learning a bit about the Mashup Server can’t hurt. I’ll know more once I’ve looked at it, but my impression is that the Mashup Server is somewhere between BPEL and Ruby on Rails (or TurboGears) in terms of declarativity and introspectability (yes I like to make up words) for management purposes.

This may well be sweet spot and it’s my second reason for being interested in the Mashup Server. I am always interested in tools that help with quick prototyping and the best tool is different for each job. The Mashup Server is pretty unique and I can imagine it being a nice tool for some management integration prototypes once the participating services have been suitably XML-ized (something that that Oracle Fusion Middleware makes easy).

Interestingly, the release of this JavaScript-based platform comes on the same day that Joe Gregorio declares JavaScript to be the new SmallTalk.

In a recently published “executive e-mail”, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia describes the company’s view of virtualization. You won’t be surprised to learn that he thinks it’s a big deal. Being an IT management geek, I fast-forwarded to the part about management and of course I fully agree with him on the “the importance of integrated management”. But his definition of “integrated” is slightly different from mine as becomes clear when he further qualifies it as the use of “a single set of management tools”. Sure, that makes for easier integration, but I am still of the school of thought (despite the current sorry state of management integration) that we can and must find ways to integrate heterogeneous management tools.

“Although virtualization has been around for more than four decades, the software industry is just beginning to understand the full implications of this important technology” says Bob Muglia. I am tempted to slightly re-write the second part of the sentence as “the software marketing industry is just beginning to understand the full potential of this important buzzword”. To illustrate this, look no further than that same executive e-mail, in which we learn that Terminal Server actually provides “presentation virtualization”. Soon we’ll hear that the Windows TCP/IP stack provides “geographic virtualization” and that solitaire.exe provides “card deck virtualization”.

Then there is SoftGrid (or rather, “Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization”). I like the technology behind SoftGrid but when Microsoft announced this acquisition my initial thought was that coming from the company that owns the OS and the development/deployment environment on top of it, this acquisition was quite an admission of failure. And I am still very puzzled by the relevance of the SoftGrid approach in the current environment. Here is my proposed motto for SoftGrid: “can’t AJAX please go away”. Yes, I know, CAD, Photoshop, blah, blah, but what proportion of the users of these applications want desktop virtualization? And of those, what proportion can’t be satisfied with “regular” desktop virtualization (like Virtual PC, especially when reinforced with the graphical rendering capabilities from Calista which Microsoft just acquired)?

In an inspirational statement, Bob Muglia asks us to “imagine, for example, if your employees could access their personalized desktop, with all of their settings and preferences intact, on any machine, from any location”. Yes, imagine that. We’d call it the Web.

In tangentially related news, David Chappell recently released a Microsoft-sponsored white paper that describes what Microsoft calls “Software + Service”. As usual, David does a good job of explaining what Microsoft means, using clearly-defined terms (e.g. “on-premises” is used as an organizational, not geographical concept) and by making the obvious connections with existing practices such as invoking partner/supplier services and SOA. There isn’t a ton of meat behind the concept of S+S once you’ve gotten the point that even in a “cloud computing” world there is still some software that you’ll run in your organization. But since, like Microsoft, my employer (Oracle) also makes most of its money from licenses today, I can’t disagree with bringing that up…

And like Microsoft, Oracle is also very aware of the move towards SaaS and engaged in it. In that respect, figure 11 of the white paper is where a pro-Microsoft bias appears (even though I understand that the names in the figure are simply supposed to be “representative examples”). Going by it, there are the SaaS companies (that would be the cool cats of Amazon, Salesforce.com and Google plus of course Microsoft) and there are the on-premises companies (where Microsoft is joined by Oracle, SAP and IBM). Which tends to ignore the fact that Oracle is arguably more advanced than Microsoft both in terms of delivering infrastructure to SaaS providers and being a SaaS provider itself. And SAP and IBM would also probably want to have a word with you on this. But then again, they can sponsor their own white paper.