If you completely missed the milestone, NetBeans version 5.5 was released last week. The IDE contains all of the functionality that’s been around in the beta and pre-release versions for months now, including:

• Support for Java Enterprise Edition 5 (i.e. the Java Persistence, EJB3, and JAX-WS 2.0 specifications
• Support for Subversion up to version 1.4
• Developer collaboration features
• SOA support (XML, BPEL, or Java web services) through the free Enterprise Pack
• Performance and memory usage monitoring (including remote JVMs) though the free NetBeans profiler

In addition to all of the aforementioned features, which are part of the official 5.5 release, the Visual Web Pack Technology Preview was also released. This long-awaited feature brings to NetBeans a rich JSF-based UI. For those of you that have used Sun’s Studio Creator product, this addition to NetBeans will be both welcome and natural.

VisualWebPack_Lg.png (82.33 KB)

For those of you that have not experienced Studio Creator, the rich UI component IDE will be quite an experience. Standard JSF components are supported as well a number of AJAX-enabled JSF components from Sun’s BluePrint AJAX component modules. The NetBeans team has already created a number of Visual Web Pack specific tutorials. In addition, although I cannot verify it, I am fairly certain that the existing Studio Creator tutorials will work with little or no modification. Finally, if you’ve latched onto Ruby / RoR, check out the CRUD screencast in which NetBeans is used to generate a set of entity beans from a database and then to produce a set of RoR-like scaffolds, all without writing a single line of code.

I ran across some very unique work from the state of Missouri in the area of project oversight the other day. Missouri’s well documented approach to project oversight is not only a great state government practice; it is by far the best documented practice in the public or private sector that I could find in this area. The project oversight methodology was nominated for a NASCIO recognition award in 2004 under the State IT Management category.

The five guidance documents on Missouri’s project oversight website represent a comprehensive, end-to-end project oversight methodology. In addition to detailed process flows, artifact definitions and templates, the methodology also includes simple but very useful explanations, such as the table illustrating the differences between project management and project oversight, which I’ve reproduced below.

ProjectOversight.png (7 KB)

In my mind, items such as Missouri’s project oversight approach are the types of knowledge capital that would have been great seeds on which to found the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC), which I’ve blogged about in the past. Since the GOCC appears to be all but dead, I don’t know what other alternatives are available for inter-State exchange of government practices, outside of NASCIO. I’ve decided to mirror Missouri’s documents on my site and have included links below. Hopefully, Missouri can find a way to proactively open source these documents, even if no common exchange exists for such materials.

Project Oversight, Part 1 (598 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 1 (2086.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 2 (2019.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 3a (1820.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 4 (1042 KB)

Over the last several months, I’ve really been trying to get my arms around SOA and develop a meaningful opinion and knowledge base on this so often used, even more often abused, and ever-more-frequently maligned three letter acronym (TLA). Along the way, I’ve discovered a couple of great resources that have helped shape my thinking and hone my implementation skills on the topic:

• Prentice Hall’s Service-Oriented Computing Series - Right now this series consists of just two books by Thomas Erl, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design” and “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services”. These two books, however, are tantamount to the old and new testament; literally comprising the SOA bible. The series is also slated to be expanded into a more complete collection, along the lines of Addison-Wesley’s Martin Fowler and Kent Beck signature series.

Thomas’s books have helped me to understand how my traditional proxy and wrapper-based viewpoints fit into service design and how I might be able to improve the robustness of SOA interfaces built using these patterns. These books also reinforced my positive experiences with contract-driven design and have rekindled my interest in XML schema definitions, which I haven’t used extensively for years.

• Enterprise Service Orientation Maturity Model (ESOMM) – “Maturity model… uh oh, here comes the heavy handed approach to SOA”, you might be thinking. In my opinion, however, this is the most dense (that is, succinct and knowledge rich) piece of material about SOA that has been published to date and a must read for anyone looking to role out SOA to their enterprise. The ESOMM defines 4 layers, 3 perspectives, and 27 capabilities required to support a SOA (see diagram below). The maturity levels are based upon SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), but the similarities pretty much end there. As with the core CMM, think of this as a roadmap towards evaluating and improving your organization’s SOA capabilities – not as a report card.

   
esommgif.gif (32.31 KB)   

• Service-Oriented Analysis and Design (SOAD) – This is a nifty article which seeks to bridge the gaps between the object oriented and business process oriented design and modeling and the requirements of modeling for an SOA. The article does a great job of walking through traditional approaches that most people are familiar with and then adding SOAD-specific elements to the design. The article concludes with a short case study that includes traditional models such as a business process workflow, class diagram, and state diagram and then augmenting this with a service breakdown model and a rather interesting business interaction model (see diagram below) that integrates SOA specific concerns into a more traditional UML sequence diagram.

SOAD_LG.gif (29.3 KB)

• Java and .NET Specific Implementation Materials – Jeffrey Hasan’s book Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# is by far the best text in the .NET realm. Jeffrey starts with a very solid approach of WSDL and XSD contract driven design and then gradually introduces the new WS-* standards, integrating them one-by-one. The original book covers WSE 2.0 with his newest text covering WSE 3.0. SOA Integration Using Java EE 5 Web Services is the best text that I’ve found from a Java vantage point.  I like the fact that this book starts out with REST (Representational State Transfer) type services to show how things look before all of the standards-compliant overhead is added. Good coverage is provided for JAX-WS 2.0, JAXB, and JSR-compliant packaging. The book is not yet available on the open market but the work in progress is available as a “Rough Cut” book through O’Reilly’s Safari.

      

• BPEL-Specific Materials – BPEL specific implementation details haven’t seemed to make it into any published books yet. The vendors offer a good deal of online materials in this area. To learn it this way though, you’re going to have to commit yourself to a particular implementation. Good materials can be found in the following places:

o     JBoss - JBoss jBPM

  o     Sun - NetBeans Enterprise Pack

o     Oracle - BPEL Process Manager

o       .NET - Windows Workflow Foundation

In a previous posting, I reviewed the 37signals book Getting Real and encouraged folks to pick up a copy. The good news is that the full text for this book has recently been released online. You can find the HTML version of the book here. You no longer have any excuse not to read it.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a pretty dedicated listener of both the Wall Street Journal Audio Edition and the IT Conversations podcast site. This morning, I caught some great audio from both of them.

IT Conversations - The IT Conversations audio came from the Software 2006 conference series. The focus of the podcast in question was a CIO panel at that conference. Toby Redshaw and Con Goedman, IT executives from Motorola and Shell International, respectively, provide some great insights into the user-focused mentality that it takes to succeed as an IT executive in the corporate world. They are both quite candid, with Mr.Redshaw providing some especially interesting insights and sound bytes. I’ve quoted a couple below:

[On dealmaking] “You’ve got to remember, the people that cut the deal aren’t the people that manage the relationship. I don’t care if the [software] salespeople leave with blood coming out of both of their ears. I’m not going to see those guys again.”

[On the widespread use of wikis and blogs at Motorola] “Where the real work gets done is down in the ranks that interact with each other and exchange information and build ideas and come to conclusions and do stuff. Management is just overhead.”

[On introducing wikis and blogs at Motorola] “I purposefully didn’t tell anyone upstairs or laterally that this was going on until we got to a scale where we couldn’t stop it.”

[On vendor dislikes] “The easiest way for you to watch me pull the trap door lever in my office and drop you into a pit of crocodiles is ‘tell me about your problems.’ ‘Hmm… interesting, we have some software that we think will fit your problems.’”

[On vendor likes] “I love honesty. My best vendors pull me aside and say ‘you know that idea you have, it’s stupid. Don’t do it, it’s a bad idea and here’s why.’”

Anyone who thinks that IT executives are out of touch needs to give this podcast a listen. These guys are focused on delivering user value, remaining business centric, and they just get it when it comes to understanding what it takes to encourage the type of collaboration and creativity that it takes to differentiate a company’s product or service offerings.

Wall Street Journal - On the other side of things, and totally unrelated to IT or the normal stock option backdating concerns that the WSJ has been so focused on lately was their cover story on the move towards home-based care in Vermont, entitled “Olden Days: Seniors in Vermont Find They Can Go Home Again.”

The article covers an innovative approach being taken in Vermont to move elderly citizens out of facility-based care and into home-based care with their families. Interesting here it that the families are then allowed to collect for the care they provide to their family members (spouses not included). The plan is approved and funded by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) under a special waiver to normal Medicaid administration protocol. The waiver’s goal is to reduce or cap Vermont’s annual Medicaid funding / spending increase.

These Medicaid expenditures amount to 20% of some state’s budgets and are matched with funding from the federal level as well, providing a huge incentive for innovative ways to reduce these costs. The WSJ audio focuses not on the money side but on the human element instead; telling the story of several individuals whose lives were dramatically improved through participation in Vermont’s program. The audio also paints the assisted living providers as organizations scared of and resistant to change and willing to resort to scare tactics to retain the facility-based care entitlement legally afforded to Vermont’s citizens.

The reason that I found this audio file particularly interesting, aside from the fact that my parents care for my 93 year old grandmother and that my first state government project was on a Medicaid waiver system, is that the story reminds me of why I stick it our with state government projects – the potential to make a difference in peoples’ lives. Transformation programs such as the ones enabled by the Medicaid waivers not only offer the possibility to save money, they afford people the opportunity to lead normal lives, where that otherwise might not be possible. Far beyond the dollars, the bits, and the bytes, this is what really makes a difference.

The Wall Street Journal article is available in printed form or in MP3 format to Audible.com providers. The official text of the Vermont waiver can be found at http://www.dad.state.vt.us/dail/1115Waiver/VTLTCWaivernoappendices.pdf, while a provider-slanted but informative summary can be found at http://www.ahca.org/brief/ib_vtwaiver.pdf.

I’ve recently been re-reading Scott Ambler’s excellent work on the Enterprise Unified Process and focusing my attention on the strategic reuse discipline, in particular. Dealing with this on a day-in, day-out basis, I’m trying to apply this particularly to the business domain that I work in, state government. I like the way that Scott went about illustrating the enterprise management disciplines with the traditional RUP workflow maps. Above and beyond this, he borrows from an earlier article of his, A Realistic Look at Object-Oriented Reuse, to create a couple of diagrams that really hit home. I’ve taken the opportunity to adopt these diagrams to enterprise work being done in state government. The adopted diagram can be found below.

Reuse.png (79.92 KB)

The comments to the right of the chart demonstrate that there are three coarsely delineated segments of reuse:

1. Areas where domain-specific reuse is occurring now. Unfortunately, these areas fall towards the lower end of the benefit spectrum. In this segment, wholesale cross-state system transfers are particularly widespread. In many cases, the cost of the system being transferred is negligible or nonexistent due to federal funding rules. However, it is rare when these systems can be transferred without acquiring the knowledge of the people that created them. In many cases, this is an acceptable trade off because the domain in questions is inhospitable to other solutions and orthogonal to the domain for which they were originally created. Make no mistake, however, this is more a reuse of human resources and knowledge capital than it is of system elements.
2. Areas where domain-specific reuse is not warranted. In the center of the above chart lie frameworks and artifacts. With industry standard processes such as the RUP, MSF, and a variety of Agile processes, there is little need to create domain-specific processes or artifacts. The same holds true for frameworks, where Sun, Microsoft, and a variety of vendors and open source options are likely to be much more stable and better supported than any inhouse created options. This should not preclude you, however, from customizing these processes and frameworks and, as necessary, extending them to meet your exact needs.
3. Areas where domain-specific reuse should be occurring. These are the higher-order levels of reuse. This includes domain-specific analysis patterns for state government as well as a variety of architected solutions. These solutions may include COTS products such as the one from Curam Software, solutions targeted as cross-cutting domains such as licensing, and leveraging emerging data exchange standards to encourage the sharing of knowledge and data between business partners and communities of practice.

On September 26^th, President Bush signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The represents the first piece of legislation sponsored by upstart Illinois senator Barack Obama to make it into law. Being touted as the “Google for Government”, the law directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the creation of a single comprehensive searchable Web site that would include information on all federal grants, contracts, and other funding awarded to public and private organizations. As the President mentioned at the signing, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. These range from reputable grants to operate state Medicaid systems to questionable allocation of funds such as the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska, the so called “bridge to nowhere”. Although at way to high a level to be a true comparison, the Death and Taxes graph provides a good representation of what we might end up seeing.



With an estimated start-up cost of about $5 million per year for the first two years and ongoing costs of $2 million per year, the Web site to support the law will be relatively inexpensive (in the grand scheme of things) for the Federal government. What is the impact going to be on local and state governments? From the bill’s text (more information), it would appear that the costs of reporting direct and sub-award data are to be factored into existing grants as indirect costs, since these costs would result from complying with conditions for federal assistance. Whether or not the states choose to follow suit and drive out more accountability from their grantees and contractors remains to be seen. This type of “trickle down transparency” would certainly be good for the taxpayer though and would demand a level of accountability previously unheard of at the state and local levels.

I’m often asked about tools and technologies that I use on a daily basis. Like everyone else out there, I lead a pretty busy life and I’m always trying to find ways to be more efficient or to use tools that better support the way I work and live. Below you can find a list of the tools and technologies that make my life easier in some way or the other. I’ve cataloged these tools using some general categories to help delineate functionality. As much as possible, I tried to avoid the mundane things and concentrate on smaller niche tools or new technologies that you might not have heard of or actively use and which might enable you to tweak a bit more efficiency or productivity out of your day. Enjoy and please feel free to add comments citing tools that you believe might be of interest to others.

Digital Media

• Wall Street Journal on Audible.com – The Journal is the way that I get my news every day. No commercial interruptions, no funding drives, no annoyances. The MP3 version shows up at around 6:00 am every morning and is ready for download to my iPod. The daily read is about an hour long and includes selected articles unabridged and read in their entirety.

• IT Conversations - Some really great Podcasts by leading edge thinkers in the IT industry. The material is first rate strategic thinking and helps keep me centered on larger issues even when my day-to-day concerns are often much more pragmatic.

• TiVo, TiVo Central, and TiVoToGo – Yeah, almost everyone offers DVRs these days but TiVo was not only the original, it has remained the most fully featured. With TiVo Central, you can schedule your recordings from a Web browser so that you can make sure to record that show you forgot to schedule last night. With TiVoToGo, you can transfer TiVo recordings to your PC, laptop, or most recently to a number of mobile video devices, such as the video iPod. There’s nothing like watching Lost or 24 on the walk into work in the morning.

• Video iPod and the Transpod – The video iPod is truly an amazing thing. All that storage, all those songs, and a phenomenal little viewing screen. The Transpod lets me take my music on the road with me and will continue to get good use until I get my next car, which will definitely have some type of interface for the iPod.

• Handy Backup – I’ve never had a hard drive with critical personal files crash on me. Statistically speaking, though, it’s only a matter of time before this happens. I therefore use the Handy Backup tool to do incremental and occasional full backups to an offsite FTP server. The disk space, you ask – MediaMax Streamload - $4.99/month for 100GB storage.

• Turbine Video Encoder – Used for taking my AVI videos and converting them to the industry standard Flash format for video distribution. This is the same process that YouTube does except that it’s not them doing it, it’s me.

• Audacity – An open source sound recorder and editor that’s great for recording, editing, and publishing audio in MP3 format. I’ve use this for all of my GeoGlue recordings.

• Afterdark CD Series – With different techno flavors representing a variety of US and international cities, the Afterdark collection contains enough funky grooves to get you through days of work without ever hearing the same song twice.

Web-Based

• Firefox – Once you go to Firefox, you won’t go back to Internet Explorer. Firefox is benefiting from fresh ideas in a market where others had long since capitulated to Microsoft’s dominance and meaningless updates. Microsoft’s newest version of Internet Explorer, with tabbed browsing, integrated search, and customization is a blatant rip off of Firefox. Thanks but no thanks.

• Netvibes, RSS, and Delicious – Earlier this year, I switched from my home page of over 3 years – Google and moved to Netvibes, a Web 2.0 home page. While Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft struggled to catch up with their home grown portal offerings. Netvibes and its brethren (such as Pageflakes) have created vibrant ecosystems with all of the portal services that you might need and open APIs to create your own services should you see fit. Two of the most useful services are the RSS and del.icio.us modules. Having access to all of your blogs and favorite links from one well organized home page will contribute a lot to your efficiency.

• Safari and Books 24x7 – As an addict to technical books, these two sites were godsends in so many ways. With enterprise subscriptions, the entire array of Apress, O’Reilly, Addison Wesley Professional, and Wrox technical books amongst others are at your fingertips. If you buy and read a lot of technical books and can handle the digital media, this is definitely something for you. If the subscriptions seem a bit too pricey, a Professional membership to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) will get you entry grade access to both of these collections.

Software Engineering

• Visual Studio Professional and NetBeans - On a day-to-day basis there’s really no other way to do professional .NET and Java development than with a professional IDE. For .NET Visual Studio professional has all of the tools that you need and avoids the overbearing Team System overhead that you might not. With Java, I’m doing my work right now in NetBeans although I’m working with a bunch of different IDEs to determine which I like best. Oracle JDeveloper and MyEclipse are a close second and third, respectively.

• Enterprise Architect – UML modeling, team-based modeling, round trip code-model synchronization and design tool extraordinaire. Enterprise Architect does it all and does it all well. All of this for $200 per license. EA is arguably one of the best buys in the industry and one tool that you’ll never catch me without.

• TestDriven.NET – A must have for any .NET developer, in my mind. TestDriven allows you to run a variety of unit test suites (NUnit, MbUnit, and Team System) directly from the Visual Studio IDE. One of the killer features is the ability to run the tests with the debugger. Recent features include the addition of menu items leveraging NCover for code coverage and Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for disassembly and dependency analysis amongst libraries.

• WebHost4Life and eApps – I host a variety of content online and have found these two hosts to be the best over time. WebHost4Life provides reliable .NET hosting using .NET 1.1/2.0, full SQL Server 2000/2005 functionality (with full Enterprise Manager access), registering of COM/COM+ components, and set up of SharePoint sites. eApps provides Java and Ruby on Rails hosting. Java hosting includes JBoss/Hibernate, OpenLDAP, and Subversion repository creation.

Knowledge and Document Management

• OpenOffice – Although I’m still locked into Office at work, OpenOffice provides a free alternative from my home computers. With support of the new Oasis standard OpenDoc format, reading from and saving to Microsoft compatible (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint) files, built in PDF creation, and conversion of Powerpoints to Flash, OpenOffice meets all of my home document management needs.

• Subversion and TortoiseSVN – A great example of truly open source software beating out best of breed commercial competitors. Subversion is an open source revision control system that is replacing CVS as the repository of choice for managing open source and commercial code alike. Running on top of Apache, Subversion communicates very efficiently via http and is thus a great choice for distributed development. With widespread plugin support, including the Windows Explorer-based Tortoise SVN, Subversion is a great choice not only for managing source code but for managing changes to any documents that might be accessed by a variety of users.

• The Brain – Although there is a lot of mind mapping software out there, the Brain is by far my favorite. It’s a great way to organize disparate thoughts; allowing me to capture hundreds of thoughts, focus on the ones at hand and drill down through the whirling nodes of radial visualization with a few clicks to get to any of those hundreds of thoughts or ideas. Check this one out online.

• Win2PDF Pro – I distribute almost all my Web-based documents as PDF. Win2PDF Pro is much cheaper than a full version of Acrobat and it let’s me create PDF from most common programs. The pro package includes password protection, encryption, PDF hyperlinks and other niceties.

• Camtasia – Useful for illustrating the use of particular software or techniques. On-screen activities are captured and may then be edited down and described with the addition of narrative audio tracks.

• Whiteboard Photo Image – I am a big advocate of using whiteboards as a documentation and facilitation tool. To avoid recreating the informal images on these whiteboards, I suggest the use of digital cameras to capture what’s on the whiteboards and the use of software like whiteboard photo image to make these images a bit more true-to-life of the sketches that were originally created. The tool also does a great job with sketches, CRC cards, user stories, or anything else which starts out as paper but which you might wish to give a bit more permanence.