1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,000 Hello everybody, here we are at EclipseCon 2009 in lovely Santa Clara. 2 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:09,000 We've got another guest with ourselves, would you like to introduce yourself? 3 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Yes, hi, my name is Oliver, I'm working for a company called Sopra, it's based out of Germany. 4 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:19,000 Sopra is a company that produces an SOA, an open source SOA suite, 5 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:23,000 and we're also running the Swordfish project in Eclipse and I'm the project leader. 6 00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:29,000 We actually, I forget if I was doing it with you, but at Redmonk we had a video of just talking about Swordfish, 7 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:31,000 about a year ago or so. 8 00:00:31,000 --> 00:00:32,000 Yes, I think you met Rico. 9 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:34,000 That's right, it was with Rico, that's right. 10 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:38,000 And at that point, you know, it was sort of an idea that you guys were developing. 11 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:39,000 This week. 12 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:42,000 You guys actually sort of released the 1.0 version of Swordfish. 13 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:43,000 We announced the release. 14 00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:44,000 You announced it. 15 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:46,000 It's going to be released at the end of next week. 16 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:47,000 Right. 17 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:50,000 But we announced the release and it's the first re-release, it's 0.8. 18 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:52,000 And I'm very proud of that. 19 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:57,000 It's an achievement, definitely, and had a long way to go through all the IP compliance process in Eclipse. 20 00:00:57,000 --> 00:00:58,000 Right, right. 21 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:02,000 It's always difficult, especially when you have an existing code base and need to somehow 22 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:08,000 restructure that and make it basically IP clean so that it can smoothly go through the IP compliance 23 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:09,000 process. 24 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:14,000 It was a huge effort, but we finally managed to do it and now we're proud on our first release. 25 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:17,000 That said, can you tell us what Swordfish is exactly? 26 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:20,000 I mean, for the Eclipse world, it is something slightly different than what I think most people 27 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:21,000 would expect. 28 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:26,000 Definitely, because Eclipse is probably most well-known for everything IDE related. 29 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:30,000 So the whole runtime story is quite new for Eclipse. 30 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:33,000 And Swordfish is definitely something that happens on the runtime side of things. 31 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:37,000 So it doesn't have any fancy IDE plug-ins. 32 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:39,000 It doesn't have a UI. 33 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:46,000 It's a completely runtime oriented kind of framework that you can use to build service oriented applications 34 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:51,000 on top of existing Eclipse technology like Equinox and other things from the Eclipse ecosystem. 35 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:53,000 So it's back-end technology. 36 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:54,000 It's back-end technology. 37 00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:55,000 You could also use it on the front end. 38 00:01:55,000 --> 00:01:59,000 You could use it for creating RCP applications that interact with back-end web services, for 39 00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:00,000 example. 40 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:02,000 So it's not completely back-end, but it's mostly back-end. 41 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:08,000 The idea of SOA service oriented architectures is a pretty expansive idea. 42 00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:10,000 It can mean all sorts of things. 43 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:15,000 And usually what I find is people who have, or technologies that are an SOA, if you will, 44 00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:20,000 I mean, they have a particular sort of take on what an SOA is. 45 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:22,000 And I imagine Swordfish is the same sort of thing. 46 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:28,000 The basic philosophy of Swordfish is that the ESB as the central component in any SOA should 47 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:30,000 be actually not that central. 48 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:31,000 It should be decentralized. 49 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:33,000 It should be a distributed ESB. 50 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:35,000 And this is exactly the pattern that Swordfish follows. 51 00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:41,000 So it's a distributed ESB, which basically means there are no central components that you 52 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:45,000 definitely need for participants in your SOA to interact. 53 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:46,000 So it's very decentralized. 54 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:47,000 Very decentralized. 55 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:48,000 Okay. 56 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:51,000 It's connected with the actual business implementations of code. 57 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:52,000 Okay. 58 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:55,000 So all the mediation happens directly between participants. 59 00:02:55,000 --> 00:03:00,000 I mean, there are some central components like a configuration system, a registry that is used 60 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:03,000 during mediation of service calls. 61 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:06,000 But you don't need that once the connection setup has happened. 62 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:08,000 And so would you say there's a lot of peer-to-peer stuff happening in the Swordfish? 63 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:09,000 Yeah, definitely. 64 00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:10,000 Okay. 65 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:11,000 Definitely. 66 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:12,000 After the first connection setup, everything is peer-to-peer. 67 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:16,000 There's no central component that becomes a bottleneck. 68 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:18,000 How did the Swordfish technology come about? 69 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:25,000 The history goes back until, I think it's 1999, so one decade of experience, when Deutsche 70 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:30,000 Post DHL, which is the largest logistics company in the world, started their SOA program. 71 00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:37,000 And they found that there was no commercial solution available, so they created their own SOA framework. 72 00:03:37,000 --> 00:03:42,000 And in 2007, they decided to publish it as open source software. 73 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:50,000 And basically the mission of SOA is to, well, to support the further development of this platform 74 00:03:50,000 --> 00:03:53,000 inside the Eclipse Foundation ecosystem. 75 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:55,000 SOA was founded in 2007. 76 00:03:55,000 --> 00:03:56,000 Okay. 77 00:03:56,000 --> 00:03:57,000 It was exactly this mission. 78 00:03:57,000 --> 00:03:58,000 Right. 79 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:01,000 And so it really is a company built around a single stack. 80 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:02,000 Yeah. 81 00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:03,000 Yeah. 82 00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:05,000 I mean, we're constantly extending the stack to other things. 83 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:07,000 For example, we are adding BPM. 84 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:10,000 We are adding service activity monitoring. 85 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:12,000 Everything around this platform. 86 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:16,000 But it pretty much revolves around this core component of the SOA. 87 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:21,000 Given that you're sort of, I mean, what I would term a sort of ESB-based SOA, if you will. 88 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:22,000 Which... 89 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:23,000 Whatever ESB means. 90 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:24,000 Yeah, sure. 91 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:25,000 It's different things from different people. 92 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:29,000 It begs the question what an ESB is, but we'll save that for the ESB discussion. 93 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:34,000 What are the kind of things that, whether it was Deutsche Post or other uses that you're 94 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:37,000 seeing or thinking of, like what are people using the Swordfish for? 95 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:44,000 Since Swordfish is actually a framework, it's not a complete ESB, I don't see any limitation 96 00:04:44,000 --> 00:04:45,000 regarding its use. 97 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:49,000 So you can use it for pretty lightweight applications or you can use it for heavy enterprise applications. 98 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:52,000 It depends on the kind of plugins that you install inside the framework. 99 00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:57,000 Because the framework doesn't mandate any specific implementations. 100 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:01,000 For example, you could do completely without registry and just use local service information 101 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:02,000 to make it service costs. 102 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:06,000 Or you could use an enterprise registry for large enterprise settings. 103 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:07,000 Right. 104 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:08,000 So there's no limitation. 105 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:12,000 Another thing that's often associated with SOAs is the, you know, the WSTAR specs. 106 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:13,000 All the big web services specs. 107 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:14,000 Yeah. 108 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:20,000 And that's another interesting sort of different take on people who, on SOA platforms that you 109 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:23,000 will have is sort of how much, how web servicey they are. 110 00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:27,000 And so like how, how does sort of this, the web service standards fit into Swordfish? 111 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:29,000 Right now we're pretty web servicey. 112 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:35,000 I wouldn't say we're confined to web services, but the current implementation and the current 113 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:39,000 components that we deliver as part of Swordfish are completely geared to our web services. 114 00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:42,000 But we're going to add things like distributed OSGI later. 115 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:43,000 It's on the roadmap. 116 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:48,000 But the need our customers have right now is web service technology. 117 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:50,000 And this is why we're quite web servicey at the moment. 118 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:55,000 I'm not going to put out the list of service, of standards that we support, but pretty much 119 00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:56,000 everything. 120 00:05:56,000 --> 00:05:57,000 Right, right. 121 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:01,000 We were talking before we were filming a little bit that you guys had six sessions about 122 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:03,000 Swordfish here at EclipseCon. 123 00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:08,000 And I'm always curious when people announce something, one of the ways I'm always, you know, 124 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:12,000 trying to figure out what the reaction to it is, is by what questions people are asking about it. 125 00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:18,000 The question we get asked most is what the differentiating factors are. 126 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:21,000 Because there are many other open source SOA solutions out there. 127 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:25,000 So what differentiates Swordfish and other open source frameworks? 128 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:32,000 And the answer to that is we're building upon existing open source frameworks. 129 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:35,000 And we add features that we're missing in enterprise environments. 130 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:41,000 So we've learned from the experience at Deutsche Post that things like integration of a runtime 131 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:46,000 registry, extensive monitoring, remote configuration are things that large enterprises really need 132 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:48,000 to run, to successfully run the SOA. 133 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:51,000 And this is missing in things like service mix, for example. 134 00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:52,000 So we're adding that on top of service mix. 135 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:57,000 It sounds like part of what you're getting at is what I would call sort of the operation side of having an SOA, 136 00:06:57,000 --> 00:07:00,000 that it's certainly a big task. 137 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:05,000 But one thing to develop something that would be an SOA or uses SOA techniques. 138 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:09,000 But then when you actually put it into runtime, there's a whole other set of concerns that you have 139 00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:13,000 when you give it to the people who are now in charge of making sure it's healthy. 140 00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:16,000 And so what are the kinds of things that Swordfish has to offer for that? 141 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:23,000 For example, we provide a facility to monitor what's going in inside your SOA. 142 00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:29,000 To collect events and then you can, for example, add components that correlate events, 143 00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:37,000 complex event processing engines to correlate events and, for example, calculate KPIs based on those events. 144 00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:39,000 So something that large enterprises need. 145 00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:43,000 I guess it's been a few years now, but Eclipse has really moved strategically. 146 00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:48,000 You know, the Eclipse Foundation and the projects it works on into doing runtimes, if you will, 147 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:51,000 instead of, as we were talking about at the beginning, just being UI focused. 148 00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:56,000 And so, obviously, you know, Swordfish is a runtime environment, a backend sort of thing. 149 00:07:56,000 --> 00:08:02,000 And how, I mean, how, in respect to, you know, the Eclipse ecosystem and community, 150 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:05,000 how is Swordfish sort of fitting into that, expanding into the runtime area? 151 00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:10,000 First of all, it builds upon existing Eclipse runtime technology, such as Equinox. 152 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:16,000 Equinox is the common basis for all Eclipse runtime technologies, and it definitely builds upon Equinox. 153 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:23,000 But we also see that there are a lot of other projects in the runtime space that could probably make use of Swordfish. 154 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:30,000 One noted example is Smila, Smila project, which creates something like a semantic search kind of thing. 155 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:34,000 And they definitely have a need to interface to web services. 156 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:38,000 And Swordfish is exactly the kind of framework they could use to do exactly that. 157 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:39,000 Well, that sounds great. 158 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:41,000 Well, thanks for taking all this time to talk about Swordfish with us. 159 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:42,000 Thanks for giving us a chance to talk about it. 160 00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:43,000 Absolutely. 161 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:44,000 Thank you. 162 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:45,000 Absolutely.