RE: [alf-dev] ALF in perspective

["Tim Buss" <TBuss@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Suzi,

Thank you for your interest.

I couldn't find this message as a post on the ALF Newsgroup but I think
that is a better place for this kind of discussion.  Newsgroups are
better at threading discussions.  I encourage you to participate in that
Newsgroup if you have general questions about ALF.  Look on
http://www.eclipse.org/alf/ ALF is an eclipse  "Technology Project"

To address your question, J2EE is a general programming platform.  While
it can be used for integration it can also be used for many other
purposes.

The aim of ALF is to provide a common platform around which tools in the
Application Lifecycle world can interoperate.  Since there is a broad
mix of tools, platform independence is paramount.  Web services offer
the best chance at this and are the only mechanism that the software
industry at large has agreed on as a platform independent mechanism.
Hence the "blind rush" you mentioned.

ALF includes some level of process through the orchestration of web
services (BPEL) to provide higher value coordinated services.  This
provides a common platform intended to solve the essential integration
problems.  ALF does not address the Lifecycle Process directly or
provide tools to do that.  Vendors that participate in ALF will fulfill
that need using ALF as the underlying mechanism to coordinate the tools
that participate across the lifecycle.  Without something like ALF that
is hard to do.

I am not sure what distinction you are making between business and
development lifecycles.  Clearly ALF is not intended to address such
things as loan application fulfillment.  However, it is intended to
address the business end of application lifecycles, requirements
gathering being the most obvious example. 

Regards,

Tim Buss
Serena Inc.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: alf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:alf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Suzanne Yoakum-Stover
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 9:09 AM
To: alf-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [alf-dev] ALF in perspective

Fellows,

I first learned about ALF from a great talk given by Brian Carroll and
Kevin Parker of Serena (www.serena.com) at Eclipse World in August 
(http://www.eclipseworld.net/).   I immediately became interested
because my 
work is  turning toward the integration of disparate, often stove-piped
systems in order to support better information propagation and sharing
as 
well as to leverage those systems to build new processes and
capabilities.   

Looking through the information on the ALF project page
(http://www.eclipse.org/alf/), I was caught by the statement that "ALF
is SOA for developers," and began to wonder whether I got the wrong
impression.  

Perhaps someone on this list can set me straight.  

What I'm looking for is some perspective on where ALF fits in to the
variety of existing and emerging integration technologies.  In
particular, I'd like to better understand the domain and range, if you
will, of J2EE, web services, semantic web technologies, SOA, and of
course, ALF.  

My current understanding is that J2EE is an integration technology for
legacy systems and especially DBs, any of which may be remote.  J2EE
provides the plumbing for hooking up those systems and encapsulates the
business process management in some sort of java class or perhaps using
a BPEL engine.  

As I understand it, web services simply expose application services on
the web 
in an implementation independent way.   These services could well
include 
ones provided by J2EE systems.  

SOA adds mechanisms for automatic service discovery and negotiation.
For this to really be mechanized (i.e. without requiring a human to
interpret the metadata), we need machine processable vocabularies (say
RDF), ontologies (in say OWL), and ideally, the rest of the semantic web
technology stack (logic, 
proof, trust).   

In contrast to J2EE which is server-centric and server-bound, SOA is
process-centric and hardware-unbound.  

Today, I see a lot of effort going in to building J2EE systems for
integrating 
DBs, and an almost blind rush to turn everything into web services.
What I 
have not seen much about is the process management piece that would
enable everything in a work flow.  I thought ALF might be such a thing,
but the emphasis in ALF seems to be on the development rather than the
business lifecycle.  

I apologize for the long email and look forward to your comments,

Suzi



--
Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, Ph.D.
Sr. Computational Scientist
SAIC
6359 Walker Lane
Alexandria, VA 22310
(703) 253-1208
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