Intalio last week released their open source based BPM System - Intalio|BPMS 5.0, including amongst other things a BPMN Editor and a BPEL server engine. The release is a milestone for Intalio in their effort to realise a complete solution for their BPM 2.0 vision. InfoQ took the opportunity to interview Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO, and Arnaud Blandin, EMEA Director, about the new release.
Sean McGrath shares some thoughts about how to manage unavoidable complexity in the problem domain through what he calls a "Combinatorical Enterprise Architecture" - which in essence means to identify the key patterns of behavior within the problem domain chaos, and combine them into a more simplistic "pseudo-chaos".
Adrian Cockcroft is defining a new type of enterprise computing platform where he addresses the problem of power consumption with the "Millicomputer" - a computer that requires less than 1 Watt. The idea is to build enterprise servers out of commodity components from the battery powered mobile space. 100 such Millicomputers can be clustered on a single 1U rack and consume less than 160W.
Nati Shalom says existing tier-based middleware cannot for true linear scalablility. Instead he proposes a new middleware stack based on self-sufficient processing units that supports a partitioned/scale-out model. Pat Helland at Microsoft some years ago proposed some new transactional patterns and formalizations to be used in what he calls almost-infinite scalable systems.
Last week however, IONA presented their open source strategy roadmap with the announcement of a merger of the former Logicblaze FUSE product and IONAs own Celtix product. The new open source product line will keep the FUSE brand and will consist of four product modules that can either be deployed together or independently.
Roger Sessions claims that the most popular EA frameworks (Zachman, TOGAF, FEA, and Gartner) have failed to evolve to the needs of today's more complex development needs. Instead, Sessions proposes a 'Partitioned-Iterative' Approach that reduces complexity through partitioning an organization in smaller pieces, rather than defining the architecture for the whole company at once.
With this release of Geronimo you can finally run it on Sun Java 1.5 VM, as long as you don't require CORBA. Another notable change from the 1.0 release is that Geronimo now is available in two distributions, one full and certified J2EE distribution and one "stripped down" distribution that only incudes a minimal installation with a Jetty or Tomcat http server.
