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#38

Issue June 2014 | presented by

Plugging the desktop/cloudy IDE holesProject Flux is on the case

Dont get locked in

Long-term support, Eclipse style

Whats hot, whats notThe burning issues of the month

Game changing stuffWhy Open API and API is on target

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Editorial

2www.JAXenter.com|June 2014

With two and a half years slow and measured work behindit, its not an exaggeration to call Javas development con-servative when compared to languages like Scala, which aredriven by thousands of commiters in gazelle-esque leaps. And

whilst Java gently ticks along, the ecosystem around it shootsup at a rate of knots.

But it's not just language developments that matter to usat JAX. It's also the amazing innovations and products thatsupport you, whatever your code of choice. On this frontthe RebelLabs recent look into the most popular tools andtechnologies on the scene offered plenty of food for thought.Continuous Integration is clearly becoming more of a normacross the board, with a 10 percent uplift in respondents fromthe previous year.

Another growing priority in the sector is that of API man-agement. In this issue, Kai Whner examines the ways in

which Open API represents the cutting edge of a new busi-ness model, presenting new routes for expanding brandingvalue and paths to market, as well as modelling new valuechains for intellectual property.

Thinking long-term

In this article, Kai also discusses the components and archi-tecture of API Management solutions and compares differentAPI management products, and how these products comple-ment other middleware software.

Elsewhere, weve got an interview with Eclipse project Fluxcontributor Martin Lippert, who will be giving us the insidestory on this innovative new effort to bridge the gap betweenthe desktop bound and free-floating cloud IDE. Why are westuck in a creative rut with this technology, and how are thelunar-crew attempting to mix things up?

Continuing the Eclipse theme, weve also got insights onthe foundations approach to long-term support, courtesy ofDr. Jutta Bindewald and Pat Huff. Find out how their opensource principles inform their approach, and how they goabout avoiding the shackles of vendor lock-in.

Lucy Carey, Editor

Long term support: The Eclipse way 4In it for the long haulDr. Jutta Bindewald and Pat Huff

In Flux: Martin Lippert on the mission to marry the desktop 11and cloud IDEOpen API & API management: Redefining SOA 13Conceptual curve

Kai Whner

Cracking Microservices practices 19Masterclass

Bilgin Ibryam

Index

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Hot or Not


Oracle in-memory frontingLarry Ellison ruffled a few feathers with his latest announcement about to Oracles In-memory Computing strategy. Upstarts Hazelcast picked the same date to launch HazelcastEnterprise, a commercial offering which will go head to head with the Java overlords. Bothsystems have scalability, high availability, reliability, cloud readiness, convergence of theOLAP and OLTP approaches, and compatibility with SQL in common. Where the pathsdiverge is that Hazelcast are all about low-cost, open source software, whilst Oracle oper-ate on a path geared towards vendor lock-in, leading Hazelcast to label the San Franciscobehemoth an Apple wannabe. We do love a bit of sass on the side of any product launch.

Funky old JavaWeve banged on about this before: Java is best when fresh. This advice has been reiter-ated again by Microsofts latest Security Intelligence Report, which councils that keep-ing Java bang up to date provides maximum ROI for the security of your IT systems.According to the report, old Java plug-ins especially are at risk of attacks from exploittoolkits, and its a snap to hack into web pages using outdated software. Although its

easier said than done in some cases, if you can, for the best security ROI, it pays to usethe most recent versions of Java.

Groovy is Swift is Groovy is SwiftApples reveal of glossy proprietary language Swift was perhaps the biggest shock of themonth. Cobbled together from a grab-bag of modern language features, everyone fromRust users to die-hard JavaScript adherents laid claim to different aspects of Swift. Oneparticularly compelling argument came from team Groovy, who see their language asAndroids respective Swift counterpart. Lest anyone accuse Groovys creators of merelyjumping on the we-did-it-first bandwagon, Apple did in fact make a direct reference toGroovy during Swifts unveiling ceremony.

Its all coming up GradleDont get us wrong, Groovys revolutionary build automation tool, Gradle, is top notch.Still, we were surprised to see that it topped a recent poll by ZeroTurnaround as the toolpeople want to better understand. Geared at resolving sticking points like maintainabil-ity, performance, usability, extendability, and weak automation in other build systems,

Gradle is overseen by warders Gradleware, who have worked hard to build up a solidreputation for the software against arch rivals Maven and Ant and its likely this solidleadership that may be drawing peoples interest from around the JVM.

Red letter month for LinuxJava-ites were disgruntled at the thought of waiting over two years for their update sospare a thought for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users, who had more than threeyears before the launch of RHEL 7. First launched in 1994, Red Hat Linux forms acentral pillar for Red Hat solutions across cloud and virtualization, storage and middle-ware. Its hoped that the operating system will further consolidate its grip in the space,moving beyond its position as a commodity platform. In other Linux-related celebra-

tions, container technology Docker, which RHEL 7 will help push into the enterprise,reached 1.0 status this month. Party on, Linux people!

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Eclipse


by Dr. Jutta Bindewald and Pat Huff

What do many commercial applications have in commonwith design tools for aircraft? They are both mission-critical,they both contain open source (often Eclipse components),and they both have to be functional for many, many years.Keeping these long term solutions up and running is crucial

and at the same time a major challenge. Changes in the en-vironment or in the data structure may awaken bugs thathave slept peacefully for years. Changes in the upper software

layers may lead to undetected problems in the lower layers.The reality is that an application may crash even after havingworked just fine for a long time.

If your business is to build, sell, and run professional soft-ware, you are faced with the task of supporting your offeringover its complete life cycle. If the problem is in your owncode, you may be able to analyze and fix the bug. There is still

know-how in your company, you own the source code, youstill have access to the build scripts, and you still have a testenvironment, so you have a way forward.

Long term support The Eclipse way

In it for the long haul

As Open Source moves into mainstream applications, it becomes imperative

that support issues in that code can be addressed throughout the lifecycle

of those applications. This is often difficult as the Open Source communities

tend to focus on new function and not on maintaining older releases.

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Eclipse


However, what if it turns out that the prob-lem is caused by a bug in an open source com-ponent that you used in your solution? Eclipseis well known as an open source communitythat produces exceptional developer tools andruntimes that also embraces and encouragescommercial adoption of their technology. In-deed, the Eclipse Foundation is unique amongthe open source communities in addressing is-sues important to commercial adopters, suchas intellectual property and legal clearance.Now, Eclipse is extending that to the supportissues of its consumers. As these consumerscome to depend on products built on Eclipsetechnology, the ability to maintain these prod-ucts throughout the complete life cycle of acommercial offering becomes another impor-tant part of the value proposition to them.

The Lifespan Problem

Official support for a version of an Eclipseproject ends after nine months with the re-lease of Service Release 2. So if you discover a bug in anancient (from the open source project committer perspec-tive) version, it will either already be fixed in the currentversion under development at Eclipse, or you will be toldthat it will be fixed in the next support release or in the nextmajor version. Moving your product to the latest version isoften not a viable option. The risk and the cost of exchang-ing components inside a productive solution are high, and

many customers are not willing to accept that risk withoutseeing a clear benefit. In addition, there are often regulatoryrequirements for multiple years of stability which prohibita migration to newer releases at the same rate and pace of avibrant open source community like Eclipse. For example,aerospace companies have to ensure software maintenanceof their offerings for decades.

The Options

So how do you fix bugs in (possibly very) old versions ofEclipse projects? There are basically two options: You do ityourself or you look for professional help.

The do-it-yourself option has a number of challenges

you must surmount. Yes, you will find the source code inthe Eclipse repositories; however do you understand it wellenough to apply critical changes? Can you re-create the buildand the appropriate test environment? Can you sign the bi-naries? There are also legal considerations. For example, theEclipse Public License requires that you make all your sourcecode changes publicly available.

The professional-help option is also not as easy as itsounds. You need to quickly find the right maintenance pro-vider for your specific problem. In the best case, you want tochoose between several providers, but how do you comparethem? Once you have decided, you have to make sure that

you are not locked into that one provider; what happensto the source code, binaries, etc. if you want to switch toanother provider?

The Eclipse LTS Answer

This is where the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) Work-ing Group comes into the picture. The LTS Working Groupwas created to address the long term maintenance for Eclipsetechnologies that are commercially adopted. LTS providesthe infrastructure and a marketplace of needed skills to allowyou to provide support for your customers over the manyyears of your products life cycle.

At the same time LTS is designed to help those companiesor individuals who are in the business of providing profes-sional support for Eclipse projects (the Maintenance Provid-ers). Here are some of the building blocks of LTS:

1. The Marketplace: This is where maintenance providersadvertise their offerings and where a potential consumerof these services can find the professionals to help themwith his problems.

2. The Technical Infrastructure: This shared infrastructureoffers all necessary components to the maintenance pro-viders: from source repository to signed binaries. We willdescribe it in more detail below.

3. The Organization: LTS is organized as an Eclipse Work-ing Group. Maintenance providers must join the WorkingGroup in order to leverage the LTS infrastructure.

How Does It Work?

If you are a potential consumer of LTS-based support servic-es, you do not have to be a member of the LTS organization.You simply visit the LTS Marketplace to find and contactan appropriate maintenance provider. The maintenance pro-vider will then discuss the terms, costs, and details with you.In general, you will get the fixes as signed binaries. The sourcecode is available as open source under the license of the origi-

nal project (usually the EPL).If you are a maintenance provider, you join the LTS or-

ganization to benefit from the shared services and infra-

Abb. 1: Eclipse LTS Process Overview

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Eclipse


structure. Let us take a closer look at this infrastructureand how a maintenance provider would use it. It consistsmainly of a Git repository, a Gerrit code review system, theMaven/Tycho build infrastructure, and a Hudson server forcontinuous integration.

When a bug in an older version of an Eclipse project isreported, you can fetch the source from the LTS Git re-pository. After applying the necessary source code modi-fications, you push the changes to Gerrit for code review,

thus also triggering the rebuild of your component. If thebuild succeeds, you will get the first positive vote from theHudson voter.

But this vote is not enough; other maintenance providersare asked to review your changes and give their vote. If atleast one other provider accepts your changes and no one re-jects them, you are done, and the source code changes canbe pushed back to the central LTS repository. You can nowbuild your component with Maven/Tycho and deliver thesigned binaries to your customer.

This is quite easy and straightforward, isnt it? But never-theless, some questions may come to your mind.

Is Maven/Tycho mandatory to participate in LTS? No,all projects can participate in LTS, but if you use anotherbuild infrastructure than Maven/Tycho you are obligedto check in your build scripts to ensure a reproduciblebuild

Who has access to the bug fixes I made? The source codeis available (usually under the EPL) as open source to any-one, thus complying with the Open Source license terms.Access to the binaries and to the signing service is limitedto LTS members.

How can I create private bug fixes that should only beavailable to the public after a certain point in time (e.g.

security fixes)? LTS maintenance providers are granteda private Git forge. Only the provider himself has accessand can grant rights to this branch. Code changes in thisbranch are not subject to a public Gerrit code review.

The LTS Market Place

As you can see, Eclipse LTS offers an easy way for mainte-nance providers to fix bugs in older releases. But how can theyreach potential customers? An important benefit to joiningLTS is the newly-created Eclipse Market Place for LTS pro-viders, which offers an easy entry point for maintenance pro-viders and their customers. Here maintenance providers can

offer their services on the marketplace, listing all the projectsthey can provide support for. If you are a potential consumerof these services, the LTS marketplace will be an ideal way to

find and choose between service providers that can help youwith your problems.

Go to http://marketplace.eclipse.org/and select Long TermSupport under the list of Markets to see the current list of LTSmaintenance providers.

Collaborative and OpenLet us emphasize one aspect: Eclipse LTS is a collaborativeapproach based on Open Source principles. LTS membersand maintenance providers work in a shared infrastructurehosted by Eclipse. Fixes in LTS and associated binaries willbe available to all LTS members. In particular, that meansmaintenance providers can offer not only their own bug fixesto their customers but also fixes done by other maintenanceproviders.

From a customer point of view this minimizes the risk ofvendor lock-in. If you are no longer satisfied with your main-tenance provider, or they stop supporting the project, you

may choose another maintenance provider. Thanks to theshared infrastructure and the collaborative approach, noneof the fixes from the original provider will be lost.

Dr. Jutta Bindewaldis working as Development Manager for SAP. She is

a member of the Eclipse Board of Directors and Co-Chair of the LTS work-

ing group.

Pat Huff is a Program Director in IBM Rational, responsible for Open

Source and Eclipse. Pat manages the relationship between the IBM prod-

uct development community and Eclipse. He is a member of the Eclipse

Board of Directors and is Co-Chair of the LTS Working Group.

References

[1] LTS homepage: https://lts.eclipse.org/

Eclipse LTS offers andeasier wayto fix bugs

in older releases.

Participants

Steering Committee Members: IBM, SAP, Innoopract, Po-

larSys and CA Technologies

Premium Members: Atos, Codetrails, itemis, Boundless, Erics-

son, Obeo, Airbus, CEA LIST

Interested Parties: Bosch

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LONDON 2014

featuring

Business Design Centre, London

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follow us: @JAXLondon JAX London JAX London

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October 13th 15th, 2014Business Design Centre, LondonLONDON 2014

JAX London is returning from 13th 15th October at the

Business Design Centre, Islington, bringing Java, JVM and

Enterprise Professionals together for our technology and

methodology focused event. Known as the place where

the most respected thinkers and the brightest minds of the

tech community meet, JAX London offers a deep dive for

the modern developer and architect aiming to transform

open technologies into valuable business solutions. We

pride ourselves by always focusing on the big picture: Java

core, architecture, and web technologies, as well as expert

professional insight into the very latest methodologies and

best-practices.

JAX London offers a unique experience featuring some of

the most highly regarded and sought after speakers, pre-

senting the latest trends and developments, in a profes-

sional and relaxed atmosphere.

Learn how to increase your productivity, identify which tech-

nologies and practices suit your specific requirements and

learn about new approaches. Network and exchange ideas

with other developers and experts about Java, Agility and

Big Data and many other important topics.

The conference is divided into workshop and session days:

Monday 13th October hosts a pre-conference workshop

and tutorial day, allowing developers to get hands-on in half-

day and full-day workshops overseen by experts.

Tuesday 14th & Wednesday 15th October see the confer-

ence proper taking place with more than 60 technical

sessions, keynote presentations, the JAX Expo, community

events and more.

Big Data Con will also be joining JAX London. A perfect op-

portunity to find out more about the latest knowledge onmodern data stores, big data architectures based on Ha-

doop plus advanced data processing techniques.

Register now and save on the Very Early Bird offers until

31st July!

Standard ticket holders also have access to Big Data Con.

For more information and the latest news about the confer-

ence and our speakers check out www.jaxlondon.com.

Join us for JAX London 2014

Some highlights of the JAX London sessions

Richard Warburton (Monotonic Ltd)

Richard is an empirical technologist and solver of deep-dive techni-

cal problems. Recently he has been working on data analytics for high

performance computing and has written a book on Java 8 Lambdas for

OReilly.

Performance from Predictability

These days fast code needs to operate in harmony with its environ-

ment. At the deepest level this means working well with hardware:

RAM, disks and SSDs. A unifying theme is treating memory access

patterns in a uniform and predictable way that is sympathetic to the

underlying hardware. For example writing to and reading from RAM

and Hard Disks can be significantly sped up by operating sequentially

on the device, rather than randomly accessing the data. In this talk

hell cover why access patterns are important, what kind of speed

gain you can get and how you can write simple high level code which

works well with these kind of patterns.

Simon Ritter (Oracle)

Simon Ritter manages the Java Technology Evangelist team at Oracle

Corporation.

Lambdas and Streams in Java SE 8: Making Bulk

Operations Simple

The significant new language feature in Java SE 8 is the introduc-

tion of Lambda expressions, a way of defining and using anonymousfunctions. On its own this provides a great way to simplify situations

where we would typically use an anonymous inner class today. How-

ever, Java SE 8 also introduces a range of new classes in the standard

libraries that are designed specifically to take advantage of Lambdas.

These are primarily included in two new packages: java.util.stream

and java.util.function.

After a brief discussion of the syntax and use of Lambda expressions

this session will focus on how to use Streams to greatly simplify the

way bulk and aggregate operations are handled in Java. He will show

at examples of how a more functional approach can be taken in Java

using sources, intermediate operations and terminators. He will also

discuss how this can lead to improvements in performance for many

operations through the lazy evaluation of Streams and how code can

easily be made parallel by changing the way the Stream is created.
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Some highlights of the JAX London sessions

Josh Long (Pivotal)

Josh Long is the Spring Developer Advocate. Josh is the lead author on

Apress Spring Recipes, 2nd Edition, the O'Reilly "Pro Spring Roo" book,

the Pearson "Livelessons for Spring" and a committer on several Spring

projects and the Activiti BPMN framework.

'Bootiful' Code with Spring Boot

Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework

from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conven-

tional, common sense defaults to make application development not just

fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long for a look

at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider

it for your next application (REST, web, batch, big-data, integration,whatever!) and how to get started. Let's take advantage of the dynamic

nature of a virtual JUG: Josh Long will be live coding and (attempting

to) answer your questions on all things Spring and Spring Boot as he

introduces the technology.

The Full Stack Java Developer

Today's Java developer is a rare bird indeed. SQL and JPA on the back-

end, or MongoDB or Hadoop? HTTP, REST and websockets on the web

tier? What about security? JavaScript, HTML, CSS, (not to mention LESS,

SASS, and CoffeeScript!) on the client? Today's Java developer is a full

stack developer, and has enough problems to deal with already. Join

Josh Long for a look at how Spring Boot reigns in the complexity, and

empowers you, today's Java developer, to build applications quickly. He

intends this talk to introduce the Spring toolsystem in live-coding of anapplication to demonstrate websockets, REST, JPA and SQL, unit testing,

web security and HTML5 and Angular.js-powered client applications

rendered through Thymeleaf. This talk will also include a discussion on

modern web application concerns like resource processing (LESS, SASS,

CoffeeScript) and client-side dependency management options for the

Java developer.

David Delabasse (Oracle)

David Delabassee is a software evangelist working for the Java EE Team

at Oracle.

Server-Side JavaScript on the Java Platform

Project Avatar is an open source platform for server-side JavaScript

applications on the JVM. Project Avatar uses not only the Node.js pro-

gramming model, but also its ecosystem. These Java/JavaScript hybrid

applications can leverage capabilities of both environmentsaccessing

the latest node frameworks while taking advantage of the Java platforms

scalability, manageability, tools, and extensive collection of Java libraries.

In this session, you will learn how to write hybrid applications that take

advantage of both ecosystems.

Pushing Java EE outside of the Enterprise : Home Auto-

mation & IoT

Java EE is a rich platform widely used in the Enterprise. This session will

look at the relevance of Java EE outside of this traditional domain., i.e.

how Java EE is also relevant for a connected home and more generally

for IoT. David Delabasse will show the various extension points and

technologies available in Java EE to integrate external systems such as

using JCA to connect to a KNX Bus, the most widely used protocol in

home automation, etc.

Home Automation is by nature highly event driven so we will look how

Message Driven Bean and CDI can be leveraged in this context.

Finally, he will also have a look at additional technologies that are rel-

evant in the IoT space such as JAX-RS, WebSocket, etc.

Peter Friese (Google)

Peter works as a Developer Advocate at Google in the Developer Rela-

tions Team in London, UK. He is a regular open source contributor,

blogger, and public speaker.

Build iOS Apps with Java

In this session, Peter Friese will show how to use tools like RoboVM to

build fully native iOS apps based on the Java language ecosystem. You

can see how easy it is to create native iOS UIs using just Java code.

He will also demonstrate how to use 3rd party Java or Objective-C

libraries to make your life easier. Finally, he will show how alternative

JVM languages like Xtend, Kotlin or Scala can be used to create apps

based on RoboVM. Time permitting, you will have a look at how to use

RoboVM to create cross-platform games based on the Java platform.

Introduction to Android Wear

In this session, Peter Friese will give an overview of Android Wear and

how to integrate it in your product strategy. He will look at the underly-

ing design principles and discuss a number of use cases for apps that

connect to wearable devices. After that, he will show some code exam-

ples and teach how to use the Android Wear SDK.

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Agile knowledge exchange through actingPawel Badenski (Bottega IT Solutions) and

Johannes Thnes (ThoughtWorks)

Knowledge exchange is one of the primary

reasons people go to a conference or attend a

workshop. But talking about experience is not

always enough. Talking about it and then experiencing it through doing

is what makes the difference. Thats why weve combined knowledge

sharing and improvisation theatre in our workshop Agile Knowledge

Exchange through Acting.

In this workshop, participants act out improvised scenes from everyday

lean and agile life, including improvised retrospectives, standups, pair-

programming and other typical activities. We use improvisation gamesto create interesting and challenging situations, allowing participants

to demonstrate how they might react and learn from the examples

provided by others.

In addition, participants will:

learn more about their emotions

gain experience using different communication styles

experiment with new behaviours

Dataflow, the forgotten wayRussel Winder (Freelancer)

Java 8 brings Streams to the JVM, an easy way of dealing

with stream based data evolution either sequentially or inparallel. So JVM now has data parallelism covered. There

has been a lot of marketing of actors as a tool for handling

concurrency and parallelism, systems such as GPars and Akka bring this

to Java, Scala and Groovy programming. However there are other archi-

tectures: communicating sequential processes (CSP) and dataflow. Go

has brought these models of concurrency and parallelism to the world

of native code systems but what about the JVM? GPars has dataflow

capability.

This session will focus on the dataflow and CSP models of concurrency

and parallelism and will present some small practical examples as a

guide.

Hands on wit Data GridsStephen Millidge (C2B2)

This workshop will give you a rapid introduction to working

with Data Grid technologies like Hazelcast, Infinispan,

Coherence and others. It will be a mixture of brief slides on

the concepts of Data Grids followed by a large amount of

hands on Javas code. In the workshop we will configure a data grid on

Amazon EC2 with a node on each attendees machine. We will also cre-

ate a simple chat application using Data Grid Events, and finally we will

hunt the POJO across the grid using Entry Processors for On Grid parallel

processing.

If you've never played with a Data Grid and therefore never had a chance

to appreciate the power of this technology, then we will show you how

simple and easy it is to get started and use it. You will go away inspired

to create your own on-grid applications. Or if not inspired, at least mildly

enthusiastic.

Hands-on performance tuning

Matt Braiser (C2B2 Consulting)

This hands on lab will present a number of applications

which have been built to include some common significant

performance bottlenecks. Attendees will be able to work

through the applications using a variety of free and open

source tooling to get practical experience of identifying and resolving

the bottlenecks. The techniques required will be covered at the start of

the labs, and the exercises will give hands-on experience of using the

various tools and techniques.

Performance tuning is seen as a black art by many, when really it is a

scientific process of measurement and elimination. This lab aims to give

attendees practical experience of identifying and resolving some of thekey performance problems that are seen in enterprise java applications,

although the principals will extend to applications in any language. Hope-

fully once attendees have identified and resolved a performance problem

in a lab environment, they will be able to take this expertise and apply it

to their own applications.

The economies of scaling softwareAbdelmonaim Remani (PolymathicCoder Inc)

You spend your precious time building the perfect applica-

tion. You do everything right. You carefully craft every piece

of code and rigorously follow the best practices and design

patterns, you apply the most successful methodologies

software engineering has to offer with discipline, and you pay attentionto the most minuscule of details to produce the best user experience

possible. It all pays off eventually, and you end up with a beautiful code

base that is not only reliable but also performs well. You proudly watch

your baby grow, as new users come in bringing more traffic your way

and craving new features. You keep them happy and they keep coming

back. One morning, you wake up to servers crashing under load, and

data stores failing to keep up with all the demand. You panic. You throw

in more hardware and try to optimize, but the hungry crowd that was

once your happy user base catches up to you. Your success is slipping

through your fingers. You find yourself stuck between having to rewrite

the whole application and a hard place. It's frustrating, dreadful, and

painful to say the least. Don't be that guy! Save your soul before it's too

late, and come to learn how to build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-

grade Java applications that scale from day one.

Topics covered include: parallelism, load distribution, state management,

caching, big data, asynchronous processing, and static content delivery.

Leveraging cloud computing, scaling teams and DevOps will also be

discussed.

P.S. This session is more technical than you might think.

JAX London Workshop Day

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Eclipse Interview


JAX Magazine: Can you outline the project for our readers?

Martin Lippert: Project Flux is a new project at Eclipse. Itsabout moving towards the cloud based IDE. Project Flux triesto solve two different problems in cloud base architecture:first, the idea that future developer tooling will in some waysbe based on the cloud, or run on the browser instead of theclassical desktop idea. But we dont really know what this isgoing to look like. There are certain ideas about just imple-menting exactly the same IDE thats running on the desktopat the moment, just running in the browser. But I dont thinkthats the right way. So Flux is about trying to finding out whatthis tool could look like, and how it could be implemented.

The second part is that, if you took a look at approachesto cloud based developer tooling today, people are buildingsomething thats running inside the cloud, you can access itwith a browser and thats it. You have to jump over thewall into this cloud based world, and then you are caughtthere. You have to check out your stuff in the cloud, and leaveeverything else you were working on behind on your desktopIDE. Its a totally separate world. Its quite difficult for peopleto jump over this wall because of the either-or decision theyhave to make. So this step is quite huge.

Flux is trying to build a bridge between those two worlds,so toolmakers like myself can move towards cloud based de-velopment tooling in a very smooth and slow way. People canstart using cloud based developer tools at the same time, whilethey are continuing to use their IDE. Cloud tooling is quite fea-ture rich now but you dont want to leave everything behind.Thats the basic thing were trying to solve with Flux.

JAXmag: Originally this was known as Project Flight right?

Lippert: Yes, Flight was our first name. But right before wemade it public and presented it to Eclipse, we saw that therewas this project from Twitter that was also call Flight so we

decided it wasnt such a good idea to have two projects withthis name. Anyway, I totally dig the name Flux too like theFlux capacitor thing in the Back to the Future movies.

JAXmag: Going back to what you were saying before, there

is a cognitive dissonance between developing for the cloud

and IDE. Why do you think this is?

Lippert: Im not sure if you can call this a cognitive dis-sonance. But I think many of the elements that you have inyour desktop IDE, they are the usual elements theyre veryfamiliar and youre used to them. You have your navigatorand the open tabs and so on. Whereas on the browser, if you

are trying to rebuild exactly this, that feels a little strange. Itsnot really adopting the idea of web applications. Interestingly,in the Orion project at Eclipse, they are trying to move awayfrom the traditional desktop IDE paradigm, but are findingthat people actually want some of these elements included(like context-menus, the navigator tree, etc.). Maybe its justthe natural way of doing things, and maybe the traditionalway is actually better. But I like to step away, and step backfrom these traditional views, to trigger new thoughts aboutthese things. Maybe youll end up building similar things thatare there in existing desktop IDEs if its a good solution. may-be not. Im not totally sure what the future cloud based devel-oper tool will look like exactly we have a lot of ideas, and

have built prototypes and things like that, but we dont have aperfect answer yet. I think it will evolve over time.

Portrait

Martin Lippert is a Principal Software Engineer at Pivotal and

works on development tools for the Spring Framework, Cloud

Foundry and JavaScript. Together with his team, he is responsible

for the Spring IDE, Spring Tool Suite and the Cloud Foundry In-

tegration for Eclipse. Martin is also co-founder of it-agile GmbH,

one of the leading agile companies in Germany. He is interested

in Agile and Lean Software Development, refactoring techniques,

innovation, and the delivery of high-quality open-source software.

In Flux: Martin Lippert onthe mission to marry thedesktop and cloud IDE

Breaking a tired old paradigm: Pivotals Martin

Lippert outlines this groundbreaking new server

facing project to JAX Magazine.

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Eclipse Interview

www.JAXenter.com|March 2014 12

JAXmag: Do you have an idea for the basic blueprints for the

architecture of Flux?

Lippert: Yes, we have a pretty clear vision for the archi-tecture of Flux, and its totally different to what we have incurrent desktop IDEs. The basic idea is that you have veryloosely coupled components that are running in a cloud based

environment. Those very small components are some kind ofmicro services, and are connected with asynchronous mes-saging. Theres no RESTful API theres no server that youcall to do some stuff. They are communicating with messagesonly. Everything else is implemented on top of this messag-ing backbone. For example the synchronization protocol thatFlux uses to sync project and files across services is imple-mented as a set of messages that are being sent around. Thesame is true for the desktop IDE. It is connected to this mes-sage channel and can communicate with other Flux services

that way. The real-time sync while you are typing is imple-mented on top of this asynchronous messaging as well. It cre-ates a whole new vision for building a distributed developertooling platform.

The project and file synchronization is Flux is a bit likeDropbox for code. You can connect your projects in your

favorite desktop IDE to Flux and from there on, all the filesare synced with Flux it feels very seamless, and its all beingbacked up automatically on the cloud. Thats a very funda-mental service of Flux. On top of that, other service compo-nents that are running inside the cloud can participate in thissynching mechanisms as well and thats very interesting, be-cause it opens up a whole load of new possibilities for build-ing all kinds of microservices inside the cloud. It opens up awhole new world of possibilities, and to me its an awesomefoundation for the future of cloud-based developer tooling.

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API


by Kai Whner

Open API represents the leading edge of a new business mod-el, providing innovative ways for companies to expand brandvalue and routes to market, and create new value chains forintellectual property. In the past, SOA strategies mostly tar-geted internal users. Open API targets mostly external part-ners. So, API management requires developer portals, keymanagement, and metering/billing facilities that SOA man-agement never provided.

This article introduces the concepts of Open API, its chal-

lenges and opportunities. API Management will becomeimportant in many areas, no matter if business-to-business(B2B) or business-to-customer (B2C) communication. Sev-

eral real world use cases will discuss how to gain leveragedue to API Management. The second part of the article dis-cusses the components and architecture of API Managementsolutions and compares different API management prod-ucts, and how these products complement other middlewaresoftware.

The Open API Business Model

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is already establishedwithin most enterprises. It is commodity. As discussed byAnne Thomas Mannes as long ago as 2009, the next software

evolution can be built on top of SOA see SOA is Dead;Long Live Services for more details:http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html.

Conceptual curve

Open API & APImanagement:Redefining SOAA deep dive into the concepts of Open API and the obstacles and opportunities it presents.

ImageLicensedbyIngramI

mage
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www.JAXenter.com|June 2014 14

Welcome to the Open API Business Model, which finallyrepresents this evolution, building on top of SOA and ser-vices. The modern buzzword for this topic is Open API.Analysts and software vendors classify the product around

Open API as API Management.

What is Open API?

Lets take a look at the definition of Open API from Wiki-pedia: Open API is a word used to describe sets of tech-nologies that enable websites to interact with each other byusing REST, SOAP, JavaScript and other web technologies.While its possibilities arent limited to web-based applica-tions, its becoming an increasing trend in so-called Web2.0 applications. This definition should be endorsed byclarifying that Open API is also used for automated ma-chine-to-machine (M2M) communication more and more.

It is not just used for communicating with web browsersand mobile apps.

Drivers for Open API

The introduction of Open API establishes several benefits:

Enable New Business Models: Increase revenue fromexisting services through partner ecosystems, and extendpresence to social and mobile platforms serving digitalcustomers.

Deliver High Performance: Accelerate edge services per-formance through load balancing, caching, and a high-performance event-driven architecture.

Secure Internal Services for External Exposure: Stand-ardize authentication and authorization across the enter-prise and through to partners, and protect services fromattack through security policies, message verification,and adaptive throttling.

Map Business Agreements to Enforceable Policies: Usethrottles to enforce SLAs for service consumers, andmonetize by metering or charging for systems integra-tion.

Federate Disparate Enterprise Applications: Unify cloudand mobile platforms through service aggregation,content-based routing, protocol bridging, mediation, and

lightweight orchestration. Rapidly On-Board Partners: Create new channels with

hot deployment of partners, services, and policies.

The benefits generate several opportunities for business.Without IT, Open API would not be possible. However,Open API initiatives usually are driven by the line-of-busi-ness, not IT (see Figure 1, taken fromhttp://www.tibco.com/products/automation/api-management/default.jsp).Business can increase revenue, reduce costs and improveefficiency by introducing Open API. Revenue growth:

New revenue streams via repurposed intellectual prop-erty

Expand channel partners and customers

Extend brand value and market reach

Cost reduction/improved efficiency:

Reduce costs through partner self service Increase supply chain and B2B flexibility Enhance R&D through crowd source innovation

Due to these opportunities, [many companies want to] ex-pose APIs directly to third-party development organiza-tions. These inquiries come from companies across multipleindustries, from entertainment and media to retail, finan-cial services, telecommunications, and even government(see The Forrester Wave: API Management Platforms,Q1 2013 by Eve Maler and Jeffrey s. Hammond, Febru-ary 5, 2013, http://www.forrester.com/The+Forrester+Wave+API+Management+Platforms+Q1+2013/fulltext/-/E-RES81441).

Real world use cases for Open API

Open API is not just a buzzword. Many success stories ex-ist already. The following shows different use cases wherecompanies increased their revenue significantly by makingtheir internal APIs public. These companies monetize withevery service call:

PayPalis an international e-commerce business allowingpayments and money transfers to be made through theInternet. It was acquired by eBay in 2002, and was usedmainly for payment of eBay auctions for several years.In the meantime, PayPal is integrated into thousandsother online shops which sell anything from books over

computers to coupons. The payment process is easy toimplement for the online shop, and also easy to use andsecure for the customer. PayPal earns money with everypayment of any online shop. PayPal offers its paymentservice through several different APIs and applica-tions or gadgets on top of it. See the PayPal communityPayPal Forward for numerous success stories: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/bg-p/PPFWD.

Amazonstarted as an international electronic commercecompany selling books, DVDs, and other goods. Today,it is the largest online retailer worldwide. Therefore,

Amazon needs thousands of servers and a good, stableinfrastructure. In 2006, Amazon started renting parts ofthis infrastructure as cloud service (infrastructure as a

Figure 1: Drivers for Open API
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service) via Open API. Today, Amazon is the worldwideleader in this segment. Revenue is growing quarter byquarter. See The Secret to Amazons Success Internal

APIs (http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/) to understand howAmazon realizes this Open API approach.

Mobile enablement is one of the hottest topics for APIManagement as most companies enable their workforceto become more mobile, and also customers want to usetheir mobile phone for communicating with the com-panies. The easiest way to solve this is offering an openAPI to push the implementation of new mobile applica-tions using these APIs. A funny success story for mobileenablement is Dominos pizzaservice, where a hackerfound out that he could order pizzas via a command

line API, see Track Your Dominos Pizza Order froma Terminal (http://lifehacker.com/388708/track-your-dominos-pizza-order-from-a-terminal). This is a postfrom 2008. Think about yourself and your friends. Howmany of you guys order a pizza or a taxi via mobile appson your smartphone, today? In some years, you will useGoogle Glass or the panel on your refrigerator to dothese things.

These use cases make internal interfaces public as OpenAPI to be used by consumers. Besides, many other enter-prise scenarios exist where API Management makes a lotof sense, for example:

Partner Gateway: Access control for well known exter-nal parties

Mobile App Gateway: Access control for apps deployedexternally

Cloud Integration Gateway: Governance and mediationcontrol for SaaS

Internal Governance: Manage internal SOA

Technical Overview about Open API

The drivers for Open API were explained in the last section.The most important thing is to be aware of these opportuni-

ties. The upcoming section discusses the technical conceptsof Open API and its corresponding API Management prod-ucts. The section takes a look at the basic lifecycle, different

components, technical architecture and relevant roles forimplementing the Open API concept in your enterprise.

Open API LifecycleThe lifecycle of Open API is illustrated in Figure 2, takenfrom http://www.tibco.com/products/automation/api-management/default.jsp. It can be described in four steps:

1. API Providers enable access to their data or businessfunctionality using public APIs.

2. API Consumers (e.g. external developers) embed theAPI functionality in their applications.

3. API usage is monetized with a pay for use model.4. Focus is on leveraging existing services in new ways.

Components of an Open API Solution

Before API consumers can use APIs, different work has tobe done by the API provider. Offering an Open API solutioninvolves the following steps:

Create a API engine on premise (in your datacenter orDMZ) or use a (private or public) cloud solution.

Open enterprise services as APIs.

Make it easy for others to use the APIs.

Act on feedback to improve your offering (e.g. regardingSLAs, customer satisfaction) and to increase revenue.

To realize this solution, you need three components: API

Gateway, API Portal Platform and API Analytics. Thesecomponents are described in the following.

API Gateway

The API Gateway is a centralized access point for manag-ing enterprise APIs, providing mediation between internaland external services, systems, and devices. You create poli-cies to secure and control services with these capabilities toensure performance and availability at web scale throughsecurity and access control, event-based runtime policymanagement, and federated web scale performance.

API Portal PlatformAPI Providers and API Consumers use an API Portal Plat-form. It is a complete software environment for building,

Figure 2: Lifecycle of Open API
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deploying, and managing a customized developer portal forAPI exchange.

API providers use the portal for API portfolio and life-cycle management, product creation and pricing, partnermanagement, and monetization.

API consumers use the portal to browse the product catalog(i.e. combination of APIs for different prices/usage quotas),

explore and test APIs, and subscribe to services.

API Analytics

API Analytics is an integrated analytics server, which offersreporting and monitoring capabilities including:

Reporting dashboard (out of the box or customized re-ports)

Monitor KPIs and SLA compliance

Drill-down into specific user behaviour Understand API usage patterns Full execution auditing and debugging Isolate problems through data discovery Trend analysis to identify future capacity needs Look for opportunities to grow the API ecosystem

Architecture of an API Management Solution

After describing the different components needed to build anOpen API solution, lets take a look at the basic deploymentarchitecture (see Figure 3, taken fromhttp://www.tibco.com/products/automation/api-management/default.jsp).

Several challenges have to be solved. The three major archi-tectural challenges for API Management are scalability andpolicy-based service delivery. Though, lets first discuss howAPI Management fits into enterprise architecture at all.

API Management in an Enterprise Architecture

The first question is how API Management fits into the exist-

ing enterprise architecture. The short answer: It is a perfectcomplementary add-on. It can be placed between existingservices and API consumers. Usually, it is deployed on prem-ise in the DMZ of the enterprise, or deployed as cloud ser-vice.

The architecture behind the DMZ does not have tochange. Existing infrastructure for realizing integration

(ESB), business processes (BPM), event processing (CEP),enterprise software (ERP, CRM), etc. can still be leveragedas before. It just gets a new gateway for publishment andmonetization.

Scalability

API Management solutions have to scale. Unlike internalservice calls in a SOA, public APIs have other requirements:Service consumers are not known, SLAs differ, and the num-ber of service calls depends on success of external partnersand can increase quickly and significantly. Therefore, an APIManagement solution has to ensure different scalability as-pects:

No single-point-of-failure Multiple instances of a gateway can be deployed across

multiple hosts Can be scaled dynamically to address peak demand Can be deployed across data centers for geo-resilience Allow caching to improve performance

Gateways report availability to load-balancer

Centralized logging of distributed deployments Infrastructure can be monitored by existing agents and tools

Policy based Service Delivery

The service delivery of open APIs has to be policy based. De-pending on the use case, many of the following policy aspectshave to be managed in a flexible, configurable way:

Figure 3: Architecture of an API Management Solution
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Authentication and Authorization

Access control granularity down to service endpoint oroperation

Single-edit configuration changes through web user interface

Throttle Capabilities

Rate and high-water mark technical throttles designed toprotect particular service implementations

Quota commercial throttle designed to prevent commercialover-use of services (e.g. wholesale usage)

Time-of-day throttle behavior down during known busyperiods or maintenance

Error-rate/ payload-size technical throttles designed tominimize impact of external parties

Group logical throttle to help manage large partners,large service deployments

Routing Capabilities

By operation: Routing based on the requested service,such as a SOAPAction or URL string

By requestor: Routing based on the name, type or classof requesting-device

By version: Version routings can be used to support mul-tiple concurrent versions of a service or a service imple-mentation

By protocol: Routing can be used to safely abstractionrequests bi-directionally

Time-of-day routing to difference services (explicitly,orchestrations)

By identity: Different partners and consumers can be

routed to different services By size: For some requests (e.g. with attachments), re-

quests can be routed by size to appropriate service han-dlers

Roles

Different roles have to be defined for Open API. API con-sumers represent partners and external developers while APIproviders can be developers, administrators, or partner man-agers. Lets take a look at the functions each role has to ac-complish:

Developers

Provide a catalog for organizing and publishing APIs Supply a repository for documentation, sample code,

usage tips Create product options and support plans

Provide REST and SOAP service interoperability

Monitor and report on API usage and performance

Administrators

Manage environments and developer accounts Set access rights by user or organization Configure deployment policies for APIs

Partner Managers Partner onboarding Community management

API Consumers

Discover and use APIs

Use a self-service portal for enrollment, key requests, andAPI testing

Select product options and support plans Monitor and report on API consumption

Products

Different kinds of API Management solutions are availableon the market. More are arising year by year. Analysts suchas Gartner or Forrester see Open API as a hot topic for fu-ture IT investments and growing revenue. Lets recap fromabove: To realize an Open API solution, you need threecomponents:

A portal (used by API providers to offer API productsand by API consumers to use them)

A gateway (configured by API providers)

An analytics tool (used by providers and consumers) toreact to feedback, usage and other events

Some vendors offer all these components. Others just offersome of these features. On the one side, there are some vendorsjust offering a portal to publish existing APIs and managepayment/billing. On the other side, there are vendors, whichoffer a total solution for building services, making them public(including billing), and analytics for improving your services.In between, some vendors offer something in the middle.

To make the right selection of an API Management prod-uct, you have to think about your requirements and thenevaluate corresponding products available on the market.An overview or extensive comparison of different vendorswould push boundaries of this article. Though, the next two

sections give a short overview about questions you shouldconcern before making a selection, and a short overview ofsome available API Management products.

Selection Criteria

Vendors differ a lot regarding their API Management offer-ings. Ask yourself the following questions, decide what youneed, and evaluate corresponding vendors with regard to:

Do you just want to build a directory for your existingservice, or do you want a real infrastructure for building,governing, deploying, and managing your services?

Do you just want to publish REST services, or do youalso want/have to make other service protocols such asSOAP or JMS public?

Vendors differ a lot re-garding their API Ma-nagement offerings.

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Do you need a flexible configuration and routing optionsusing different security standards (e.g. LDAP, SAML,Kerberos, OAuth, WS-*, XACML, etc.)?

Do you need an elastic highly scalable architecture formillions of messages (based on event driven architectureinstead of synchronous HTTP calls)?

Do you need to extend the portal to your needs (regard-ing topics such as service management, developer portal,analytics)?

Do you want to leverage other products of the samevendor (e.g. products for integration, mapping, trans-formation, routing, business processes, complex eventprocessing, etc.)?

Do you want to deploy your API Management solutionon premise or in the cloud? If in the cloud, is virtualiza-tion through VMs fine for you, or do you want a real,i.e. elastic, cloud solution?

Do you want a hardware appliance or just software? Is

it required to configure your API engine for running inyour DMZ on existing servers?

Products

Available products differ a lot in functionality and matu-rity. A more detailed evaluation is required to make theright decision for your use case. The following is just a shortoverview of different vendors, which offer API Manage-ment solutions (no complete list):

Apigee(http://apigee.com) offers a complete API Plat-form. As the companys name states, Apigee is focused

especially on API Management. The solution is designedto meet the challenges of the new mobile, social, cloudmarketplace head-on. Users can start with a (very lim-ited) free version.

Mashery(http://www.mashery.com) is another solutionfocused especially on API Management. It was born outof the Web mashup movement of the 2000s, hence itsname. However, Intel Corporation acquired it in 2013.Mashery offers a very affordable and easy to use cloudsolution to publish existing APIs. Thus, it is good forsimple scenarios. Users can start with a (limited) freeversion.

Layer 7(http://www.layer7tech.com) has deep roots in

the XML gateway market and offers many advancedrouting and security features. It has extended its prod-uct portfolio to API Management. The solution is verypowerful, but therefore very good technical knowledge isrequired.

TIBCO(http://www.tibco.com/products/automation/api-management/default.jsp) provides a comprehensiveoperating platform called API Exchange, which lets youbuild and test APIs, define runtime governance policies,migrate APIs between environments, and monitor andreport on API usage. TIBCO API Exchange leveragesother TIBCO products to combine ESB, BPM, CEP, etc.

with its API Management solution. TIBCOs productsfocus on complex enterprise scenarios.

IBMis also focused on complex enterprise scenarios and

has different powerful API Management solutions in itsportfolio (www.ibm.com/software/products/en/api-man-agement-family/), for example IBM API Management,DataPower XML gateway, Cast Iron Live Web API Ser-vices, and others.

Several further vendors offer API Management solutions.Some of the most visible ones are 3scale(http://www.3scale.net/), Vordel (http://www.vordel.com/) and Apiphany(http://apiphany.com/, acquired by Microsoft recently)focusing especially on API Management while SoftwareAG (http://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asp) and Oracle(http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/soa/api-management/overview/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=opn)are examples for other big software vendors which offernot just API Management, but solutions for the wholeintegration portfolio. MuleSoft (http://www.mulesoft.

com/platform/api/manager) and WSO2 (http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/) are two open source EnterpriseService Bus vendors, which also included API Managementsolutions in their portfolio.

Conclusion

Open API and API Management represent the leading edgeof a new business model. Enterprises have very good op-portunities to increase revenue, reduce costs and improveefficiency by publishing and monetizing internal services toexternal consumers via API Management solutions. ManyAPI Management solutions are available on the market.

Their functionality differs a lot. The products are still youngand have to improve in the next months and years but theyare already mature enough for getting started to innovate increating new business models and increasing revenue. OpenAPI and API Management have a great future.

Kai Whner works as Technical Lead at TIBCO. All published opinions are

his own and do not necessarily represent his employer. Kais main area

of expertise lies within the fields of Application Integration, Big Data, SOA,

BPM, Cloud Computing and Enterprise Architecture Management. He is

speaker at international IT conferences such as JavaOne, ApacheCon, JAX

or OOP, writes articles for professional journals, and shares his experiences with new

technologies on his blog www.kai-waehner.de/blog. Find more details and references

(presentations, articles, blog posts) on his website www.kai-waehner.de .

[email protected] @KaiWaehner
http://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asphttp://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asphttp://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asphttp://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asphttp://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://wso2.com/products/api-manager/http://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asphttp://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/integration/products/api/overview/default.asp

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Apache Camel


by Bilgin Ibryam

Ive been using microservice architectures before I knew theywere called so. I used to create pipeline applications made upof isolated modules which interacted with each other throughqueues. Since then, a number of (ex)ThoughtWorks gurushave talked about microservices. Fred George [1], then JamesLewis [2] and finally Martin Fowler [3] have all blogged aboutmicroservices, all of them helping to make it the next buzzword and now every company wants to have few microservices.

Nowadays there are #hashtags, endorsements, likes, train-ings, even two day conferences [4] about it. The more I readand listen about microservice architectures, the more I realizehow Apache Camel (and the accompanying projects around

it) fits perfectly with this style of applications. In this post wewill see how the Apache Camel framework can help us createmicroservice style applications in Java with few lines of code.

Microservices Practices

There is nothing new in microservices. Many similar ap-

plications have been designed and implemented as such fora long time. Microservices is just a new term that describesa style of software systems that have certain characteris-tics and follow certain principles. It is an architectural stylewhere an application or software system is composed ofindividual standalone services communicating using light-weight protocols in event based manner. In the same wayas TDD helps us to create decoupled single responsibilityclasses, microservices principles guide us to create simpleapplications at system level.

Here, we will not discuss the principles and character-istics of such architectures or argue whether it is a way of

implementing SOA or a totally new approach to applicationdesign, but rather look at the most common practices usedfor implementing microservices and how Apache Camel can

Masterclass

Cracking Microservices

practicesLearn how the Apache Camel framework can assist you in creating

microservice style applications in Java with just a few lines of code.

iStockpho

to.c

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Apache Camel


helps us accomplish that in practice.There is not a definitive list (yet) butif you read around or watch the videosposted above, you will notice that thefollowing are quite common practicesfor creating microservices:

1. Small in size. The very fundamen-tal principle of microservices says thateach application is small in size and itonly does one thing and does it well. Itis debatable what constitutes small orlarge, the number varies from 10 LOC to1 000 but personally, I like the idea thatit should be small enough to fit in yourhead. There are people with big heads,so even that is debatable, but I think thatas long as an application does one thingand does it well so that it is not consid-

ered a nanoservice [5], that is a goodsize. Camel applications are inherentlysmall in size. A CamelContext with couple of routes with er-ror handling and helper beans is approximately 100 LOC.Thanks to Camel DSLs and URIs for abstracting endpoints,receiving an event either through HTTP or JMS, unmarshal-ing it, persisting and sending a response back is around 50LOC. That is small enough to be understood end-to-end easi-ly, rewritten and even thrown away without feel any remorse.

2. Having transaction boundaries. An application consistingof multiple microservices forms an eventually consistent systemof systems where the state of the whole system is not known

at any given time. This on its own creates a barrier for under-standing and adopting microservices in teams who are not usedto work with this kind of distributed applications. Even thoughthe state of the whole system is not fixed, it is important to havetransaction boundaries that define where a message currentlybelongs. Ensuring transactional behaviour across heteregenoussystems is not an easy task, but Camel has great transactionalcapabilities. Camel has endpoints that can participate in trans-actions, transacted routes and error handlers, idempotent con-sumers and compensating actions, all of which help developerseasily create services with transactional behavior.

3. Self monitoring. This is one of my favorite areas of mi-croservices. Services should expose information that describes

the state of various resources it depends on and the serviceitself. These are statistics such as average, min, max time toprocess a message, number of successful and failed messages,being able to track a message, memory usage and so forth.This is something you get OOTB with Camel without anyeffort. Each Camel application gathers JMX statistics by de-fault for the whole application, individual routes, endpointsand custom beans. It will tell you how many messages havecompleted successfully, how many failed, where they failed,etc. This is not read only API, JMX allows also updating andtuning the application at run time, so based on these statis-tics, using the same API you can tune the application accord-

ingly. Also the information can be accessed with tools such asjConsole, VisualVM, Hyperic HQ, exposed over HTTP usingJolokia or feed into a great web UI called Hawtio [6].

If the functionality that is available with OOTB doesntfit your custom requirements, there are multiple extensionpoints such as the nagios, jmx, amazon cloudwatch compo-nents and Interceptors for custom events. Logging in mes-saging applications is another challenge, but Camels MDClogging combined with Throughput logger makes it easy totrack individual messages or get aggregated statistics as partof the logging output.

5. Designed for failure Each of the microservices canbe down or unresponsive for some time but that should not

bring the whole system down. Thus microservices should befault tolerant and be able to recover when that is possible.Camel has lots of helpful tools and patterns to cope withthese scenarios too. Dead Letter Channel can make suremessages are not lost in case of failure the retry policycan retry a message send a couple of times for certain er-ror conditions using custom backoff method and collisionavoidance. Patterns such as Load balancer which supportsCircuit breaker [7], Failover and other policies, Throttlerto make sure certain endpoints do not get overloaded, De-tour, Sampler, are all needed in various failure scenarios.So why not use them rather than reinventing the wheel ineach service?

6. Highly Configurable It should be easy to configurethe same application for high availability, scale it for reli-ability or throughput, or said another way: have differentdegrees of freedom through configuration. When creatinga Camel application using the DSLs, all we do is to definethe message flow and configure various endpoints and othercharacteristics of the application. So Camel applications arehighly configurable by design. When all the various optionsare externalized using properties component, it is possible toconfigure an application for different expectations and rede-ploy without touching the actual source code at all. Camelis so configurable that you can change an endpoint with an-

other one (for example replace HTTP endpoint with JMS)without changing the application code at all which we willcover next.

Figure 1: Hawtio

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Apache Camel

7. With smart endpoints. Microservices favour RESTishprotocols and lightweight messaging rather than Web Servic-es. Camel favors anything. It has HTTP support as no otherframework. It has components for Asynchronous Http, GAEURL fetch service, Apache HTTP Client, Jetty, Netty, Servlet,Restlet, CXF and multiple data formats for serializing/dese-rializing messages. As for the queuing support, OOTB thereare connectors for JMS, ActiveMQ, ZeroMQ, Amazon SQS,Amazon SNS, AMQP, Kestrel, Kafka, Stomp, you name it.

8. Testable. There is no common view on this characteristic.Some favor no testing at all and relying on business metrics.Some cannot afford to have bad business metrics at all. I likeTDD and for me having the ability to test my business POJOsin isolation from the actual message flow, then test the flowseparately by mocking some of the external endpoints is in-valuable. Camel testing support can intercept and mock end-points, simulate events, verify expectations with ease. Havinga well tested individual microservice is the only guarantee to

have the whole system to work as expected.9. Provisioned individually. The most important charac-

teristics of microservices is that they run in isolation fromother services most commonly as standalone Java applica-tions. Camel can be embedded in Spring, OSGI or web con-tainers. Camel can also run as a standalone Java applicationwith embedded Jetty endpoints easily. But managing multipleprocesses, all running in isolation without a centralized tool isa hard job. This is what Fabric8 [8] is made for. Fabric8 is de-veloped by the same guys who developed Camel and support-ed by Red Hat JBoss. It is a poly Java application provisioningand management tool that can deploy and manage a variety

of Java containers and standalone processes. To find out moreabout Fabric8, here is [9] nice post by Christian Posta.10. Language neutral. Having small and independently de-

ployed applications allow developers choose the best suitedlanguagage for the given task. Camel has XML, Java, Scala,Groovy and few other DSLs with similar syntax and capa-bilities. But if you dont want to you use Camel at all for aspecific microservice, you can still use Fabric8 do deploy and

manage applications written in other languages and run themas a native processes [10].

In summary: Microservices are not strictly defined andthats the beauty. It is a lightweight style of implementingSOA that works. So is Apache Camel. It is not a full featuredESB, but it can be as part of JBoss Fuse. It is not a strictlydefined spec driven project, but a lightweight tool that worksand developers love it.

Bilgin Ibryam is a JBoss Fuse consultant currently working for Red Hat in

London. He is interested in message oriented middleware and distributed

applications. He is also the author of Instant Apache Camel Message

Routing book, an open source enthusiast, Apache OFBiz, and Apache

Camel committer. In his spare time, he enjoys contributing to open source

projects and blogging at http://ofbizian.com .

Twitter: @bibryam

References

[1] Micro-Service Architecture, by Fred George (video): https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=2rKEveL55TY

[2]Micro-Services Java, the UNIX way, by James lewis (video): http://jz13.java.

no/ presentation.html?id=2a7b489a

[3]Microservices, by Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.

html

[4] Con: The Microservices Conference: https://skillsmatter.com/

conferences/6312-mucon

[5] Nanoservices: http://arnon.me/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Nanoservices.pdf

[6] Hawtio: http://hawt.io/[7] Circuit Breaker Pattern in Apache Camel by Bilgin Ibryam: http://www.ofbizian.

com/2014/04/circuit-breaker-pattern-in-apache-camel.html

[8] Fabric8: http://fabric8.io/

[9] Meet Fabric8: An open-source integration platform by Christian Posta:

http://www.christianposta.com/blog/?p=376

[10] Micro Services the easy way with Fabric8 by James Strachan: http://macstrac.

blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/micro-services-with-fabric8.html

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Editor in Chief: Sebastian MeyenEditors: Lucy CareyAuthors: Dr. Jutta Bindewald, Pat Huff, Bilgin Ibryam,

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rKEveL55TYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rKEveL55TYhttp://jz13.java.no/presentation.html?id=2a7b489ahttp://jz13.java.no/presentation.html?id=2a7b489ahttp://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.htmlhttp://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.htmlhttp://www.ofbizian.com/2014/04/circuit-breaker-pattern-in-apache-camel.htmlhttp://www.ofbizian.com/2014/04/circuit-breaker-pattern-in-apache-camel.htmlhttp://macstrac.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/micro-services-with-fabric8.htmlhttp://macstrac.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/micro-services-with-fabric8.htmlhttp://macstrac.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/micro-services-with-fabric8.htmlhttp://macstrac.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/micro-services-with-fabric8.htmlhttp://www.ofbizian.com/2014/04/circuit-breaker-pattern-in-apache-camel.htmlhttp://www.ofbizian.com/2014/04/circuit-breaker-pattern-in-apache-camel.htmlhttp://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.htmlhttp://jz13.java.no/presentation.html?id=2a7b489ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rKEveL55TYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rKEveL55TY

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