Skip navigation
1 2 Previous Next

Virtual Thoughts

19 posts
tejones

Red Hat Summit 2013

Posted by tejones Jun 17, 2013

I am back home from Boston this week after my first Red Hat Summit. What a tremendous conference this was... very well run and attended. I am really proud to be counted as a Red Hat employee.

 

The purpose of my attendence was to co-present with Mustafa Saglam from SAP to talk about our co-ordinated efforts over the last 18+ months. The presentation was called Interoperability Results from SAP & Red Hat Collaboration and featured an overview of SAP NetWeaver Gateway as well as demos of integration with JBoss Middleware, specifically with JBDS and Red Hat JBoss Data Services. Getting a chance to show customers and potential customers how to consume SAP data in JBoss using an OData, REST-based, open standards interface exposed by SAP NetWeaver Gateway was an exciting opportunity for us and was well-received by the audience. Many companies have struggled to find ways to consume or integrate their SAP siloed data and the collaboration between Red Hat and SAP has removed that barrier. The demos walked people through how to take an SAP NetWeaver Gateway OData service and import as a data source in JBDS/EDS. I also showed off our new OData Translator that maps OData services to relational entities and generates queryable tables in Teiid Designer. These tables can then be deployed in a virtual database (VDB) and accessed as a JDBC or REST source. Finally, I showed how any deployed VDB can be accessed as an OData service using the OData provider capablities of Red Hat JBoss Data Services.

 

photo 3.JPG

 

While I was there, I also worked the Data Services demo pod. This gave me a chance to share the power of data virtualization with attendees. Many had never heard of our data services product or even knew such a technology existed. I had many tell me their data integration issues and it was so rewarding to see the light go on in their head when they realized that we could not only solve their dilema, but we could do so at a fraction of the cost and time that it would take to build a custom solution. The SAP booth was right next to the data services pod, so the close proximity allowed us easily share our stories with attendees. We both walked interested parties back and forth to share the exciting and complimentary technologies both SAP and Red Hat have developed.

 

The conference also gave us an opportunity to announce a new Fedora 18 virtual image that is pre-configured to allow for the installation of the SAP NetWeaver Gateway Trial Bundle. The bundle allows you to take Gateway for a spin and even comes with a ready-to-go OData service that contains flight information. You can use this Gateway instance to try out the JBoss integration or just get familiar with OData.

 

I am excited to continue working with Mustafa and SAP on developing more integration with JBoss middleware. Stay tuned for more technical advances between us to make your SAP and Red Hat integration projects a snap!

The SAP Services Registry in SAP is a UDDI v3 compliant web services registry that allows developers to access underlying SAP data. With these services, it is possible to generate client stubs and create applications that utilize this data. SAP has come out with an open source plugin that allows searching a registry and getting the associated WSDL document for a given service as well as deriving other UDDI based information. Please see this video for an example of how to use the plugin in JBoss Tools 3.3.

 

As the video describes, there is a conflict with the search plugin and the EGit plugin. As a result, the two cannot run in the same environment. Once this issue is resolved, it is my end goal to include the plugin in JBoss Tools. The source code can be found here: https://github.com/tejones/sap-services-registry-eclipse

 

Patches welcome.

In JBoss' continuing partnership with SAP, we are creating more and more ways for our products to integrate. With the advent of SAP Netweaver Gateway, there are even more ways to consume and use SAP data within JBoss and Red Hat solutions.

 

SAP Gateway is an OData server that exposes SAP data via RESTful services using standards such as HTTP, AtomPub and JSON. This is a perfect integration point for many JBoss technologies. For example, using our Enterprise Data Services (EDS) product built on Teiid, we can consume a Gateway service and federate the data from that service with other related information from disparate data sources. A federated view in EDS means we can bring together all of the data we care about and expose it as a single source, either relationally or as a REST service. If we wanted to, we could even combine mutliple SAP Gateway services and create a single source. COOL!!!

 

Check out this example of how to accomplish this integration in the cloud using SAP Gateway, JDV, OpenShift and a MySQL instance: Example

 

The transformations required to create the federated view are generated using a wizard in Teiid Designer 7.8. You can see a tutorial video on importing the SAP Gateway source and generating the required transformations HERE.

 

Enjoy and stay tuned for more tech goodness from Red Hat and SAP!

"I don't want to make this a great conference, I want to make this the best conference you have ever been too.". Those were the words of StrangeLoop founder Alex Miller at this year's StrangeLoop conference in St. Louis, MO. I am here to say that, at least for me, Alex reached his goal.  I have been to many conferences over my 17 years working in information technology and none have had such an array of compelling speakers and sessions. The list of speakers read like a "who's who" of software superstars. 

 

Just to name a few..


Gerald Sussman

Allen Wirfs-Brock

Rich Hickey

David Geary

Howard Lewis Ship

 

Highlights

 

  • Chatting with Gerald Sussman while he was sitting at my table during Allen Wirfs-Brock talk about the post-pc computing era, or the "Ambient Computing Era" as he called it.
  • Mike Lee's talk on Product Engineering. I  want to move to Amsterdam.
  • David Geary's HTML5 presentation. I now know everything I need to know about Canvas. Very powerful stuff and David presented it very well. If you ever get a chance to see him present, do it.
  • The Language Panel
  • Neil Ford's presentation on Functional Thinking. Ok... I get it now. Thanks Neil!
  • Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk.  There is no room for "complect" code in our software!
  • Lance Ball's session on Datamapper - an ORM for Ruby. An impressive suite of technology including TorqueBox and Infinispan.
  • Mingling and exchanging ideas with my peers in the industry. This conference is a draw to some of the finest talent in software development and architecture in our field (over 900 attendees this year)... that speaks volumes to the quality product Alex put together.

 

The only problem I had with this conference was that there were so many great sessions that I could not attend. I had to pick one and miss out on the others. The good news is all the sessions were recorded and will be posted on infoq.com within a few weeks.

 

Looking forward to next year since, by Alex's definition, it will be my new best conference EVER! I have no doubt he will pull it off.

Filter Blog

By date:
By tag: