GroundWork And Eclipse
By Craig Thomas, CTO, GroundWork Open Source
These are exhilarating times for GroundWork Open Source. We are reaching more customers with better solutions, and bringing the value of open source software to mid-market systems and network management. As GroundWork makes progress along its technology roadmap, we make contributions to the community -- the community that helps us make contributions to our customers. After all, as the projects in open source get stronger, more comprehensive, and more robust, our ability to bring our disruptive software engineering economics to the mid-market is enhanced.
This month, I'd like to introduce you to another open source community that GroundWork has joined, Eclipse, and the specific project we are engaged in, Eclipse COSMOS.
Eclipse is an open-source Java application platform and an integrated development environment. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit that leads the development of Eclipse. Members are an A to Z of technology leaders, including Actuate, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, Compuware, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, SAP, Sybase, and Zend Technologies. There are a good many other companies, academic institutions, and individuals that contribute as well.
Java developers know Eclipse primarily as an extremely feature-rich open source IDE, that has hundreds of commercial and open source plug-ins. There are IDEs for C/C++, PHP, and even COBOL. There are also open source and commercial applications that are "powered by Eclipse," making use of its run-time environment and software delivery capabilities.
Among well known Eclipse projects is BIRT, the business intelligence and reporting tools project. This project provides a report execution server and a report designer. GroundWork Open Source integrates the BIRT report execution server in GroundWork Monitor Professional 5.0. This allows both GroundWork and our customers and partners to develop new reports and tailor existing reports using an open source tool. There are lesser known projects, including an application for learning Mandarin Chinese, a personal finance manager, and stock trader.
In Technology Insights for November, 2006, I walked through the evolution of Service Modeling Language, an open standard for use in defining and managing IT services, from computer systems to complex applications. A key next step in that evolution is implementation of the open standard in open source.
That is the mission of the Eclipse COSMOS project. The initial community for Eclipse COSMOS started forming last summer. People from Alterpoint, IBM, OC Systems, Cisco, Intel, Compuware, Simulalabs, Sybase, and yours truly from GroundWork Open Source helped to put together a project proposal, preliminary architecture, and project plan, which they presented for an Eclipse Project Creation Review held December 6, 2006.
The Eclipse COSMOS project is now hard at work developing its first set of deliverables. The initial release will be integrated with the Eclipse release in mid-year 2007, and there will be a demonstrable system in March. Here are the components:
- A Resource Model Editor with a graphical modeler for Service Modeling Language, a validator based on Schematron for SML models, and a repository for SML models. The resource models are used to describe the environment, both the systems and services, as well as the monitoring capabilities.
- Management Enablement plug-ins, which generate tooling for instrumentation of the environment.
- Data Collection mechanism, which receives data from the resource instrumentation, normalizes it, and persists it in an RDBMS.
- A Data Reporting mechanism, which presents the collected data.
All of these components will work in Eclipse. The management and reporting interfaces will work in a web browser as well.
But wait a minute, isn't Eclipse COSMOS reinventing the systems and network management wheel? Well, yes and no.
The most significant innovation in Eclipse COSMOS is SML. The use of models to describe the environment, and including programmatic validation of changes to the models, enables interoperability among hardware and software vendors with a new degree of fidelity. So that's the yes part of reinventing the wheel.
However, crucial to the success of Eclipse projects is a good delineation between what is open and what is available for individuation. The commercial contributors to Eclipse seek to improve their products by engaging in open source development. Eclipse COSMOS is aimed at building components. The components enable the use of SML, allowing developers to build plug-ins that generate instrumentation, and collect data from the instrumentation in a schema. There is additional development aimed at demonstrating the components, and constructing SDKs. But the result of the Eclipse COSMOS team will be tools for use in Eclipse, as opposed to commercial grade IT monitoring systems. And that's the no part of reinventing the wheel.
The Eclipse COSMOS project team is knuckling down for a demo of the core SML-based technology at EclipseCon 2007, March 5 through March 8, Santa Clara, California. Release 1.0 of Eclipse COSMOS is planned for mid-year.
I will keep you updated as we make progress.
About Craig Thomas
Craig brings over 20 years of experience with software engineering and architecture of enterprise-scale business-critical systems to GroundWork. Craig has a long track record at successful start-ups where he has been responsible for the overall product technical direction, leadership, and architecture as well as contributing as a hands-on developer. Most recently he was the CTO of Steelwedge Software, an innovator in the emerging field of Enterprise Planning and Performance Management (EPPM). Prior to Steelwedge, Craig was the CTO and Co-Founder of OneRelease Venture Engineering (acquired by Manugistics). Craig has also held Director of Engineering positions with ProBusiness Services, Inc., Premenos, and at Sybase where he was one of the early members of the database engineering team.
