Blogging Roller

WIP: Common Navigation

2011-03-27T10:08:44+00:00

This is the second in my series of Web Integration Patterns. Check out the intro at this URL http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/web_integration_patterns

Synopsis

Make separate web sites and applications appear to be one by using common user interface elements for navigation.

Motivations

Provide easy navigation between integrated web sites & applications.
Make separate web sites appear to be one and parts of the same overall user interface.

Related patterns

Links

This pattern is an extension of the Links pattern. The idea is to use links combined with common user interface (UI) elements, as a way to provide navigation between integrated sites and to make the separate sites appear to be parts of a whole application. This pattern is usually implemented via a banner with links, a tabs or some other type of menu component.

To make this work, somebody has to create the common navigation, give it an attractive design, decide which web sites or applications are included in the navigation. Consequently, this pattern works well for a set of web sites owned by the same organization, or a suite of packaged web applications.

Pros and Cons

The advantages of Common Navigation are that it works, it does make separate web sites seem to be part of one integrated whole and it's relatively easy to implement. One disadvantage of this approach is that the Common Navigation elements can either conflict with, in a visual sense, or distract from the web sites themselves. But if you're selling a suite of web applications, you've got control of whole design and you can solve this problem.

Examples

Here are some examples of Common Navigation that I see almost everyday. The first is Google.

Common Navigation in Google web applications

Google Mail, Calendar and other Google apps all share a Common Navigation bar across the top of the page. Google decides which apps appear in the menu, and the tech blogs whine whenever an item is moved or removed from the line-up. This is a pretty shallow integration: just links to applications and no more.

Now, let's see a deeper example.

Common Navigation in IBM Lotus Connections

IBM Lotus Connections is a suite of social software applications including social networking, blogs, wiki, forums, file sharing and etc. As you can see below, Common Navigation is used to provide links, not just to applications, but into specific parts of applications. For example, the Latest Entries page in the Blogs app, and the Wikis that I own vs. Public Wikis.

Next, another suite example.

Common Navigation in IBM Rational Team Concert

IBM Rational's Jazz-based products use Common Navigation, but with a project-orientation, showing a user's project's within each application. You can see this below in Rational Team Concert. A development project spans different applications and may have requirements managed by one web application, defects tracked by another, test cases managed by a third and so on. Each user sees the right menu for their projects.

Next, an example that's not a suite of web applications.

Common Navigation in StumleUpon

Another example is StumbleUpon. When you use StumbleUpon, you see the banner at the top of every page. You press the Stumble! button and a you see a randomly selected web page from anywhere on the web, or from some specific category of web site, and you still see the StumbleUpon banner. The StumbleUpon banner makes the whole web seem like one big site, deigned for "stumbling" around and sharing the things you find with friends.

Wrapping up

I wasn't sure that Common Navigation really deserved its own pattern, as it's really just a simple and obvious application of the Links pattern, but I think this works. As always, feedback is welcome. What did I get wrong? What did I leave out?

Next up: Web Annotations.

re: RDF and OpenSocial

2010-12-03T08:22:48+00:00

This is the closest thing to a blog post that I've written lately, a post to the OpenSocial specification group on aligning OpenSocial with RDF and Linked Data:

This is a topic of interest to me, so I'll try to elaborate.
First, I want to point out that RDF is not a representation, it's a way to model data and it's multiple ways to represent that data (in XML, JSON, etc.). I think the real question is: how do we enable OpenSocial to hook into the RDF-based web of "Linked Data" that is rapidly growing up around scientific data, government open data and the academic world. I'm not going to go into the benefits of Linked Data in this post, but I will disclose that I work for a company that uses RDF as a common data model to enable loosely coupled integration across our web application products (see also Jazz Integration Architecture [1] and OSLC [2]). We'd like to be able to integrate with OpenSocial services in the same ways.

I'll explain the basics of RDF. RDF is way to model web data and ways to represent that data in XML, JSON, Turtle, etc. The RDF data model is simple, we have resources identified by URIs and property values associated with those resources. Resources can have types, each type is identified by a URI. Property types have URIs too. Once you have defined your data model in terms of RDF types and properties, you can represent resources and their properties using RDF representations. There's RDF/XML for XML, there's RDFa for embedding properties in HTML. There's are JSON representations too, but not a standard for JSON yet.

So, to bring OpenSocial in-line with the world of Linked Data, we would define each class of OpenSocial objects as an RDF type, with a URI. We would define each OpenSocial property as an RDF property, with a URI. In some cases, we'll want to use existing properties, like the Dublin Core title, name, etc., and in some cases we'll want to define entirely new types and properties.

As a starting point, I think we would do the following:

* In OpenSocial v2, we would define all OpenSocial objects and properties as RDF types in the OpenSocial Specs. This means simply assigning a URI to every class and every property we define, using standard properties where appropriate and defining new ones as needed. Object and property names would rename the same and we'd have what is essentially an RDF mapping built into the spec. Existing OpenSocial representation formats would stay the same, but we'd add some new RDF representations.

* We'd introduce an optional new OpenSocial spec that services MAY implement: the OpenSocial RDF Specification. The specification would simply require that a service provide RDF representations of it's resources via content-negotiation. The service could offer RDF/XML or HTML with RDFa, JSON/RDF or all of the above.

That's a starting point and I think we could come up with some other ideas if we thought more about use cases. Anybody else interested in aligning the worlds of OpenSocial and Linked Data?

Link: RDF and OpenSocial

Agile planning w/Google Wave and Team Concert

2010-06-16T12:15:00+00:00

This sounds cool. I'd love love to see the slides or better yet, a sceen-cast.

Distributed Planning Poker
Integrating Google Wave and Rational Team Concert for collaborative effort estimation

Collaborative estimation and planning is a key concept for all agile development process frameworks. We will present a solution for playing "Planning Poker" that enables distributed development teams to estimate the effort of work items and build consensus in a collaborative way.

The prototype uses Google Wave as a collaboration platform and OSLC (http://www.open-services.net) for seamless integration with the developer IDE and work environment. We will show a demo on how a distributed team can estimate user stories and tasks from a product backlog in a collaborative way, and instantly use the results as the base for further sprint planning.

Additionally, attendees will learn some basic concepts and features about Google Wave, OSLC and IBM Rational Team Concert.

Social Connector for Rational Team Concert

2010-06-16T12:00:00+00:00

Mainsoft's Team Concert to Lotus Connections integration is getting better and better. I know this because I spent about 12 hours last week offering demos of the product at Innovate 2010. The except below is from a blog post on Jazz.net about the newest preview release. You can try it now. There's a download link at the end of the post and, like Team Concert, it's nice and easy to install and configure.

Build a Community around Your Project

Growing a social network around a software project brings developers up to speed faster. New hires and teams that are added to a core team will find all the information they need in a central Lotus Connections community, including blogs, forums, wikis, file repositories, and bookmarks. These collaboration systems offer a broad teamwork base for any software project. For example, wikis can hold product specifications, blogs can be used to publish roadmaps to a wider audience, forums can be used to gather feedback from beta testers, and a file repository hosts nightly builds with download statistics and commentary features.

Creating a new Lotus Connections community, or linking to an existing one, only takes a couple of clicks. The administrator sets the Lotus Connections community in the Social Network tab under project management.

Once the project community is created, all project members are added to it and as new developers join the project, they automatically become members of the project community.

Rational Workbench for CLM launched at Innovate 2010

2010-06-14T12:47:34+00:00

From my point-of-view, this was the big news from Innovate 2010: integration, linking and process automation across the software lifecycle from requirements, dev, build and test -- based on open interfaces defined by OSLC:

Dave Thomson: Why is this important? The activities involving requirements, development, build and test are not process silos. Integrating these disciplines through process automation, links between artifacts, and reporting across these links improves the productivity of teams while also improving the quality of the deliverables from those teams.

To focus this effort, we’re bringing Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and a new requirements management product tentatively named “Rational DOORS Requirements Professional” more closely together and calling this set of products the Rational Workbench for Collaborative Lifecycle Management.
What’s a “workbench”? A Workbench is a term we use to describe a combination of products, services, and best practices that are designed to work well together to solve a particular problem.

IBM talking OpenSocial at Google I/O

2010-05-12T11:52:04+00:00

IBM is going to be at Google I/O again this year, talking about OpenSocial and giving demos of new OpenSocial features in IBM products. Randy Hudson of IBM/Rational will be there to show how OpenSocial Gadgets can be used in Jazz-based product dashboards (introduced in Jazz Foundation 3.0 Milestone 5).

And IBM's Mark Weitzel, who happens to be an officer of the OpenSocial Foundation, will participate in panel discussion on Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise.

Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise
Social Web, Enterprise - Mark Weitzel, Matt Tucker, Mark Halvorson, Helen Chen, Chris Schalk

Enterprise deployments of OpenSocial technologies brings an additional set of considerations that may not be apparent in a traditional social network implementation. In this session, several enterprise vendors will demonstrate how they've been working together to address these issues in a collection of "Best Practices". This session will also provide a review of existing challenges for enterprise implementations of OpenSocial.

Session type: 201
Attendee requirements: General understanding of OpenSocial technologies. Some Enterprise experience is also recommended.
Tags: OpenSocial, Enterprise
Hashtag: #socialweb7

Date: Thursday May 20
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Room: 9

The Jazz Connection

2010-01-04T18:25:58+00:00

Here's something I've been closely involved with during my entire IBM career (almost 9 months now): making software development more social by integrating Rational Team Concert and Lotus Connections.

In case you don't know, Team Concert is Rational's "complete agile collaborative development environment" with integrated source code control, issue tracking, build management and very slick Eclipse and web-based client UIs -- it's a collaborative environment for software developers. Lotus Connections is IBM's comprehensive social software suite with blogs (Roller based!), wikis, social bookmarking, forums, file sharing, social networking and more -- an environment for more general collaboration.

IBM partner Mainsoft has developed an integration between Team Concert and Connections and it's now available as a tech preview. The product makes it easy for developers to hook a a software development project up to a Lotus Connections and enable software developers to collaborate with the much wider community of folks involved with a software project including end users, subject matter experts, executives and other stakeholders. As you can see from the list of features, it's a pretty tight integration.

If you want to learn more about the integration, check out the links I referenced above. There's also a short podcast available at Developer Works and there will be sessions at Lotusphere 2010 this month and (with luck) at Rational's Innovate 2010 Conference in June.

IBM at last month's Enterprise 2.0 OpenSocial panel

2009-12-14T13:32:02+00:00

It's been over a month since the Enterprise 2.0 OpenSocial panel and since we were never able to get a group blog post together, I've decided to publish a short summary of what I said about IBM on the panel. I'm paraphrasing myself from memory so this is not exactly what I said but it should be pretty close:

IBM has been successfully innovating in the area of browser-based components, also known as widgets or gadgets, and social APIs for years now. If you haven't seen the IBM Mashup Center you should visit the IBM booth and take a look at the demo. It allows you to create Web 2.0 style mashup applications by dragging-and-dropping widgets into place and wiring them together. You've probably heard of Lotus Connections. Connections is IBM's social software suite and it includes blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking and more. Each one of those components features a comprehensive AtomPub-based REST API.

We're working with the OpenSocial community to ensure that the specification meets the needs of our customers and is able to interoperate with our existing iWidget technology (and I think I mentioned the OpenAjax Hub here too). You can see most of the improvements that we're interested in the slides, so I won't go into detail now, but I will mention a couple of things for example: we would like to see better inter-gadget communication, specification modularity (coming in OpenSocial 1.0) and a stable and predictable specification change process.

I work for Rational, the part of IBM that creates tools for software development and delivery, something that is also social and collaborative in nature. We're enthusiastic about OpenSocial and we hope to enable use of OpenSocial Gadgets in Jazz-based product dashboards sometime in 2010. We may also support some of the OpenSocial Social APIs, but we are still learning and experimenting. Jazz products are developed in an open and transparent way so you can track our progress via our wiki and work-items at Jazz.net.

I won't try to paraphrase what the other panelists said, I'll let them do that, and I'll leave out my SocialSite pitch for now as most of my readers have already heard it. I'll put together an update on SocialSite during the next month and I think I'll have some good news to report.

RSC 2009: connecting developers and community

2009-05-26T22:22:00+00:00

I've attended every JavaOne since 2004, but this year I've got new job and a new conference to attend. This year I'll be traveling to Orlando, FL and attending the Rational Software Conference also known as #rsc2000 in the twit'o'sphere.

I'm not going to be giving a talk, but I will be manning a demo pedestal and showing some of what I've been working on in my first couple of months at IBM: working on getting Rational Team Concert and other Jazz-based products to work well with Lotus Connections, IBM's social software suite which includes communities, forums, blogs, bookmarking, social networking and wikis (coming soon in Connections 2.5).

Why would you want to use Team Concert with Connections? It's all about connecting developers to community, helping developers use social software tools to inform, share and collaborate with the wider community of people that support, manage, sell and use the software.

The tentative plan that we've outlined for all (registered users) to see on the Jazz.net is all about making it easy to setup and integrate community infrastructure for a new software project.

For example, wouldn't it be nice if, when you setup a new project in Team Concert you'd have the option of setting up an integrated Lotus Connections community complete with a project blog, discussion forum, wiki space and shared bookmarks? Shouldn't those blogs, forums and wikis be searched when you do a project search and shouldn't it be dead-simple to fire-off a blog entry or forum post to start a community conversation about a work-item or any other Team Concert artifact? We think so and we think that's just a start; there's lots more we can do.

If you're going to be at RSC 2009, please stop by and say hi. I'll be on duty from 5-8PM on Monday and most of the day Tuesday. Whether you're there or not, if you've got ideas about developer tool and social software integration, I'd love to hear from you.

First impressions

2009-04-30T22:10:58+00:00

I've been at IBM for one month now and I'm just now starting to settle in and make some progress. I'm going to try to work some blogging back into my schedule and tell you about what I'm doing at work. For starters, here's a quick summary of my first impressions.

People

I'm working in IBM's Rational division, home of software development tools from compilers and SCM systems to UML modeling tools and IDEs. The developers I've met in person here have been smart, mostly young and very web savvy folk working on Jazz and emerging technologies.

I've been pretty happy to find the same culture of transparency that I found at Sun, at least in the groups I've interacted with. The Jazz team shares everything via blogs, wikis, makes source control and issue tracking available to the public even though it is not an open source project. I've found IBM's centrally hosted internal blogs, social bookmarking and community sites, many of which are powered by Lotus Connections, to be really useful. So far, the "corporate culture" isn't really all that different than what I saw in Sun, but I've only been here a month.

Software

All of the software I use on a daily basis has changed. I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe. I'm using Lotus Notes for email, calendar and SameTime instant messaging instead of Mac Mail, Calendar and GTalk. I'm using Eclipse and Websphere instead of Netbeans and Glassfish, DB2 instead of MySQL and blogging with Lotus Connections instead of plain old Roller. I'm adjusting pretty well I think; took me about a month. I've heard lots of complaints about Notes in IBM and elsewhere, but it is nice to have everybody hooked into integrated mail, calendar and instant messaging. At Sun everybody seemed to be using a slightly different set of communication tools.

My first assignments involve Jazz (see also From the Eclipse Platform to Jazz), which is new architecture and foundation for Rational's product line. Rational Team Concert (RTC) and two other products so far are built on Jazz which provides a repository, source code control, integrated bug tracking as well as infrastructure for RESTful web services interfaces and an Ajax-based clients ends. The Web UI and the Eclipse UI are great and that's what makes RTC a pleasure to use. And unlike pretty much every other piece of software I've dealt with here Jazz is very easy to install.

The Jazz internals are pretty interesting too and another alternate universe for me. The architecture is basically the Eclipse plugin architecture, powered by the Equinox OSGi container and running in Eclipse, in a Servlet Container and in the browser. The whole system is made up of OSGi bundles and each bundle is also an Eclipse plugin. This is true for the Java code and the Dojo-powered JavaScript code in the web-client because Jazz includes the necessary infrastructure for JavaScript OSGi bundles. I've got to become an expert on this stuff, and fast.

Office

Big changes here as well. I've been working from home for almost 5 years so it's great to have local co-workers and an office. IBM has a couple of huge complexes in the Research Triangle Park (RTP), which is about a 20 minute drive for me. The building I'm in is basically a giant cube farm, but it's modern, set in the woods with lots of windows and the cubes are very nice, as cubes go. The cafeteria is reasonable and about like the one at Sun's California campuses. Much of the Jazz team works here in RTP, which is convenient for me, but my immediate co-workers on the CTO team are scattered around the country. Like Sun, most folks seem to do a mix of office and work-from-home and I'm doing the same.

You can probably tell already that I like the job a lot and I haven't even told you what I'm working on yet. I'll have to start telling you about that in a later post.