THE CONTEXT:
I should develop a software to calculate billing for a lot of customers
The software should be used by different local administrations, each one with its own rules to calculate the billing to its citizens.
At first i've thought to a workflow engine in order to "design" different calculation flows and apply then to the customers.
In the past i had a little experience with a workflow manager product (i worked a little with IBM BPM) and i had a lot of difficult to debug what happens when something went wrong and i found a lot of performance issue (respect to a simple OOP software).
Maybe these difficulties went caused by my poor knowledge of the tool, or maybe IBM BPM is not as good as IBM says.
Anyway, respect to my objective (produce a custom billing, and make it as flexible as possible in therm of configuration and process) is a workflow engine a suitable product?
Any suggestion about tools, frameworks and above all how to approach the problem.
My initial idea of the architecture is to develop a main software in c# (where i'm more confident) and using a workflow engine (like JBpm) as a black box, invoking previously configured flows into the bpm.
I would recommend using Cadence Workflow for your use case. It records all events that are related to your workflow in an execution history. It makes troubleshooting of production issues very straightforward.
As workflow is essentially a program in Java (or Go) you have unlimited flexibility on implementation. The performance is also not an issue as Cadence was built from ground up for high scalability. It was tested to over hundred million open workflows and tens of thousands of events per second.
See the presentation that goes over Cadence programming model.
Related
On Db2 v11.1, how do we get or setup the notification for DBA team if there is any hang or slowness situation in off shift working hours?
The answer depends on the external monitoring and alerting solution you deployed, and how you configure that tooling in your environment.
This application layer tooling is not built into Db2-LUW, although APIs exist in Db2-LUW for such tooling to get the data it needs in order to operate.
IBM and several third parties offer solutions for real time monitoring and alerting in this space. Many cover app-servers, web-servers, database layers, networks and operating-system layers and have different alerting configurability. Many have plugin type architecture with plugins for Db2-LUW monitoring. Do not use stackoverflow for product recommendations however.
For "slowness", this is only meaningful to measure usually at the application layer, in terms of response times and other metrics etc.
For database-hangs, IBM offers a db2-hang_detect script that tooling can orchestrate , requires careful interpretation and even more careful testing.
I am looking for suggestion before I could plan / design an open source flutter package which enable developers to introduce distributed consensus to their application (basically a blockchain within mobile phones) along with their existing backend stack.
This package would work along with existing backend to generate identity, participate in validation of transaction, and store a copy of chain within their device. Later I am planning to use pluggable encryption based on developer’s need for enhanced security.
Keeping in mind of the best consensus as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant but PBFT/BFT has resource intensive PoW to do consensus which phones can't be, I am planning to implement PBFT based on technique explained in “Elastico” paper (review/summary is attached here [1]).
This is just an initial idea rolling in my mind for few hours now. I need to realise the feasibility this technique inside a mobile phone to form a network.
[1] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/paper-review-secure-sharding-protocol.html
Why do you want to build this
This package would help devs to integrate features of blockchain to their centralised app stack without rebuilding their backend. Talking about application part, consider situations which involve decision making and forming opinions, supply chain management, data provenance (integrating with IPFS)
Development of the plugin will take some real effort and time.
Not having done any serious feasibility study on the project but I believe this plugin will be useful for a longer run.
If there are some suggestions based on your experience in plugin development, pl share it here.
I have been asked to start exploring a Activiti tool for some client demo.
The demo will also have JBoss Drools with which Activiti will be integrated.
I am new to both of these tools and business process world, so excuse me if the question is dumb.
The question is why do you need Drools? Isn't Activiti enough for the job?
Both of them have conditional elements so why do you need Activiti on top of drools?
This question doesn't quite fit the purpose of StackOverflow, so don't be surprised if you get a few flags. But I'll try to give a short answer.
Activity is a workflow engine, Drools is a business rules engine. They serve two different purposes.
Workflow engines are useful when you have a flow of actions of different actors that need to be controlled programmatically.
Rules engines are useful when you have business rules for executing some task automatically that you want to describe in a declarative way.
Both purposes are orthogonal to each other, meaning that the problem you have to solve may require none, just one, or both of them.
Imagine a workflow where a customer reports an incident, some experts have to work on it, and finally a bill gets produced, but no heavy algorithms are behind those tasks. That might be supported by a workflow engine without a rules engine.
Imagine a complex price model for a product, like cars having all sorts of special features that may be ordered. (Hifi speakers cost 400 €, except if the executive version of the car is ordered, where they only cost 200 € if ordered in combination with smartphone adapter...) Here a rules engine may be useful, although nobody talked about a workflow, so no workflow engine is needed.
Imagine the first example (incident workflow) together with a complex billing scheme. Here both tools may be used.
I wonder why these two types of tools are in some places described as perfectly fitting together. (Maybe this kind of claim motivated your question.) They serve two different purposes, and whether you need them both depends on the problem you have to solve.
At our company, we are looking at replacing a number of legacy systems that handle information from our customers into our company. Typical systems allow the user to drop an ftp file somewhere. This file will then be transformed by a number of programs and eventually end up in some kind of database. In total we have +30 different "systems" or applications that does this. And, it is more or less a mess.
We believe we lack a common system to manage these flows: triggered by upload or possible another event, register the data, create some sort of "job" (or process) from it, pass it through the variuos services/transformation programs it needs to go through, provide feedback to the customer, provide information about progress, etc to us, handle failures and so on. Sort of like Jenkins (/Hudson/CruiseControl/similar) but for information transformation jobs, rather than build jobs, and with a job beeing more of a "process instance" of a job, then the job itself (e.g. different data should trigger the job several times, running concurrently).
We are cabable of writing such software ourselves, but surely software as this exists(?) I have been googling around, and found that what we need ma possibly be "job scheduling" software or "business process management" software. However, these are all new domains for us, and I am quite uncertain to as what kind of software would fit our needs. It appears one could invest quite a deal of ressources into this type of software before
So, what I am looking for is pointers to what kind of software or systems that could solve the kind of needs we have. Preferably Open Source, Java based, running in a Java EE container or similar, but really, at this point, almost any pointer/hint will be welcomed :-)
Thanks in advance
P.S. I realise I may be out of scope for Stackexchange, but I have been unable to locate another forum where this kind of question might be answered, so I hope it is OK.
I know of the following products:
Redwood Cronacle (I worked with it 1994-1997 and it still runs). Purchase product. Oracle and C based. Strong in multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Oracle E-business suite core. Purchase product. Oracle based. Strong for integration with the same ERP system. Weak for multiple server platforms.
Invantive Vision (I developed it :-). Purchase product. Oracle and Java based. Strong in integration with ETL (Pentaho open source). Weak for multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Quartz Scheduler. Apache license. Java based. Worked with in 2004 or so. Strong focus on embedding.
Hi I don’t know if you will find that solution in open source or Java. It sounds like bespoke or custom software to me. I would advise you to search for a project management software developer with high level of IT and Data warehousing. Ask for bespoke and customized installations with a real time database. I think you will solve your problem with this.
I do a sort of integration/stress test on a very large product (think operating-system size), and recently my team and I have been discussing ways to better organize our test workloads. Up until now, we've been content to have all of our (custom) workload applications in a series of batch-type jobs each of which represent a single stress-test run. Now that we're at a point where the average test run involves upwards of 100 workloads running across 13 systems, we think it's time to build something a little more advanced.
I've seen a lot out there about unit testing frameworks, but very little for higher-level stress type tests. Does anyone know of a common (or uncommon) way that the problem of managing large numbers of workloads is solved?
Right now we would like to keep a database of each individual workload and provide a front-end to mix and match them into test packages depending on what kind of stress we need on a given day, but we don't have any examples of the best way to do more advanced things like ranking the stress that each individual workload places on a system.
What are my fellow stress testers on large products doing? For us, a few handrolled scripts just won't cut it anymore.
My own experience has been initially on IIS platform with WCAT and latterly with JMeter and Selenium.
WCAT and JMeter both allow you to walk through a web site as a route, completing forms etc. and record the process as a script. The script can then be played back singly or simulating multiple clients and multiple threads. Randomising the play back to simulate lumpy and unpredictable use etc.
The scripts can be edited and or can be written by hand once you know whee you are going. WCAT will let you play back from the log files as well allowing you simulate real world usage.
Both of the above are installed on a PC or server.
Selenium is a FireFox add in but works in a similar way recording and playing back scripts and allowing for scaling up.
Somewhat harder is working out the scenarios you are testing for and then designing the tests to fit them. Also Interaction with the database and other external resouces need to be factored in. Expcet to spend a lot of time looking at log files, so good graphical output is essential.
The most difficult thing for me was to collect and organized performance metrics from servers under load. Performance Monitor was my main tool. When Visual Studio Tester edition came up I was astonished how easy it was to work with performance counters. They pre-packaged a list of counters for a web server, SQL server, ASP.NET application, etc. I learned about a bunch of performance counters I did not know even exist. In addition you can collect your own counters too. You can store metrics after each run. You can also connect to production servers and see how they are feeling today. Then I see all those graphics in real time I feel empowered! :) If you need more load you can get VS Load Agents and create load generating rig (or should I call it botnet). Comparing to over products on the market it is relatively inexpensive. MS license goes per processor but not per concurrent request. That means you can produce as much load as your hardware can handle. On average, I was able to get about 3,000 concurrent web requests on dual-core, 2GB memory computer. In addition you can incorporate performance tests into your builds.
Of course it goes for Windows. Besides the price tag of about $6K for the tool could be a bit high, plus the same amount of money per additional load agent.