ESME Blog

There were three events in the last few weeks that led to an massive increase in attention about ESME (leading to a record number of page views on our wiki!)

1. On November 19, Salesforce introduced Chatter which

lets employees set up profiles to connect with coworkers, issue status updates to say what they’re up to, and subscribe to feeds from people–and from applications. Also for collaboration, it lets people join groups to share updates and content. And the service integrates with today’s two hot social-networking services, Twitter and Facebook. [Source]

There are similarities between the functionality offered by Chatter and that offered by ESME which caused many individuals to take another look at ESME and its relevance.

2. In his keynote at the SAP UK & Ireland User Group Conference 2009,  analyst Ray Wang compared ESME and Chatter.

3. ZDNet Blogger Dennis Howlett wrote a blog entitled “Fawning over Chatter and how SAP missed its chance”

All three events fit in well with the increased activity in ESME that has occurred in the last few months.  As new contributors join and old contributors become active again, there is definitely a feeling of progress that has energized the extended ESME community.

I’m sure the next few months will be even more exciting.

In the past, we’ve blogged about our performance tests but in the chaos of our various development cycles we never really institutionalized such tests.

We are now reaching the point as we push towards our first release that we need to assure that performance considerations are met. One move in this direction was our use of Hudson as a base for building ESME on a daily basis. Now, we’ve started examining our performance in detail by planning a series of performance tests to examine ESME in various configurations (cloud-based, on-premise, etc.). The goal is to establish a performance testing component as part of our continuous integration efforts. There is now a Apache wiki page where the various performance test configurations and the performance test results will be listed.

We already started with this increased focus on performance tests with an initial test conducted by Markus Kohler on 2009-11-19. Here is a screenshot from this test.

The results of this test are described in full detail here.

For us, the most important thing is to establish a structure and format for such tests that makes it easy for us and ESME users to be able to compare results in a logical fashion. It is only so that users can decide what sort of infrastructure is necessary for their respective ESME installations.

We are currently collecting ideas about how to best collaborate with #ubimic.

#ubimic is a group of university researchers interested in microblogging from different points of view (computer science, information systems, organizational science). Together we think that microblogging has great potential when it comes to integrating normal users and things like sensors, machines and software. We are experimenting with different microblogging tools and scenarios.

There are interesting collaboration possibilitites and we’ve already started describing potential uses cases where we might be able to collaborate. Examples of these use cases are:

• Use Messages for Back-end Requests
• Microblogging SAP System
• Task management
• Device-related Use Case (RFID)

The big picture of the collaboration efforts might look like this:

Take a look at our wiki page for more details about our collabortive efforts.

We’ve waited far too long.

After our move to Apache, we were always saying that our Web UI was too primitive and a new one was top priority. Well, the design for the new web UI is finished. The web designer Joy Reyes has been working on the new UI design.

The next step is to take this design and bring it to life with our existing code base.

It is now possible to add formatting to your ESME messages. Through the use of the Textile formatting language, you can create messages with bold, italic, etc.

For example, the messages in the top message were created with the following lines:

_emphasis_
*strong*
__italic__ **bold** ??citation??
-deleted text-
+inserted text+
^superscript^
~subscript~
%span%
@code@

We haven’t gotten all the Textile possibilitites  to work but we are trying to get as many as possible to be available for users.

Have fun.

We’ve been cleaning up our code base to enable more international versions of the application. We also have some new contributors who are helping with the translation work.  Xuefeng Wu is a new contributor from China who is helping us with various aspects of the project. With his help, we are working on bringing out a Chinese language version of ESME.

Don’t be shocked by the UI. This picture was taken with the old UI (Our new UI is currently being designed! More soon).

One of the advantages  of having an international team is being able to crowd-source the translation work. Expect ESME in different languages once we get our new UI up and running.

In order to assure that ESME fits well into enterprise settings, we have started including Java Management Extensions (JMX) to our application.  This is to allow the monitoring of ESME at various levels (number of messages, number of users, etc.).  Most monitoring tools in the enterprises can tap into JMX-based measures; therefore, we decided to use this standard as well.

Currently, we have only added approximately 10 measures but plan to add more measures as the need arises.

If you’d like more information about the use of JMX in ESME, we’ve created an initial page in our wiki.

We are now using Apache Hudson for daily builds.   Every day, our code base is extracted from the subversion-based code repository, built and tests performed. This allows us to make sure that we have code base that is viable and assists in our quality control measures. JIRA items that were built also receive comments describing the successful build.

If you want to keep track of our builds, here is the RSS feed.