A few words from Sig Rinde from Thingamy:
Thingamy’s ‘Work Processor’ runs the workflow without glitch with path choices at most corners – punting a little ‘train’ of relevant and inter-realted objects (Workflow/issue/request/idea object – the main one + Assignment objects) through a workflow. The Assignment objects holds the task instructions and captures what’s done in the assignment while the Workflow objects holds the details about the issue/idea/request. That way an Assignee is presented with a list of relevant objects, all the pertinent information required for a specific task + the Assignment object to fill in with result and files.

When having been assigned a task, or when trying to get one’s head around the progress of a workflow there is always a need for ad-hoc communication with co-workers and/or other participants, “anybody
know…?”, “Could somebody help with…?” etc. Normally that would happen by email, phone or walking over – all of which limits the discovery of the unknown, like a co-worker having unknown but useful knowledge or ideas.

ESME adds that crucial part of ‘Discovery & Discussion’ that inevitably happens during any process, in a task or when studying the progress. In addition it should become the natural in-system conduit
for communication as well as the social pivot point, the water cooler, for the group/department/firm.

Most other E 2.0 efforts tries to add some notion of ‘process’ on top of separate and siloed apps drifting towards becoming middleware 2.0 – better is to have an underlying ‘process engine’ that gives the main
flow framework and datamodel using social media for the in-task ‘Discovery & Discussion’. Crucial is that the data in the two parts are related – in this case any ESME message can be related to any
Thingamy object adding context to both sides.

I don’t know what next step, as in features, will be – our philosophy is to keep it as simple as possible in the beginning and only add if it makes huge sense and works in practice. So we’ll see, the good thing is that both ESME and Thingamy are extremely nimble and doing crazy stunts underway should be easy!

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.

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.

I tried using an iPhone today against the Stax deplyoment with the latest Apache code drop.
On Laconi.ca’s app wiki, there are a few different apps to choose from. After trying out a few I eventually ended up using LaTwit. € 2,49 in the iTunes App Store.

Below is a screenshot of my timeline on the iPhone:



If you want to try it yourself, you need to do the following:
1. Create a user on the ESME server at Stax
2. Click on the manage token link and create a token. This is is your password for using the iPhone client

3. In the account settings in LaTwit:

Add the ESME API URL in the field “Server API URL” in this format: esmecloudserverapache.dickhirsch.staxapps.net/twitter

Add the username which you created in step 1.

Add the password (token) which you created in step 2.

4. Remember to enable the account before you finish.

5. You should now see the public timeline.

Please note that we have not yet done everything in the Twitter API, so some things still aren’t working (for example following users). Other functional characteristics of Twitter like DMs aren’t yet part of the ESME architecture.

Please also note that the Web UI at Stax doesn’t work properly, so bear with us. The Stax deployment is the latest code drop from Apache which means it might include bugs.

The first picture shows the environment with one server:

The second picture shows three servers:

What is interesting is the comparison of these results with the initial load tests that were based on an older version of Scala with a notorious memory bug. In the first tests, the performance curve was very chaotic. The new version of ESME is much more stable and shows more expected performance behavior.

We’ll publish more details on these latest performance test soon.

This is the complete ESME presentation from the RIA Hacker Night in Bangalore.
Mrinal is presenting while other team members in the room and around the world interact with him and the audience.

ESME at DemoJam Bangalore, this time presented from Abesh and Mrinal.

• Sending ESME messages
• Receiving ESME messages

Of course, there are some applications (Web Client, ESME Desktop Client, etc.) that represent both patterns but I’d like to concentrate on those applications that fulfill one pattern but not the other. 

Sending ESME Messages 

Applications that fulfill this pattern are those that supply the ESME cloud with information in the form of messages. These applications may either be based on human-created content via UI or machine-based content. Examples of this integration pattern are:

• Javascript Client
• VBA Client
• Java Logger Component(presented at the DemoJam in Berlin)
• ABAP Development Lifecycle Watcher (presented at the DemoJam in Berlin)
•  A watcher process that deals document management-related (“check-in”, “check-out”, etc.) events. In Sharepoint, this functionality might be linked to the Microsoft Workflow Foundation. In SAP’s Knowledge Management & Collaboration (KMC), this could easily be implemented via the KM IResourceEventReceiver

Receiving ESME Messages

Applications that fulfill this pattern are those that receive ESME messages and then process the information in some manner.. One of the main requirements for such applications are the ability to deal with long polling (ala Comet-style ) communication in order to avoid performance problems on ESME server instances. 

Possible implementations of this pattern include:

• ESME Bots
• Light-weight applications that just show certain messages based on tag-based filters. An integration via javascript-based scripts (for example, dojo) would allow use in most browser-based scenarios.

DemoJam only gives each team six minutes to present their innovations on stage.
This is not much, so when we were given the opportunity to give a 45-minute “Meet the Jammers” in-depth session the following day in the Clubhouse Theater, we happily took it.

This session was streamed live on Ustream.tv, and gives you a deep dive into what makes ESME tick.

I thought what about those individuals who work with Excel, Word, etc. Should they be left out of the micro-blogging world? With that thought in mind, I sat down down and wrote a VBA macro that creates messages on ESME. This macro is based on ESME’s REST API.

It In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to do a full-blown client but there are number of existing micro-blogging tools where users can post entries on what they are doing (”finished presentation”, “working hard on sales analysis”, etc). I thought this functionality was a nice feature but I hated the idea of having to switch applications to just post a quick message.  Therefore, I thought a macro that just pops up in your Office tool of choice which allows you enter a quick message for ESME would be nice. The macro I created is very primitive and could be definitely enhanced to make it prettier and even more useful.

To authenticate themselves, ESME users must replace “insert_your_token“ with their own authorization token. Tags are currently hard-coded as well.

Sub ESME_sendMessage()

‘HTTP variable
Dim myHTTP As MSXML2.XMLHTTP

‘HTTP object
Set myHTTP = CreateObject(”msxml2.xmlhttp”)

‘open the connection
myHTTP.Open “post”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/login?token=[insert_your_token]“, False

’send
myHTTP.Send

‘ Send Message

Dim message

message = InputBox(”Enter Message”)

myHTTP.Open “post”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/send_msg?message=” + message + “&tags=Test,excel&via=excel”, False

’send
myHTTP.Send

‘Logout
myHTTP.Open “get”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/logout“, False

’send
myHTTP.Send
End Sub

This blog is associated with the topic of Shadow IT , because ESME has the ability to empower not only those users who are aware of the newest / hottest social media technologies but also individuals who are more accustomed to Microsoft Office than Twitter. Such individuals develop complicated macros themselves to meet their requirements. They don’t need (or want) to go through normal IT channels. These people don’t know PHP, Ruby on Rails or Java. They’re not developers.  What they do have, however, is a better understanding of their individual business needs than any developer will ever have. Therefore, let these users decide how they are going to use ESME. 

Corporate IT just has to install ESME and then publish the link to such users.  The ability of accessing ESME via VBA gives this group of users the capability to decide themselves how they will use the tool.