Developing Collaborative Applications for the Peer Web using Adaptive XML

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Developing Collaborative Applications for the
Peer Web using Adaptive XML

• Jeffrey Kay ltjkay_at_engenia.comgt
• Chief Technology Officer, Engenia Software Inc.

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B2B CollaborationBuilding Strong Relationships
B2B Collaboration. Business-to-business (B2B)
relationships can be enriched by various
collaboration tools. While currently a nascent
market, collaborative services will quickly be
embedded in diverse B2B areas such as Net
markets, partner relationship management tools,
and portals.
B2B services will first use collaboration as a
market differentiator, but by 2004 rich
collaboration services will be a given for most
B2B activities.
Collaborative services can enrich
business-to-business relationships by boosting
site stickiness, facilitating transactions,
creating communications channels, disseminating
information, and improving problem solving.
Companies should build collaborative services
around B2B activities. Matt Cain, MetaGroup

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Collaboration

• Collaboration is about people, processes and
  projects
• Collaboration systems must be able to adapt to
  change
• People require proactive, event-driven,
  contextual, and adaptable information to avoid
  information overload
• Processes and projects need meaningful and useful
  information that can be automatically processed
  in an appropriate fashion
• Enterprises and people must be able to directly
  and easily connect to each other with minimal
  integration
• Distributed processes must be able to span
  between enterprises, creating virtual workflows

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B2B Collaboration Is Transitioning From
Centralized To Distributed
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B2B and Peer Technology

• By using the Internet to bundle products with
  related information and services, creative
  companies can improve their effectiveness and
  efficiency of their clients businesses. By
  doing so, the will be able to forge strong,
  long-lasting client relationships that will
  de-emphasize product price and exchange-based
  transactions.
• Harvard Business Review, Beyond the Exchange,
  November-December 2000
• Peer technology enables enterprises to forge the
  strong, long lasting relationships needed to
  succeed in todays market

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peer \pir\ n.

• 1 one that is of equal standing with another
  EQUAL esp one belonging to the same societal
  group esp. based on age, grade or status

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A Definition of P2P

• P2P means many things
• Content distribution networks between individuals
• Cycle sharing systems for computationally intense
  tasks
• File sharing between devices
• Collaboration systems
• Instant messaging
• A clear definition is key to success
  implementation of peer technology in an enterprise

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p2p \pir too pir\ n. a virtual network of
functionally similar nodes created using an
alternate, often private, namespace
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p2p n. a virtual network of functionally similar
nodes created using an alternate, often private,
namespace

• Important concepts
• Connectivity is implied in the definition
• Intermediaries dont imply lack of purity
• Functionally similar doesnt mean exactly equal
• Alternate namespaces step outside the realm of
  DNS
• Namespaces could be user or system generated

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The Significance of P2P

• Services at the edge of the network that
• Increase user autonomy and empowerment
• Enable the easy distribution of new services
• Enhance relationships between enterprises and
  between individuals by reducing the reliance on
  centralized exchanges and e-hubs
• and improve the overall power and scalability
  of the Web

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Focus of Peer Web Technology

• Discovery
• Provide named access to edge services
• Locate and services that do not have a fixed IP
  address
• Connectivity
• Transfer information between edge nodes without
  interruption by intermediaries (firewalls)
• Standard message formats for common service
  access
• Security
• Identify trusted peers and users
• Ensure non-repudiation of transactions
• Maintain privacy of transactions

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Not the Focus

• Illegal distribution of content
• Napster and Gnutella educated the market about
  peer technology but generally do not represent it
• Circumvention of IT
• Empowerment does not have to be about hopping
  firewalls
• Enterprises need to be educated and evaluate the
  applicability of peer technology
• Arbitrarily Creating Standards
• Much of todays web technology is applicable to
  the peer web
• Some additions enhance the ability for edge nodes
  to interconnect

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B2B CollaborationBuilding Strong Relationships
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B2B CollaborationBuilding Strong Relationships
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B2B CollaborationBuilding Strong Relationships
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B2B and Peer Technology

• Todays open standards provide solid components
  for creating peer based B2B collaboration systems
• XML applied as an information interchange vehicle
• Scripts joined with XML to create portable
  business logic
• Complex, adaptive system structure to create
  independent, cooperative, collaborative
  applications that sharing of data and business
  rules

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Applying Peer Technology to the Web

• Discovery
• Identify new entities in the web
• Connectivity
• Easily network in new enterprises and partners
• Adaptability
• Adjust automatically to new entity types,
  additional nodes
• Scalability
• Distribute the processing among the partners to
  reduce central server burden

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Implementation Approach

• Distributed Web Services
• HTTP and XML as basic plumbing
• Relationship Model
• Long-lived links between entities in the system
• Adaptive application development model
• The system grows dynamically as the number of
  participants increases
• New elements can be introduced without requiring
  changes to the existing ones

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Adaptive XML

• Supplants the traditional "business logic in a
  box" mentality and moves towards a more common
  environment where the business logic can be
  directly part of the data it is expected to
  manipulate
• Unique characteristic of being a dynamic entity,
  not a static data construct
• Combines the ability of XML information
  interchange with scripted behaviors to enable
  intelligence and collaboration
• An important approach to developing collaborative
  systems because entities can have the opportunity
  to adapt to their environment by changing their
  own properties or evolving new, more complex
  behaviors

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Adaptive XML

• Representational entities describe business
  constructs and their corresponding behaviors
• People
• Activities
• Processes and process steps
• External events
• Functional entities provide services to other
  functional and representational entities
• Search services
• Connectivity services

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Adaptive XML Application Model
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Characteristics of Adaptive XML

• Environmental awareness
• Autonomy
• Reactivity
• State

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Environmental Awareness

• Relationships define nearby entities
• Context is asserted by relating multiple Adaptive
  XML streams to each other
• Bidirectionality of relationships with verbs
  provides context and semantics
• Event handlers accept environmental notifications

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Autonomy

• Autonomous and scheduled operations
• Allows systems to begin to work for users
• Moves systems from user-demand-driven to more
  autonomous operation
• Entities can change based on non-user events
  changes in the weather, fluctuations of the stock
  market, news events
• User moves from demanding content to examining a
  snapshot of the state of a model

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State

• Adaptive XML is not static
• It is intended to be changed based on the
  business rules contained within its set of
  defined behaviors
• Changes to the XML reflect its current state
• Behaviors with the XML can be defined to operate
  in context of the current state
• Adaptive XML will naturally change state as it is
  used to implement collaborative applications
• Tasks can record completion
• New information can be related and added to the
  system
• Events can be triggered based on changes

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Reactivity

• Reactivity is the ability to respond to changes
  and to adapt accordingly
• Todays XML schemas are not intelligent at all
  most target basic information interchange
• Adaptive XML begins to add intelligent behavior
  to information the XML can change to react to
  the world around it
• New properties added as needed without schema
  redefinition
• Recalculations based on characteristics of
  neighbors (e.g. computing the state of a project
  based on the total collection of task end dates
  and statuses)

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Skeleton Adaptive XML
lt?xml version"1.0" encoding"UTF-8"
?gt lt?engenia.com version"1.0"?gt lteOBJECT
xmlnse"urnengenia.com" guid"xo_f709d140ffff83f
c11d49f35d57af8f8ebc3"gt lteTITLEgtAllen
Abbeydalelt/eTITLEgt lteDESCRIPTIONgtAnalystlt/eDE
SCRIPTIONgt lteTYPE VERSION"3.5"gt_bc_personlt/eT
YPEgt lteSCRIPT LANGUAGE"javascript"gtlt!CDATA f
unction onPropertyChanged(prop,oldvalue,newvalue)
if (prop.toLowerCase() "title") return
false // cannot change title here return
true gtlt/eSCRIPTgt lteATTRIBUTESgt
ltLASTOBJECTUPDATEgt977328294910.000000lt/LASTOBJECTU
PDATEgt lt/eATTRIBUTESgt ltePROPERTIES
STRUCTURED"true"gt ltPASSWORD
PRIVATE"false"gtswaprodslt/PASSWORDgt
lt/ePROPERTIESgt lteRELATIONSHIPSgt
ltXO_3E8ACE60FFFF850211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3
OBJTYPE"_bc_group"gt ltVERBgtMANAGESlt/VERBgt
lt/XO_3E8ACE60FFFF850211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3gt
lt/eRELATIONSHIPSgt ltePUBLISH/gt
lteSECURITY-POLICYgt ltALLOW TYPE"RWD"gt
ltXO_97485F40FFFF837211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3gtREADWRITE
DELETEACCESSlt/XO_97485F40FFFF837211D49F35D57AF8F8E
BC3gt lt/ALLOWgt lt/eSECURITY-POLICYgt lt/eOBJEC
Tgt
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XML Architecture
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Node Architecture
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Applications for B2B Collaboration

• Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and
  Replenishment (CPFR)
• Supply Chain Logistics Collaboration
• eXtended Relationship Management (XRM)
• Partner management
• Client management
• Vendor management

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The Business Internet

• Adaptive XML helps companies fulfill the promise
  of the Business Internet with adaptive
  collaborative systems
• Much more complex systems can evolve over time
• More enterprises can participate more easily in
  systems that are designed to adapt to change
• Systems can adopt new enhancements and still
  participate in existing workflows and processes
• B2B collaboration begins to scale as systems
  decentralize

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Peer Technology is the Centerpiece of B2B
Collaboration

• Successful B2B is all about relationships and
  peer technology makes it happen
• Capabilities of B2B collaborative systems come
  together to help enterprises form tight
  relationships
• Enterprises provide more value to each other by
  developing long lasting relationships and working
  cooperatively
• Long lasting relationships are established
  through peering rather than through centralized
  exchanges

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Pointers

• XMLP www.w3.org W3Cs efforts to fully
  standardize SOAP
• P2PWG www.p2pwg.org Working Group for Peer to
  Peer technology
• Decentralization www.yahoogroups.com Where the
  P2P geeks go

• Jeffrey Kay ltjkay_at_engenia.comgt
• Engenia Software Inc.www.engenia.com