Input Sources - Mooshabaya

Screencast depicting the Input Sources - Feeds (rss1.0, rss2.0), Scraper, and Files of Mooshabaya. The respective mashups are generated using Mashup Generator of Mooshabaya and can be deployed into WSO2 Mashup Server, as it has the respective implementation of these input sources as host objects. This screencast was captured using XVidCap and modified (video length is reduced to 4 min and 53 seconds) using ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -i in.mpeg -t 00:04:53 -target film-dvd inputsources.mpg

[1] Feed Host Object Guide
[2] Scraper Host Object
[3] File Host Object
[4] Writing a Custom Host Object

Timeline: Community Bonding

April 26th 1900 UTC the names of the accepted projects were announced, and the community bonding period began. Since I have been given svn, blog [1], and the wiki [2] access on 30th of April, I wrote down the timeline in a wiki page of OGSA-DAI. I will record the further project progress and decisions in the ogsa-dai wiki. Tickets will be created for each task that is specified in my proposal using Trac - an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system, used by ogsa-dai project, which I will mark as resolved with the progress.

[1] OGSA-DAI Blog
[2] AlternativePresentationLayers 
[3] REST in OGSA-DAI
[4] The Java API for RESTful Web Services
[5] Governance Model 
[6] Part VI. OGSA-DAI for server developers
[7] Part II. Getting Started
[8] Coding Guidelines - OGSA-DAI

Mooshabaya discussions at research lab

February 22nd, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/A.S.Malinga, K.Pradeeban / CSE Research Lab]

I am writing a switch which will hide the existing menus from mooshabaya if enabled; by default mooshabaya will display all the menus. Dr.Srinath also asked to implement a screen scrapping component. And we will have to make it possible to run the workflow from xbaya itself instead of going to mashup server to invoke it from there. These are the milestones from March 11th demo.

Dr.Srinath asked to come up with a use case, which  will essentially cover all the use cases of Mooshabaya for the demo. He will fix a meeting with Dr.Sanjiva soon. The demo that we will prepare will be sent to Suresh Marru from IU. 

Since modifying Axiom's pom succeeded, I am currently trying to make mbaya a new carbon-orbit bundle, hence reverted the changes that made to axiom for testing.

We also had a discussion about Taverna and other workflow composers, which can be used instead of XBaya, though XBaya became our preferred choice since we are familiar with it and it is convenient when coming to integrate to mashup domain. Project updates and todos at the moment can be found here, where this depicts the overall view of the project.


March 24th, 2010

We had a meeting with the project's internal mentor Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara where we gave an overall idea and an update on the status of the project and got her thoughts and remarks.

We also demonstrated the project to the Project Coordinator Mr.Shantha Fernando and the project mentor Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara for the third formal project evaluations. I described and demonstrated the other input sources (files, feeds, and scraper), the XMLBeans Event generator for the known LEAD Event Types, and mbaya orbit bundle that makes XSUL messenger working as the monitoring module.


April 5th, 2010

We discussed the potential research paper for the project as well as the timeline with Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara, and got her suggestions and thoughts.


April 23rd, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/all/ CSE Research Lab]

We had a meeting with the mentor Dr.Srinath Perera where we gave the updates of the projects, discussed the further procedure of Mooshabaya, and the research paper.

May 26th, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/Research Lab]
We showed the screencasts, and showed the final draft paper and got his suggestions and consent. We got his thoughts on the research paper that we had submitted too.

May 27th, 2010
We discussed the draft report with the project's internal mentor, and got her consent and suggestions.

gsoc2010OgsaDaiPres

It's really exciting to start working with Google Summer of Codes for the second time. I had an interest in applying for OMII even for my GSoC 2009, as mentioned in the post "my summer of codes so far" since Taverna and OGSA matched my experience during the internship, where I later applied for Abiword due to my personal interest in Abiword and the project. So this time I didn't have to spend much time to choose OMII and particularly OGSA-DAI. 

After a considerable amount of research myself, and with the assistance of the OMII developers for OGSA-DAI project, Mr.Bartosz Dobrzelecki (bartek) and Dr.Mario Antonioletti (mario) from the University of Edinburgh, I applied for the project "Alternative presentation layers for OGSA-DAI" on 8th of April, where the application deadline was on 9th of April.

I was given access to the ogsa-dai private developer irc on 15th of April, as well as Michal - the candidate for the project "Re-implementation of the OGSA-DAI Distributed Query Processor in Clojure." This has given us an opportunity to interact with the developers well before the "Community Bonding Period" which begins on 26th of April, along with the official announcement of the successful applicants.

OGSA-DAI can be checked out from its svn location. svn co https://ogsa-dai.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ogsa-dai/ My code will be committed to the trunk ogsa-dai/trunk/presentation/cxf. The presentation layer code stays in ogsa-dai/trunk/presentation/, where WSDLs are inside the folder wsdl and the currrent axis presentation layer is inside the folder axis. Hoping a Summer of Love with OMII/OGSA-DAI starting in a very few days, with the hope that University of Moratuwa will lead the GSoC participant count for the forth time (2007 - 22, 2008 - 24, and 2009 -22). Hope to keep blogging my progress on the project here.

Upcoming Schedule : FYP

Our final year project CS4200 has the below upcoming milestones.

• April 30th, 2010 - Beginning of Semester 2: Submission of research papers or extended abstracts to ERU
• Last week of April - meeting with English editor
• May 16th to 21st - Submission of final draft report to Moodle and supervisors
• May 27th 2010: approval of the projects by the supervisors for final evaluations
• 3rd & 4th June 2010 - mid of semester 2: Final evaluations - presentations, demonstrations & vivas
• 2nd week of June 2010: Project demonstration in the Exhibition
• 24th June 2010: Submission of final report (hard bound) and project CD/DVD.
• 24th June 2010: Submission of final versions of research papers

The final year project will continue till the mid of the semester 2, which is the final semester of our university life.


-- Project timeline updated as on 19th of June. --

• 21st, 23rd & 24th June 2010 - mid of semester 2: Final evaluations - presentations, demonstrations & vivas
• Project demonstration in the Exhibition - in place of this we may arrange a public demonstration and invite the industry to evaluate (but no plans yet)
• 23rd July 2010: Submission of final report (hard bound) and project CD/DVD. CD/DVD should contain all project documents including the final report and project web, source code, 10-minute video of the project, 1-minute video of the project, and any other item necessary for a future project group to continue the project.
• 23rd July 2010: Submission of final versions of research papers.

xOA and SOA++

Have you ever come across acronyms such as WOA, ROA, ..? Since the success story of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), many researchers and young enthusiasts have been trying to find more xOA (-Oriented Architectures) that can take SOA a step further (or claim to do so, at least in theory). Here I try to list some of those xOAs. Most of them (WOA, XOA, UOA ..) promise to take SOA to a level higher, or try to pose as an alternative or competitor to SOA.

Just go through these links and have some fun.

AOA (Agent Oriented Architecture)
BOA (Business Oriented Architecture)
COA (Collaboration Oriented Architecture)
DOA (Delegation Oriented Architecture)
EOA (Ecosystem Oriented Architecture)
FOA (Federation Oriented Architecture)
GOA (Goal Oriented Architecture)
HOA (Human Oriented Architecture)
IOA (Information Oriented Architecture)
MOA (Model Oriented Architecure)
POA (Process Oriented Architecture)
ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture)
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
UOA (User Oriented Architecture)
VOA (Virtualization Oriented Architecture)
WOA (Web Oriented Architecture)
XOA (Experience Oriented Architecture)

Pls note that there may be some alternative definitions for some of these acronyms as well.

Install *this* font before reading!

Recently I was going through the online version of the teachers' guides from the National Institute of Education Sri Lanka (NIE). The major issue I noticed in those documents was, they have been written using non-unicode fonts (Sinhala - DL-Manel-bold and Tamil - Bamini). It should be noted that converting them to unicode is not very difficult given the UCSC converters. However the practical difficulty of using non-unicode fonts to the shared documents is, the other users are expected to have that particular font in their system. Copy-pasting into a plain text editor becomes impossible. Still I have seen many web sites asking to download the particular font to view their site correct. Some sites even ask the users to use Internet Explorer or some other specific browser. I would rather request them to change their site to unicode than asking each user to install their not-so-sexy font.

Here is a sample of the above mentioned issue.
mEka Odjlh - Written using DL-Manel-bold, which appears as garbage text here.
පෑන් ධාවකය - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

Similarly for Tamil
Ngid nrYj;jp - Bamini
பேனை செலுத்தி - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

I could also notice during the recent series of IT seminars in Jaffna peninsula, that the students who mentioned that they can type in Tamil were actually referring to their ability of typing using Bamini font. I guess we have created an awareness of Unicode among them. Unicode is much essential, if we really want to go beyond mere typing in local languages.

CSE - IT Awareness Seminar Series

The CSE IT Awareness program by the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Moratuwa went quite successful, with 11 seminars all over the island in Tamil and Sinhala media. Final year undergraduates of the department along with a staff member visited the destinations and carried out the seminars. The seminars held at the 11 schools went quite well. I joined the team which went to the Jaffna peninsula, where we conducted the seminars in Tamil medium in 6 schools - Putthur Somaskandha College, Kopay Christian College, Kokuvil Hindu College, St. Charles M.V, Urumpurai Siva Tamil M.V, and Chullipuram Victoria College. I did my talk on இணையம் (The Internet). A handout was also distributed among the participants as a supportive learning material.

It was really nice to see the students showing a great interest in learning new technologies. It is our responsibility to make the country an IT hub through similar workshops and seminars. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is offered as an optional subject for Ordinary Level Students where they  also have the option of doing Agriculture or some other subjects instead. What I could notice it, the number of students doing ICT is much lower than the students choosing other modules. The reasons may be the score - They may feel ICT as a difficult subject, or there may be some limitations due to the limited resources. Obviously not all the schools are ready to have ICT as a compulsory module. More resources are needed. It should also be noted that GIT is yet another module provided for the Advanced Level students.

A seminar of three hours can never cover all the necessary stuff as a basic course. But it can provide a flavor to the students and make them more interested towards learning computer science and IT. I am pretty sure we have reached this goal. The interest  was shown very clearly by the students. Now we have to go forward carefully with the success of this initial attempt.

Given below is a short video capture of a drama practice of the students of Chullipuram Victoria College, which we were able to witness during our visit. :)