Developing Collaborative
Applications for the Peer Web
using Adaptive XML
Jeffrey Kay <[email protected]>
Chief Technology Officer, Engenia Software Inc.
B2B Collaboration
Building 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
today’s 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
–
–
–
–
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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 don’t imply lack of purity
– Functionally similar doesn’t 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 today’s web technology is applicable to the peer
web
– Some additions enhance the ability for edge nodes to
interconnect
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B2B Collaboration
Building Strong Relationships
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B2B Collaboration
Building Strong Relationships
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B2B Collaboration
Building Strong Relationships
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B2B and Peer Technology
• Today’s 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
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–
–
–
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
Includes
Enterprise
Group
Includes
Event
Manages
Watches
Owns
Includes
Person
Activity
Manages
Owns
Follows
Includes
Activity
Activity
Implements
Includes
Includes
Owns
Implements
Manages
Owns
Manages
Group
Follows
Activity
Owns
Owns
Event
Person
Includes
Enterprise
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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 userdemand-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
• Today’s 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
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<?engenia.com version="1.0"?>
<e:OBJECT xmlns:e="urn:engenia.com" guid="xo_f709d140ffff83fc11d49f35d57af8f8ebc3">
<e:TITLE>Allen Abbeydale</e:TITLE>
<e:DESCRIPTION>Analyst</e:DESCRIPTION>
<e:TYPE VERSION="3.5">_bc_person</e:TYPE>
<e:SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript"><![CDATA[
function onPropertyChanged(prop,oldvalue,newvalue) {
if (prop.toLowerCase() == "title") return false; // cannot change title here
return true;
}
]]></e:SCRIPT>
<e:ATTRIBUTES>
<LASTOBJECTUPDATE>977328294910.000000</LASTOBJECTUPDATE>
</e:ATTRIBUTES>
<e:PROPERTIES STRUCTURED="true">
<PASSWORD PRIVATE="false">swaprods</PASSWORD>
</e:PROPERTIES>
<e:RELATIONSHIPS>
<XO_3E8ACE60FFFF850211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3 OBJTYPE="_bc_group">
<VERB>MANAGES</VERB>
</XO_3E8ACE60FFFF850211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3>
</e:RELATIONSHIPS>
<e:PUBLISH/>
<e:SECURITY-POLICY>
<ALLOW TYPE="RWD">
<XO_97485F40FFFF837211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3>READWRITEDELETEACCESS</XO_97485F40FFFF837211D49F35D57AF8F8EBC3>
</ALLOW>
</e:SECURITY-POLICY>
</e:OBJECT>
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XML Architecture
XML query -search
XML transforms into
standard schemas
XML accessible information store
XML/XSLT -publishing
XML-base RPC -service access
Adaptive XML -Collaboration Application Development
WebDAV -unstructured data input
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Node Architecture
Web Browser
Other Systems
SOAP
Document-Based
Applications
Adaptive XML
HTTP
WebDAV
HTTP
SOAP
Adaptive XML
Engine
WebDAV
SOAP
Adaptive XML
Engine
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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
W3C’s efforts to fully
standardize SOAP
• P2PWG – www.p2pwg.org
Working Group for Peer to
Peer technology
Jeffrey Kay
<[email protected]>
Engenia Software Inc.
www.engenia.com
• Decentralization –
www.yahoogroups.com
Where the P2P geeks go
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