Clearance – A tool for finding incorrect amounts in Bills and open energy-counters in households.

Clearance Quality – An extension for Clearance, avoiding incorrect bills by checking customer data every night. The tool creates a report and sends error propone data directly to the concerned employer for check-up.

Courrges – A software for the management of failed mail delivery to customers.

Furthermore I got official workshops for administration of Somentec XAP and Robotron e-sales. The two major energy billing systems used by our company.

import org.apache.xmlrpc.client.XmlRpcClient;
import org.apache.xmlrpc.client.XmlRpcClientConfigImpl;

public class Blogger {

public static void blog(String username, String password, String title,
String category, String content){

try {
XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();
config.setServerURL(new URL("http://address to blog/xmlrpc.php"));
XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();
client.setConfig(config);
String[] cat = new String[]{category};

Map m = new HashMap();
m.put("title", title);
m.put("categories", cat);
m.put("description", content);
Object[] params = new Object[] {"default", username, password, m, true };

client.execute("metaWeblog.newPost", params);

}
catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}

public static void main(String[] args) {

Blogger.blog("wp_user","wp_password","post_title",
"post_category","post_content");

}
}

class Post {
    public String title;
    public String description;
    public String[] categories;
}

I finished Google Summer of Code 2009 successfully, and I guess I already spent all the money I received from Google.  Anyway my dissertation was accepted by my University and I want to give a special thank to Philip Johnson and Austen Ito from University of Hawaii for this great experience in the world of open source software. Those guys are racks. To every student willing to participate in GSOC: i can just recommend it !

At the moment I am looking for a job out there, and while I’m waiting for replies I keep myself busy with a little project. An idea I had some month ago but no time because of studies. The idea is actually huge and i am looking at its feasibility. It may become reality, who knows…

Harvey

a small update this week, while i have to sprint to the finish line

Last week:

Some more documentation and implementation. I had some problems with the CBR solutions which where not mapped trough hibernate in JCOLIBRi, thus my cases had no solution. I could fix the problem by changing the hibernate configuration in the source code of JCOLIBRi. Therefor integration into IVY RoundUp is not possible and I will integrate the library in my source code. I also started implementing the overall MAPE cycle for each service in the Hackystat Service Manager. This will be documented by the end of the week in a developer guide in the wiki of the project:

This week:

Finishing up the tasks i described for the future in my last blog post.

Overview
This blog entry is finally an interesting one. Remember to the overall picture:
The overall concept was described in my post of the GSoC Weekly Update 3 of the 8th of June . The only conceptual adoption is that there is always just one single agent for each service with monitoring and execution functionality.

As already mentioned in earlier posts, the basic framework was already implemented end of July. The basic system consists of a simple Graphical User Interface and the agents. The agents are SOA services implemented in REST, and are only capable of starting and stopping the services so far (Execution part of agents).

Last week I was able to finish the set up of the blue “CBR” component. I used the Jcolibri2 CBR framework for this. JColibri is accessing an embedded Apache Derby database in the Hackystat Service Manager. I set up some initial cases with the CBR features I created over the last weeks in the database. Now one can create a new CBR Problem description and send it to the JColibri framework which returns a set of cases that are similar to the CBR problem description.

The CBR component:

The documentation and introduction to JColibri can be found here: JCOLIBRi Documentation

1. First we have to set up an embedded Apache Derby database, with a table structure as follows:

create table case_base (caseId varchar(15), service varchar(50), reachable integer,
reqLatency real, adeqHeapsize integer, exceHeapSize integer,
dbLatency real, solutionCode integer

The table structure depends on the CBR features, which are extendable and the table structure can be changed at any time in my Java Class called CaseBaseInitializer. The same class allows to enter some initial cases into the database or, later, load an exported database for porting capabilities.

2. A class called CaseRecommender implements the StandardCBRAppication interface of the JColibri library. This is the core class that creates a connection the database via hibernate and maps the cases to objects. Therefore we have four XML configuration files in the directory of the application called:

• databaseconfig.xml
• hibernate.cfg.xml
• CaseSolution.hbm.xml
• CaseDescription.hbm.xml

For details on the concept and configuration files, look at the JColibri documentation.

3. The CaseRecommender class maps the columns of the Database (CBR-features) with Similiarity Functionalities.
That looks like this:

// First configure the NN scoring
NNConfig simConfig = new NNConfig();

//Set Global similarity function to average
simConfig.setDescriptionSimFunction(new Average());

//Create attributes for Mapping CBR features
Attribute service = new Attribute("service", CaseDescription.class);
Attribute reachable = new Attribute("reachable", CaseDescription.class);
Attribute reqLatency = new Attribute("reqLatency", CaseDescription.class);
Attribute adeqHeapsize = new Attribute("adeqHeapsize", CaseDescription.class);
Attribute exceHeapsize = new Attribute("exceHeapsize", CaseDescription.class);
Attribute dbLatency = new Attribute("dbLatency", CaseDescription.class);

//Set similarity function for each CBR feature
simConfig.addMapping(service, new Equal());
//simConfig.setWeight(service, 0.5);
simConfig.addMapping(reachable, new Equal());
simConfig.addMapping(reqLatency, new Interval(100));
simConfig.addMapping(adeqHeapsize, new Interval(4000));
simConfig.addMapping(exceHeapsize, new Interval(4000));
simConfig.addMapping(dbLatency, new Interval(100));

4. Now a new CaseDescription Object can be created and send to the CBR application to retrieve the most similar cases.

This is all working successfully, what it needs is some optimization and perfection of the CBR features and cases as well as the implementation of the monitoring and execution.

What work is left ?

In the next two weeks I will complete the system, by:

• implementing the monitoring functions for the CBR features described here: http://www.weitz.lu/cbrfeatures_draft.pdf

• creating the Analysis component, if some metrics show misbehavior the metrics are captured and send to the CBR JColibri framework

• creating the Plan component will adopt the solution of the most similar case and execute it. Retrieve the solution, Reuse the solution, Revise the solution, Retain the solution. The 4 major CBR steps.

• adding execution fucntionalities to the Agents for fixing the misbehavior appropriate to the case solution.

First of all I did some more documentation and research for my dissertation. I would say that I have more than a third of my dissertation done. It is mostly the background and introduction part that is finished. I have also a solid amount of literature and notes for the main part of the dissertation which I have to transpose.

I did some adoption to my projects for the Continuous Integration in Hackystat. I used the hackystat-developer-example as template and copied the Apache ANT files. I adopted the build.xml in order to use the IVY Roundup libraries.

I am exploring a concept for the realization of CBR, where the similarity measures and best case retrieval is done with myCRB, unfortunately myCBR can only be integrated to a Tomcat web server. This is why I will also explore JColibri .

Next week:

Google Summer Code finishes the 25th of August, thus I will focus again on integrating CBR into my system and improving the system and the graphical user interface. This involves:
Implementing monitoring features into the agents in order to collect metrics for the CBR features. (Monitoring)

Hervé

More documentation, i created also a section that is an introduction to Hackystat, when its finished i will also produce a ten page long PDF out of it, maybe there is some interest.

I found a cool Java library called JAMon (http://jamonapi.sourceforge.net/) to monitor Java Applications and JDBC. I think the JDBC monitoring could be useful for Sensorbase, while the Java monitoring expects to run the application as Java Object. So far the HSM runs and stops the service over Java Processbuilder, but I will investigate if there is another integration method. Anyway I keep on looking for JVM Monitoring tools: like Java VisualVM (In which one cannot access the internals), but i found out that it is based on jvmstats.
Philip pointed my in an e-mail to Epsilon (http://www.obix-labs.com/dr/bin/view/Epsilon/), but for me the website is not reachable since weeks.

I started a thread in the mailing list on the Hackystat CBR cases, and I started to analyze and write down how the ideas in the mailing-list could be implemented. Therefore I create a little PDF (http://www.weitz.lu/cbrfeatures_draft.pdf) initializing the list of features that each service provide. It is to implement these features as metrics in the monitoring agents of the HSM and to expand the list.

This week:

Finishing the first three chapters of the documentation (Introduction, Background (Software architecture, SOA, REST, Hackystat) and “Autonomous service oriented computing” (CBR)). Thus “Autonomous service oriented computing in Hackystat”, still to go. Expanding the CBR feature list and play around with its implementation on the monitoring level and think about the cases and their implementation.

Greetings
Harvey

Last week:
I did some write up for my dissertation. I integrated the missing libraries into my project, I tried out some ways to achieve this and came across the Fatjar Eclipse plugin (http://fjep.sourceforge.net/), which is really easy to use and efficient. Fatjar just integrates the jars that are set in the java build path of the eclipse project. I came up with some CBR features, mainly gained trough the REST API of the different services. On top of these CBR features I am doing some research on JVM and Java Application Monitoring tools. There is a hell of a lot out there and I try to find an open source solution or a library that suits my need and fits with my current system to gain more CBR features. I also looked at the mail about standardization of the Hackystat projects and hope to achieve this by the end of the month, if I get it right its about Check-styles and IVY. Since I got only the REST and the JGoodies Forms libraries I think I will get there quick.

This week:
More documentation as my supervisor from my University requested, to avoid pressure at the end of the summer and more CBR features (Investigating Monitoring tools) and some cases hopefully by the end of the week. I read trough some tutorials and papers about MyCBR, but this is still work in progress and I cant see away yet to integrate it. I might also look at JColibri CBR Framework in the hope that it is supporting my understanding and maybe easier to integrate. And as soon as I have some solid documentation it will be integrated partly into my wiki.

Cheers, have a nice week everybody

Hervé