Elemenope, a great OSS project name and a good way to use OSS integration servers for BPM, supply chain automation - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 18, 2008
Elemenope, a great OSS project name and a good way to use OSS integration servers for BPM, supply chain automation

Beginning in 2000 or so, brand name enterprise application integration (EAI) and later business process management (BPM) products were supposed to be all about connecting clients, prospects, suppliers, manufacturers, etc. all along the supply chain. But IT staffs tended to use them for internal integration instead, in places where less complex technology would work just as well. It's like the old saw that casual computer users use only 10% of the functionality of Notes, Office and similar personal-productivity tools.

I was reminded of this tendency of IT folks to overcomplicate their lives when I was researching ebizQ's latest article on open source software (OSS). As part of the research I talked to John Roets of createtank, a consultancy that has open sourced an interesting little framework named "elemenope." Interesting little name too.

We're not talking IBM SystemView or Sun's Distributed Object Environment here. In fact, just the opposite: keep it simple if simple is all you need is Roets' motto. Developed around the same time as these more comprehensive but now long forgotten frameworks (and before SOAP), elemenope follows the same design philosophy in terms of abstracting away from the underlying technology. It includes:
• A repository of connectors (might be XML RPC, might be SOAP call)
• A little engine that abstracts the transport
“Forced abstraction” keeps users from writing spaghetti code every time they add a new application or data source. There's “one pathway no matter what the logic is,” says John. And the next time you need to integrate something, you don’t have to go find the guy that wrote the original service.

Just to achieve this simplicity for its consulting practice, createtank wrote elemenope in the mid 1990s. They OSS'd it under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2003 and also under the Apache license in 2006. (More on that in my next blog post; perceived legal problems with GPL are a big issue over on the Open Source Initiative license-discuss list this week.)

By the way, there's more detail on elemenope as well as activeBPEL, Apache ODE, Intalio, Jitterbit, jBPM, Open EAI, Shark and Sun in the feature article on OSS referenced above. It's is available over there to the left of my bald head. (You need to join the ebizQ Gold Club but there is no charge.) The premise of the research is the possibility that OSS integration server software might change the dynamics of external EAI/BPM use in the next decade in the same way that OSS application/web server software (see Open Source at the Core) changed "internal" application integration functionality in the last decade. Let me know what you think of the theory.