Grand Logic / Big Data

End to End Big Data Solution

2012-01-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

Grand Logic announces end to end Big Data solution. Our flag ship product, JobServer, and its supporting open source SDKs provide a superior platform for taking your raw data and creating business solutions that will drive ROI and deliver on the promise of Hadoop.

Hadoop is a great solution, but alone it is an island of data processing, algorithms and open source tools. JobServer integrates Hadoop into your enterprise to automate the flow of data and manage ETL processing to efficiently organize and track your Hadoop processing. Then it delivers rich visualization for your Hadoop results to allow you to maximize your business objectives with Big Data. Whether you are targeting mobile, tablets or desktop/web devices, JobServer's powerful GWT based SDK can deliver a rich user experience and visualization for your reports and applications.

All this allows you to manage, monitor and track your Hadoop processing to deliver the control and central management you need to empower your developers and business analysts. JobServer with Hadoop allows you to acquire your data, process it and then visualize it. See this architecture diagram of our end to end JobServer/Hadoop solution stack.

Contact Grand Logic and see how we can help you make better sense of your Big Data environment. JobServer is also partnering with other Big Data solution providers and major distributions to provide complete Big Data solution for both your in house and cloud Hadoop deployments. Please contact Grand Logic for more information to see how our products can services can make your Hadoop deployment a success.

Big Data Predictions for 2012

2011-12-30T21:39:00.000-08:00

Well 2011 has been a great year for Hadoop and its supporting ecosystem. There is a growing base of sub projects evolving to fill the many niches in and around Hadoop and there are companies coming out of the wood work to claim their piece of the pie. Not to mention the VC money pouring into Big Data related startups and many established tech players changing their business plans to account for Hadoop. So what can we expect in 2012?

Here are seven predictions for what might be in store for Big Data in 2012:

1) Going Mainstream
Discovering all of what you can do with Big Data analytics in the enterprise is only in its infancy. Right now solutions like Hadoop are the secret weapon of the rich and social who can afford the investment in time, resources and infrastructure. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are using solutions like Hadoop to do things not possible before with traditional relational BI and analytics solutions. We will see in 2012 the window widening with more traditional enterprises seeing the potential benefits that Hadoop analytics can offer. We will see more companies in various industries look to leverage Hadoop to ask questions about their operations and customers not possible before. Look for Hadoop to go more mainstream and loose some of that exoticness that currently relegates it only to the big boys.

2) Put it in the Cloud
The barrier of entry is lowering for Hadoop with players like Amazon offering low cost of entry platforms for initial Hadoop deployments. In 2012 we will see continued acceptance of using the Cloud as the infrastructure of choice for deploying your Hadoop. With Amazon and others improving virtual private network services it will make integrating private Cloud solutions for Hadoop more palatable for security conscious enterprises. Cloud will be the target platform of choice for Hadoop in 2012. This will also open the door for smaller enterprises to dip their toe into Hadoop to discover what they have been missing in their volumes of consumer and operational data warehouses.

3) Automation and Integration
Right now most Hadoop deployments are islands of data and processing infrastructure. In the coming year we will see more tech companies begin to offer better tools to enable businesses to tie their back office data stores and data warehouses with their Hadoop environments in a more seamless fashion. Efficiently moving customer and business data out of traditional data stores such as relational databases, and processed and prepared for Hadoop consumption will be critical for successful Hadoop deployments. We anticipate a new category of ETL that will be focused on the management of data movement in and out of Hadoop and HDFS. This will gain more traction in 2012. There are already Hadoop projects focusing on related areas and we will see more Hadoop type connectors popping up from traditional software vendors eager to get their products integrated with Hadoop.

4) Analytics and Visualization
Traditional BI reporting tools are not geared well toward the type of output generated from Big Data type environments. A new breed of reporting tools and analytics solutions will emerge to better consume the output coming out of Big Data systems. Look for many traditional BI vendors to begin to tailor their front-end reporting solutions to fit with Hadoop and distributed data stores including NoSQL type of data stores. But much of what traditional BI vendors will offer will not be a natural fit since most of the BI vendors and their tools are more comfortable dealing with highly structured data. Also as business analytics in companies start to get a taste of the kind of problems that can now be solved with Big Data, that were not possible before, they will begin to think of new problems to ask that will drive the need for more visualization and reporting of the data coming out of Big Data. So keep an eye out for startups and tech companies offering Big Data native analytics solutions tailored from the ground up for visualizing the statistical kinds of data coming out of Hadoop. Turning statistical questions, common when dealing with Big Data, into visual reports that can be understood by business users will be a big leap forward to turning the raw data in many enterprises into meaningful value and actionable results.

5) Going Mobile
We will see in 2012 apps and solutions that allow business users to get a glimpse of their Hadoop operations and resulting output presented on mobile and tablet devices. This one is not a big stretch considering the growing proliferation of mobile computing. But look for Hadoop to get a bit more mobile in 2012. Visualization of BI on mobile is natural trend and Big Data is no exception.

6) Going Vertical and Healthcare
Healthcare is the perennial elephant in the room when it comes to needing operational efficiency improvements and managing exploding volume of patient data (not to mention making sense of patient data). From both the billing dimension and the diagnostic patient data aspect, healthcare will benefit greatly from the type of problems that Big Data can solve. In 2012 we will see healthcare providers and healthcare IT companies begin to seriously invest in Big Data to help them solve problems not possible before with traditional healthcare IT. Look for healthcare providers to tap Hadoop to better understand their patients inorder to deal with the volumes of digital patient data and to help them deal with government regulations and compliance.

7) Real-Time Big Data?
This might be a stretch, but look for some early signs of various tech player looking to deliver more real-time business solutions around Big Data. Hadoop brings tremendous processing power to bear to solve problems that were not practical before. With computing power growing and virtualization easer to manage and deploy, look for business users to demand Big Data type problems to be solved in more near real-time situations. This will open the door for even more interesting applications of Big Data for business and even end consumers.

Let's regroup in twelve months and see how well these predictions panned out :)

Big Data is more than Map/Reduce

2011-12-21T02:39:00.000-08:00

Companies of all sizes are looking for ways to make sense of their unstructured data. Data is growing at tremendous volumes and keeping track of it is becoming more challenging and expensive. Enter solutions such as Hadoop that allow you to make sense of this data using a highly distributed architecture that is based on horizontal scaling among other things.

Products like Hadoop are a critical layer of the solution, but they solve only one part of the overall tapestry needed to make sense of your Big Data. There are two key areas that are critical to your overall Big Data solution.

Imagine your Hadoop environment sitting in the center. Data must obviously be fed into it and data will flow out. An important aspect of a successful Hadoop deployment is managing these inputs and output points. Efficient management of your data as it comes in raw and then leaves as much more easily to consume information is key to having a successful Big Data environment.

Data In - Preparing your Big Data
First, you need to prepare your data for processing by Hadoop. Unstructured data must be prepared and loaded and sometimes integrated with relational data from enterprise database sources, for example. All this must be automated and fed into your Hadoop environment. This is a critical step especially as companies get into more real-time Big Data processing. The need for real-time analysis is becoming more critical with the explosion of social information and online commerce.

This requires automation to feed and prepare your Hadoop environment to minimize manual labor and many potentially error prone steps. Having this fully automated with as minimal human intervention is critical.Solutions such as JobServer, make this automation much more manageable. JobServer is ideal for integrating with your back office databases and can meld well with your IT environment using solutions such as SOA, Mule and ETL just as a few examples. JobServer can be used to centralize the logic and management for this preparation work so that steps like loading data into your HDFS are all automated easy to monitor and track.

Data Out - Data Analytics
As large amounts information are extracted out of solutions like Hadoop, visualizing the results is critical. Here to is where JobServer and its soafaces developer API can step in to address this challenge. soafaces is based on an open source API that allows for building rich reporting and analytic solutions that can capture data as it is coming out of your Hadoop environment and visualizing it in an easy to manage way. soafaces is based on the Google GWT framework for GUI development and can support rich web-based reporting and graphing technologies to provide for rich visualization of your results. JobServer also can be leveraged here to show, in a very organized manner, the results of each Hadoop job run and can be used to provide access to the final results to the right people in your organization through web reports, spreadsheets and email alerts...etc.

Contact Grand Logic and see how we can help you make better sense of your Big Data environment. JobServer is also partnering with other Big Data solution providers and major distributions to provide complete Big Data solution for both your in house and cloud Hadoop deployments.

Please contact Grand Logic for more information.

Tame your Hadoop - Hadoop Professional Services

2011-12-07T08:34:00.001-08:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce our expanded consulting services specializing in Hadoop solutions. Hadoop is quickly becoming the tool of choice for Big Data analytics and our expertise with Hadoop and applying our tools like JobServer (job workflow/scheduling engine) and soafaces (open source framework) enable us to build complete enterprise solutions around Hadoop for our customers.

Hadoop comes with many great supporting modules but needs additional tools and features to make it easy to manage and organize all the activity and content around your Hadoop operations. With our consulting services we can quickly come in and build a management and integration layer to help you automate and manage your Hadoop deployment. This will allow you to tie your back office data and IT systems to feed data to your Hadoop operations to automate and streamline data movement between your business data and your Hadoop analytics. This is vital to having a successful ROI for Hadoop. If you can't efficiently feed data into Hadoop and extract it (and visualize it) your Hadoop number crunching will be for not. With JobServer as part of your Hadoop environment and our expertise and professional services you will be able to:

Effectively build custom ETL processing between your back office data and your Hadoop data stores
Build, package and reuse custom logic and server-side tasks for managing and editing your Hadoop jobs
Compose complex Hadoop workflows from multiple simpler Hadoop jobs (and non-Hadoop jobs) to build support for rich scenarios where data is moved between HDFS and local storage and between multiple Hadoop jobs.
Integrate easily with modules like Cascading and Pig.
Security on job by job basis to restrict all aspects of job configuration, monitoring, reporting and execution on user by user basis.
Application permissions - control what tools are available to which users.
Detailed alerting (via email or sms) to report on status and failures by jobs and by job groups.
Organize jobs into groups and partitions for user organization resource management.
Powerful job scheduling - any scheduling pattern you can think of for running your Hadoop jobs can be be built by our consulting team.
Easily create custom reports per Hadoop job. Using the soafaces framework we can build custom reports that let you view the status and results of each of your Hadoop jobs.
We are experts with soafaces and GWT and can build rich visualization for your Hadoop generated data. And we can help you visualize this on web, mobile and tablets devices to develop rich analytics that can be consumed by decision makers in your company.

So if you want to tame your Hadoop environment, Grand Logic has the technical expertise and tool chest of tools and frameworks to get you going and organized. Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Hadoop Meets JobServer - Big Data Job Scheduling

2011-12-01T17:16:00.001-08:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 3.4. This release delivers support for Hadoop allowing Hadoop customers to use JobServer as their central access point to schedule, track and report on their Hadoop jobs and environment.

Hadoop is quickly becoming the tool of choice for open source Big Data Analytics and related computing. The JobServer team saw a great opportunity to extend JobServer's awesome job processing, scheduling and reporting capabilities to make the lives of Hadoop users better.

Hadoop and JobServer are a natural fit. JobServer offers, out of the box, extensive customization and extensibility through its soafaces developer API. This allows developers to quickly build simple or complex server-side Java jobs and manage them from a central location. Extending JobServer to schedule, manage, monitor and track Hadoop jobs was a natural fit for JobServer.

With the 3.4 release, JobServer comes bundled with standard components that let Java developers bundle their Hadoop jobs into the JobServer environment. This allows Hadoop users to launch and monitor all their Hadoop jobs from one location and track all their Hadoop processing activity from one place using JobServer's web based monitoring, reporting and tracking tools. JobServer runs along side your Hadoop environment and provides both developers and administrators with the ability to build, orchestrate, schedule and deploy Hadoop jobs from one central location.

Use JobServer to build, schedule and track a single Hadoop task or to compose multiple Hadoop tasks into more complex jobs and workflows. For example, a job can be composed of multiple Hadoop tasks where one task directs its output to the input of other Hadoop tasks in the job chain. JobServer makes it easy to centrally schedule, track and monitor all your Hadoop tasks and jobs from one place for real-time monitoring as well as for historical reporting and auditing. JobServer's workflow orchestration allows users to manage and manipulate files and content between your local storage system and your Hadoop HDFS. You can also build custom web GUIs (using GWT) for your Hadoop tasks to visualize all input and output content and show real-time status as the tasks are running or to report on final status and results after a Hadoop task has finished processing.

Start using JobServer today with your Hadoop environment and see all the benefits for yourself. Download and test drive JobServer 3.4 now and improve your Hadoop experience!

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

JobServer 3.2.24 - Advanced scheduling and productivity features

2011-09-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

Release 3.2.24 introduces many new features and productivity improvements including advanced scheduling enhancements and GUI based import and export capabilities. JobServer gives you the tools to make developing and deploying your jobs and backend services efficiently and reliably with as little hassle as possible.

The new scheduling features in this release give greater flexibility in scheduling daily, weekly, monthly and interval pattern jobs. You can now schedule jobs at multiple reoccurring times of the day and customize the reoccurring times to be customized differently based on the day of the week. Other enhancements in this release include advanced GUI based import and export tools to allow administrator and developers the ability to copy jobs between Development, QA and Production environments.

Also included with this release are a number of other minor enhancements and bug fixes including improved reporting and UI usability features. Check release notes for details.

Download and test drive JobServer 3.2.24 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful developer SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom jobs and backed automated services easier, while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

JobServer 3.2 - Easier to Deploy and Manage

2011-01-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 3.2. This release introduces new capabilities that enabling end users to deploy and manage multiple JobServer instances more easily and move jobs and applications between multiple environment (such as Development, QA and Production) using improved import and export capability.

JobServer's super scalable, threaded and distributed architecture delivers powerful job scheduling and job processing. JobServer can be deployed on one machine or on a grid of machines to power your job processing/scheduling and SOA environment. Now, with release 3.2, jobs and applications can be moved between multiple environment more easily. Developers can build and test jobs on their development environment then export/import them to QA environments for testing and finally import/export them to your final Production system.

With release 3.2, you can import and export jobs using command line tools or from the JobServer GUI administration panel. JobServer gives you the tools to make developing and deploying your jobs and SOA apps efficiently and reliably with as little hassle as possible.

Included with this release are a number of other minor enhancements and bug fixes including an improved upgrade process that allows easier upgrade of existing JobServer installations with the latest patches. Check release notes for details.

Download and test drive JobServer 3.2 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful developer SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom jobs and SOA applications easier, while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

JobServer in the Clouds

2010-10-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announced the release of JobServer Cloud edition. JobServer Cloud allows our customers to access and use the powerful job scheduling, job processing, workflow and SOA/Mule messaging features available in JobServer from a hosted on-demand environment. JobServer now supports deployments via a SaaS model, allowing our customers to lower their IT costs and free themselves to focus on their core business.

JobServer Cloud delivers all the same great features and capabilities found in JobServer and can now be hosted in the clouds. This frees customers from the IT burden of buying and maintaining hardware and installing and managing their own IT environment for JobServer. With the cloud edition of JobServer, you are freed from dealing with upgrades and managing maintenance tasks and dealing with hardware issues. We can add more job processing capacity, quickly, as you need it. You just need to focus on building and deploying your jobs and SOA applications and related services. We will insure that your JobServer environment is well maintained, managed and backed up and running efficiently. We will alert you if we notice performance issues or slow running jobs and processes and if more capacity is needed.

No hardware or software to install! With JobServer Cloud, your environment will be deployed and run from the Amazon cloud with secure connectivity to your private network using Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). You can access your JobServer instance securely to run and manage your jobs and apps with full access to your private corporate network. Many customers also need their JobServer environment to connect and access local IT systems and services within their private corporate network. With Amazon's VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) we can securely bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and your JobServer Cloud environment. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated JobServer compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their JobServer resources that are in the Amazon cloud.

We are looking forward to all the great benefits that JobServer Cloud offers to our customers. JobServer Cloud is a natural evolution for JobServer given the web based nature and highly modular SDK extensibility of JobServer. This takes the JobServer solution to the next evolution in software which is cloud computing and virtualization. The Cloud edition lowers costs for customers and allows them to focus on their vertical business needs. We are looking forward to a great next chapter in the evolution of JobServer in the clouds!

We are also very excited about all the great benefits of Amazon's cloud computing environment such as EC2, S3, RDS, EBS, VPC and other services. Amazon is proven provider of virtualization and cloud computing services and offers enterprise security and mission critical reliability. Amazon and JobServer Cloud edition are a great combination.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

Grand Logic Partners with Mobile Innovator

2010-09-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce a partnership with Exalt Technologies that will drive mobile innovation. "Through our partnership with Exalt, we hope to bring great mobile enabled software solutions to our customers and into our products. Exalt is a leader in developing great user experience and rich mobile client technology. They will be a great asset and technology partner."

Exalt specializes in innovative solutions for mobile devices and web applications and is a proven leader in delivering unparalleled mobile client technology combined with thoughtful user centered design. "Exalt is happy to be working with Grand Logic and their customers to combine our mobile client expertise and UI design with Grand Logic's proven business automation software and specialized web 2.0 solutions."

About Grand LogicGrand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

About ExaltExalt is a proven technology innovator taking business mobile through the application of cutting edge mobile technology and superior UI design. Exalt specializes in web and mobile solutions leveraging a highly skilled team of Software Engineers, Information Architects and UI Designers.

JobServer 3.0 Beta Now Available

2010-09-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 3.0. This release introduces key architectural enhancements that enable distributing job processing and clustering within JobServer. Job processing can now be distributed across a network of computers allowing for high-availability and virtually unlimited job processing scalability.

Combining JobServer's super scalable scheduling engine with its new scalable distributed job processing architecture makes JobServer the ideal platform for managing and automating IT environments of any size. From large banks, to EDI processors and SaaS startups, JobServer is a solution that will allow you to automate and manager your IT environment and back-office functions.

With this release, JobServer is now scalable and highly available at all levels, from job scheduling, to job processing to web GUI applications. The 3.0 scalability enhancements allow for dynamically adding new computers (called Agents) to the JobServer environment/pool to incrementally increase job processing capacity.

Download and test drive JobServer 3.0 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful developer SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom jobs and SOA applications easier, while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.

GWT and Mule Playing Together

2009-09-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

Mule is a leading open source solution for organizations to integrate and harmonize disparate systems within their enterprise. It also provides a fast track to SOA enable many of the functions within the organization and bring down barriers to application development and integration.

GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is a popular and leading framework for building AJAX web applications. There are a number of ways for GWT applications to communicate, the standard one is through its built-in RPC mechanism but there is no easy way for your GWT applications to talk with Mule endpoints directly.

SOAFaces is a lightweight framework that ties GWT and Mule together and makes it possible for GWT apps to access the Mule API and services directly from the AJAX client. This is done through the SOAFaces UniversalClient java interface which is very similar to the MuleClient interface found in the Mule APIs. The UniversalClient allows for messages to be invoked on Mule endpoints (SOA endpoints) and objects/data to be passed and returned directly from the GWT client code. All this is done without the need to use the GWT RPC mechanism. Simply use the UniversalClient interface in much the same way you would traditionally use the MuleClient interface in the Mule framework.

SOAFaces provides three sub APIs to develop with:

org.sofaces.services.*

This is the main package that includes the UniversalClient interface and facilitates the communication and marshaling (JSON or GWT/Java serializable objects) between GWT client and Mule/SOA back end services. This package can be used independently with any custom GWT application and in any j2ee app server. Mule endpoints can be invoked and messages will be routed to a MuleClient proxy on the j2ee back end. This is all transparent to the GWT/SOAFaces developer. Mule requests from GWT are proxied through the webserver and out to the Mule services bus, with all marshaling handled by SOAFaces.

org.soafaces.bundle.client.*

This package in SOAFaces makes it easy to build modular GUI applications (called Weblets) in GWT that have convenient access to SOA services like Mule (using UniversalClient interface). This package also provides a simple and optional API to persist the state of GWT POJO objects, so building modular web apps is easier and with less hassle using SOAFaces!

org.soafaces.bundle.workflow.*

This package in SOAFaces allows building back end server components called Tasklets. Tasklets can be used in jobs and workflows to execute back end batch type processing. Tasklets can be chained together to form more complex workflows and allowing message passing between the Tasklets which provides for rich functionality to be supported. Refer to JobServer for an example of a job scheduling engine that implements the Tasket API and for running and managing jobs.

The SOAFaces framework brings together these APIs for building Mule and GWT powered applications making accessing Mule a quick hop away from your AJAX apps.

For more information please refer to the SOAFaces website.

JobServer 2.6.0 beta released - packed with enterprise features

2009-06-24T19:29:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 2.6.0. This release includes improved SOA and enterprise capabilities along with significant architectural improvements and reliability features.

Some of the new capabilities in this release include:

Support for the latest version of Mule (version 2.2.1)
High-availability features with support for hot fail-over of job scheduling
Tiered architecture allowing web tier, job processing/scheduling tier, and database tier to be on separate host machines
Support for web tier clustering - running JobServer's web GUI Workbench tools across a cluster of Tomcat servers
Support for running Weblets/GWT and Mule/SOA services across cluster of machines

This release presents a number of key enterprise features that allows JobServer to play vital role in an organization's IT computing environment. Run and schedule jobs easier than ever before and now you have access the best SOA tools and APIs to build rich web based and SOA applications using GWT and Mule.

Never before is has it been easier to build Mule applications and deploy them in your IT environment. Build web GUIs for your Mule services in highly modular way using JobServer's tools and plugin SDK. Build your Mule services and deploy them in JobServer and easily build GWT powered GUI interfaces to your Mule services. JobServer makes using Mule easy.

JobServer Weblet/Mule architecture diagram

JobServer Job scheduling/processing architecture diagram

Download and test drive JobServer 2.6.0 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful plugin SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom jobs and SOA applications easier while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.

JobServer Now Supports GWT and SOA

2009-04-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

With the latest release of JobServer 2.4.6, JobServer now support building GWT and SOA powered applications. JobServer is a great environment for building jobs and backend tasklets and now it is a great way to build and deploy GWT/SOA powered application. Check out JobServer powerful open source framework, SOAFaces. SOAFaces makes building and deploying GWT and SOA driving applications a snap.

JobServer provides a unique GWT application building tool that allows developers to build modular and component based GWT and SOA powered applications. JobServer Standard edition is now available for free!

Download and test drive JobServer 2.4.6 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful plugin SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom applications easier while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.

JobServer 2.4.6 - Free Edition is Here

2009-04-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 2.4.6. Starting with this release JobServer Standard Edition is available free! JobServer gives you the ability to build jobs and GWT/SOA powered applications.

Jobs can be built from modular building blocks and scheduled with JobServer's powerful job scheduler. JobServer also provides a unique GWT application building tool that allows developers to build modular and component based GWT and SOA powered applications. JobServer Standard edition is now available for free!

JobServer Standard is the entry level version but is fully featured. It comes with a built-in and lightweight database, which helps make it convenient to setup and get started out of the box - in minutes.All you need to have installed is the JDK. It supports most of the major functionality found in the high-end versions and is most applicable to environments with under a few hundred jobs/applications and moderate load. Developers wanting to develop new SOAFaces components in their development environment will find it handy. Even use it in Production environments and watch JobServer make your job scheduling chores and critical business transactions manageable and breeze to administer and monitor. Use JobServer in your Production environment and rest easy that your job processing is being handled reliably.

Download and test drive JobServer 2.4.6 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful plugin SDK, SOAFaces, that makes extending and customizing JobServer and developing custom jobs and applications easier while using some of the best Java/AJAX and web/SOA open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.

JobServer Release 2.4.2

2008-12-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

Grand Logic is pleased to announce the release of JobServer 2.4.2. This latest release introduces key new features and usability improvements to reporting and monitoring. One of the most requested features, the ability to run jobs in process or out of process, is available with this release. This feature provides users with the ability to customize, at an individual job level or at a Partition level, whether jobs run in the main JVM or in their own isolated JVM.

This release also includes a number of usability improvements including the ability by users to kill jobs and delete jobs directly from the JobTracker UI. Running and managing jobs is now easier than ever with this latest release of JobServer.

Download and test drive JS 2.4.2 now and learn more about JobServer's powerful plugin SDK that makes extending JobServer and developing custom jobs and applications easier while using some of the best Java and web open source technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.

SOA Job Scheduling - Out of the Dark Ages

2008-10-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Classical batch job scheduling is still caught in the dark ages (or more specifically the 1980s). Many organizations still run jobs in arcane cron driven types of environments and manage their jobs in ad hoc ways with hard to track/report and administer systems. There are expensive mainframe and client/server job management platforms out there but they are out dated, for the most part, and are complex to manage and not very open or developer friendly.

Batch job scheduling and workflow processing in general is missing the SOA bandwagon and leaving the developer and the enterprise with a patch work of ad hoc solutions to deal with. To solve this challenge several issues need to be addressed. One, there is a need for a standard way to build server-side processing tasks that are modular/reusable and can be composed into more complex jobs that can be wired together at design time. Second, server-end tasks need convenient integration with ESBs and other web services type of infrastructure to make it easy to build jobs that can access the evolving SOA environments emerging in many organizations. Lastly what is needed a is to put a nice face on your hard working blue collar batch jobs and tasks. Wouldn't be nice if you could configure a job/task from an AJAX web application to quickly customize the job's properties? And wouldn't be nice if you could do this using SOA services available in your environment and be able to build, package and deploy these batch jobs and their supporting GUI applications (property customizers) quickly and easily?

There is no sliver bullet, but what is needed is an open standard for building batch tasks/jobs. Well as you may have guessed we have the answer. SOAFaces is just such a framework. It is built with all these challenges in mind and with goal to make building modular batch jobs and SOA applications modular and reusable.

SOAFaces provides a unique approach to the solution. Here is how it works. A job can be composed of one or more tasklets. A tasklet is a rather simple server-side interface that once implemented does your bidding. Tasklets can be chained together to form more complex jobs (tasklets in a job need no prior knowledge of each other). A tasklet can optionally have one input JavaBean and one output JavaBean. The input JavaBean can be customized (its properties can be edited) by something called a weblet. This is a GWT driven modular web component that functions as the GUI customizer for the tasklet's input JavaBean. Note that the input JavaBean and weblet are optional. You can build for example a simple or just hardwired tasklet with no customizer inputs at all. So many of the features are optional to help keep simple things easy and hard things possible. The attached diagram show how tasklets and weblets work together to build SOA powered jobs.

This diagram shows the three states that a job can be in. First is the design time, when the job is being configured and wired together. This is when the weblet can be used to customize the input JavaBeans used by the tasklets among other things. Second is the processing/runtime mode when the tasklets are run as part of a job. In this stage the tasklets can consume an input JavaBean and produce an output JavaBean. The post runtime mode, defines the period after which the tasklet/job has run and end users can view the logging history of the tasklet/job and what input/output JavaBeans where used by it. This is very critical for auditing and reporting.

With the SOAFaces framework, both the weblet and the tasklet also have direct access to web services so resources across the enterprise can be accessed and used to both configure the job at design time or execute the job at runtime and with convient access to SOA service like Mule and other web services.

The final piece of the SOAFaces framework is the packaging of tasklets and weblets into bundles. A tasklet and corresponding weblet can be packaged into a JAR called a SOAFaces Bundle (aka SFB). This is a modular and self contained package that can be dropped into any job processing container that supports SOAFaces to allow developers and end users to quickly plug in new components to build jobs.

For a complete example of how SOAFaces can be used to build a robust and extensible job scheduling and management platform check out JobServer. JobServer supports and implements the SOAFaces framework giving developers and end users the features and capabilities discussed.

JobServer 2.0.14 released with Ext GWT support

2008-10-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

The latest release of JobServer 2.0 now provides support for Ext GWT. You can now build your SOA weblets and jobs using the full power of GWT 1.5 and Ext GWT. JobServer allows you to build full blown SOA applications and jobs using the GWT framework and now you can take full advantage of GWT by using the advanced UI widgets available from Ext GWT. By combining JobServer with Ext GWT you can now build powerful and visually compeling web applications while leveraging the full power of SOA and ESBs like Mule.

JobServer allows developers to build and deploy SOA powered applications and jobs using a modular architecture. Build GUI applications using GWT and deploy them dynamically to the JobServer platform while empowering your GWT applications with easy access to web services and backend ESB services. JobServer makes it easy to build GUI applications that are decoupled from the backend, while allowing easy integration with existing and new web services. With JobServer there is no need to write GWT RPC code. Read more about how JobServer and its open source SDK, SOAFaces, and how it allows developers to build modular SOA powered applications and batch jobs.

Download and test drive JS 2.0 now and learn more about the powerful SOAFaces SDK that makes developing jobs and applications easier while using the best Java and web technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.

JobServer 2.0 has hit the streets!

2008-07-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Grand Logic is happy to announce the release of JobServer 2.0. This is a major release of JobServer (JS) that delivers many new features and a brand new developer SDK. The developer SDK is an especially interesting new offering with JS 2.0. The new SDK is an implementation of the open source SOAFaces framework. By supporting SOAFaces, JS now inherently provides support for SOA, ESBs and GWT. Not only does JS now provide the worlds finest job scheduler, it now also integrates with the best open source ESB in Mule and the very popular and powerful AJAX framework with GWT.

You can still use JS for its great scheduling capabilities and its ability run your batch jobs of all kinds from shell scripts to complex ETL. And now you can use JS to manage and run your Mule services and other SOA. JS makes using Mule easy with full integration and packaging of the Mule engine. You can use JS to access SOA services like Mule endpoints but you can also use JS to deploy and manage Mule endpoint services with JS directly, making JS the perfect container for running and managing your Mule services.

By using SOAFaces, JS also now provides users and developers with a powerful way of building component software. You develop SOAFaces components and combine them together to create jobs using a point and click interface. This has always been a core capability of JS, but now you can also use the same modular approach to build GWT applications of all kinds from mash-ups to full blown and secure SOA applications. And you can manager and run this all from within the JS environment.

With JS 2.0 we build on all the great features provided in JS 1.x including:

Flexible Calendaring/Scheduling
Job Dependencies
Queues and Prioritization Management
Cascading Alert Management
Developer SDK (SOAFaces)
Security and Audit Trails
Event Driven Processing
Scalability and Manageability

Download and test drive JS 2.0 now and learn more about the powerful SOAFaces SDK that makes developing jobs and applications easier while using the best Java and web technology available to developers.

About Grand Logic

Grand Logic is a privately held company focused on delivering quality software to its customers. It is founded on the principle that when innovation, dedication, and hard work come together great things can happen.