Orbitz Open Sources Tools To Manage Large Distributed Applications

mjasay writes "CNET is reporting that on Monday Orbitz will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, both 'part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.' Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement adds significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry. In particular, it highlights Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision that enterprise IT needs to open up and collaborate. However, as Orbitz's development team notes, it's easier said than done to participate in open source, especially when creating projects rather than simply contributing to existing projects."

are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when Orbitz is going to accept progress and move away from soon to be sunseted jdk 1.4

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[afidel]

Lots of stuff runs on jdk 1.4.7 since it was the stable and supported version for so long, especially when 1.5 was in flux. I have a ton of tools that ask for it and I know most of the Oracle stuff in 10g r2 uses it (and fails to include the TZ updates so every time we install a new client we have to TZ patch it). Basically Enterprise IT is often much slower moving than other areas of IT because we get bit by bleeding edge often enough to know it's often just not worth it if there's an alternative that has the same functionality and is more stable wrt change.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no excuse for using 1.4.2 .. don't give me the stability excuse 1.5 is far better and 1.6 is way better stability and performance..

Re:

[dlb1]

not only that, 1.4.2 is going out of maintenance very soon: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/ [sun.com]

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[Noke]

I have an excuse. We use DB2 Connect (v8) on an HPUX platform (11i). Guess what? DB2 Connect v8 isn't certified to work with anything above JDK 1.4.x. In order to have support for JDK 1.5, you need to upgrade to DB2 Connect v9. But DB2 Connect v9 isn't certified to work on HPUX 11i. You need up upgrade the OS.

With a critical enterprise application, going down that upgrade path is costly and risky.

So there are actually lots of excuses especially when you are in a large enterprise environment.

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[mokeefe]

Orbitz is actively moving to 1.6 and our entire new technology platform is already on 1.5. However with some older apps dating back to 2000 sharing this same monitoring API, it takes time.

Meanwhile, ERMA does have a separate build within the same codebase for 1.5 code including support for Annotations, etc, and we make use of backport-util-concurrent.

Re:

[mokeefe]

P.S. We also have some cool MonitorProcessors that use the java.lang.management package which is new to 1.5.

Commercial competition?

[Nursie]

So does this stuff compete with things like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli software?

Re:

[Miniluv]

No it does not. ERMA could be used to instrument your software so that it can more effectively be monitored with either solution. Graphite is just a graphing tool for large volumes of numeric data which occurs in a time series.

Thanks a lot!

[KasperMeerts]

Seriously, thank you.I'm sure this will help FOSS in the enterprises and industries.

(Nobody ever does that here)

Re:

[Hatta]

Absolutely right. Never used Orbitz before but I'll give them a try next time I travel.

Re:

[Braino420]

Might want to rethink that [thebestpag...iverse.net].

Re:

[strabes]

Every time I heard the word "Orbitz" I think of that maddox article. It's so funny.

i thought java didn't matter

[trybywrench]

A large company using Java for enterprise applications? wow and here Taco had me thinking Java Only Matters to Sell Books(tm).

Thanks Orbitz for open sourcing your apps. The ERMA things looks really cool.

enterprise IT needs to open up and collaborate

[MRe_nl]

or even "enterprise needs to open up and collaborate".
I think only certain results can be expected in a business environment based
so heavily on Profit - Bottom Line - Trust nobody - Business is War type axioms.
Clearly the whole open vs closed-source software is just a small part of a bigger
question, the balance between competition and cooperation in corporations,
or indeed society. May you live in interesting times indeed.

Re:

[CBravo]

To phrase it differently: In society, how much does a group (e.g. corporation) share?

I guess you can share as long as it does not breed competition in your market or change the market as a whole in unfavorable ways.

Confused about Graphite at first

[K. S. Kyosuke]

At first I thought the talks is about this Graphite [sil.org], but it made no sense. They should refrain from giving such nice names to Java libraries! People will only get confused. :-)

Re:

[Sarlok]

Yeah, me too. AFAIK, the font-rendering graphite developed by SIL has been around for longer than this one. Google "graphite" and see the sil project as #3 (1st two talk about the mineral)

Didnt that drink die?

[citylivin]

I mean no one likes drinking little bits of goo with their sugared water. It was doomed to fail id say!

Open Source What??

[Dalroth]

Is it too much to ask for even a basic explanation of what these products are and what they do?

Re:

[baboonlogic]

This is much more informative than the summary...

ERMA [infoq.com]

From there:

Orbitz Worldwide, a leading global online travel company, has open sourced two monitoring tools Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, a persistence and visualization component. ERMA is a home grown Java API and library that has been used in several web applications at Orbitz to capture monitoring statistics in the applications at run-time. It is the source of streams of events that are processed in order to raise alerts wh

Awesome interface!

[baboonlogic]

I have spent the past month developing a similar monitoring backend to the enterprise cluster I am building here (though not in java). This looks very interesting and I will definitely give this a shot.

Look at the screenshots [wikidot.com]! My architecture was somewhat similar but my interface feels like dark age compared to this!

Datacenter Neighbors

[Anonymous Coward]

If it weren't such a huge violation of security-through-obscurity, perhaps someone might point out that Orbitz and Slashdot are neighbors in some hypothetical datacenter which may be located somewhere in the central USA. I've certainly never been there to witness such juxtaposition of Internet real estate; If I had I definitely wouldn't point it out, particularly on such a public forum as this.

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds.

ITA Software - the search engine behind orbitz

[Palal]

FYI: Orbitz doesn't use their own search engine. They use ITA Software [itasoftware.com], whose "test" interface is very handy for finding fares

Orbitz!

[Slur]

Really, I fail to see what any of this has to do with gum.