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Newsletter Archive - July 2009

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
2. Apama® Fundamentals Training Is Now Available, by Melissa Spurr
3. Introducing the course Using Actional® to Monitor and Manage Sonic®, by Arjun Sengupta
4. Updated course: Managing Operational Visibility with Actional® V2.0, by Elaine Rosenberg
5. FUSE™ goes green with travel-less virtual training offering, by Adrian Trenaman
6. Introducing the completely revised and expanded SonicMQ® administration course, by Peter Tran
7. Educational Videos on OpenEdge® Architect Now Available, by John Sadd
8. Progress training receives more awards, by Bryan Davis

Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services

As we enter the summer months, Progress Knowledge Services extends a real treat to you, our valued customers. We have been busy creating a bevy of key new courses, updating important existing courses, and even developing new delivery and content types, and we have been doing this in support of products across our portfolio. There’s something for nearly all of you in our new summer offerings.

We begin with an article by Melissa Spurr, Senior Course Developer, who describes a new three-day Instructor-Led Training (ILT) course called Apama® Fundamentals. The course leads attendees through the building of a simple Capital Markets application, all the while showing you the power and range of the Apama product. Read Melissa’s summary and sign up for Apama Fundamentals.

Arjun Sangupta, Senior Instruction Designer at Progress Software India, then takes you through a new course, Using Actional® to Monitor and Manage Sonic®, that shows you how Actional can be used to govern a Sonic SOA infrastructure. This course is available as both Web-based training (WBT) and ILT and is especially valuable for administrators responsible for managing a Sonic deployment. See Arjun’s article if you are interested in exploring how Actional can help you more fully exploit your Sonic purchase.

Next you will find a description by Elaine Rosenberg, Principal Course Developer, about a major revision of the Monitoring Operational Visibility with Actional course. Targeting administrators and architects who work with the Actional Management Server product, the course is invaluable in helping you to monitor most effectively the service activity of your SOA.

Adrian Trenaman, a Distinguished Consultant at our Open Source Center of Competence in Dublin, introduces you to a new form of course delivery, travel-less and WebEx-based, used principally for our FUSE™ courseware. See all the details in Adrian’s article.

Peter Tran, Principal Course Developer, then tells you about a hugely revised and expanded course, SonicMQ® Administration. Peter thoroughly describes by means of tables the revised lessons and the new ones. SonicMQ administrators, don’t miss this one!

John Sadd, Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist, speaks to you about some new video-based tutorials developed specifically for the OpenEdge® Architect. John describes the two collections, Getting Started with OEA and Using OEA, into which the videos are organized, and he tells you how you can use these videos with other supporting IP to make you more agile with the OpenEdge Architect.

Finally, Bryan Davis, Principal Editor and an immense contributor to the overall quality of all of our IP, informs you of yet another round of awards granted to Progress Education products. Over the past seven years, Knowledge Services has garnered 42 awards from local and international competitions in recognition of the high quality of our courseware portfolio. We are proud of these accomplishments and hope you see them as a seal of approval on our product quality.

Happy reading and enjoy a wonderful summer.

          - Don Fournier

Apama® Fundamentals Training Is Now Available

By Melissa Spurr

The Progress Apama division offers a new instructor-led Apama® Fundamentals training course: a three-day workshop centered around building a simple Capital Markets application with the Apama v4 product. While designed primarily for an audience of software developers who are new to the Apama product, topics covered on the first day also pertain to business users who have little or no programming experience.

The Apama Fundamentals course takes an interactive approach to learning – the instructor provides an overview of Apama concepts and tools through the use of slide presentations and live demos, intermixed with hands-on lab exercises that let you put the concepts you learn into action as you build a working sample application.

Here is a summary of the topics covered during the Apama Fundamentals workshop:

Day 1

After a brief introduction to the Apama product and its event-processing capabilities, you get started by setting up your Apama (Eclipse-based) development environment. You then use a graphical tool called the Event Modeler to build a rules-based Apama scenario program. This simple scenario program listens to stock market information and processes orders to buy or sell stock options, based on the set of rules that you created. Next, you learn how to update the sample application's user interface (called a dashboard), so that users of your application can dynamically set parameters for your buy/sell stock option orders, such as how many stock options to sell and at what price. The dashboard also displays the status of the stock orders as they are processed.  The first day concludes when you learn how to deploy your Apama sample application via a Web browser as a Java™ Web Start application.

Day 2

The second day of the course focuses on learning the syntax of the Apama event processing language – MonitorScript.  You write a simple MonitorScript program that tracks your position - how many stock options you currently have – and that updates your position as your stock orders are processed.  Learn how to build a SmartBlock™ – a packaged module of MonitorScript code that you easily insert and parameterize in the Apama scenario program you created the previous day.

Day 3

During the third day of the workshop, you learn how Progress Apama Integration Adapter Framework (IAF) provides bi-directional connectivity to different event sources, messaging infrastructures, and databases. The sample application uses a file adapter to access a simulated event stream from a file.

You then configure the mapping of your sample application’s adapter so that the Apama engine can read event data (messages) from the input file and write event data to an output file. The Apama Fundamentals training concludes with a review of what you learned over the course of the workshop, and where to go for more information about particular topics.

The Apama Fundamentals instructor-led training course is delivered by Progress Apama professional services. Contact the Progress Apama consulting services manager in your area to schedule a training session.

Additional Apama Courses Coming Soon

We are currently developing training materials that cover advanced MonitorScript development topics such as logging, debugging, optimizing, and testing MonitorScript applications, and identifying and implementing  MonitorScript patterns. We’ll be releasing more information on these new materials as soon as they are available.

Melissa Spurr is Senior Course Developer with Progress Software

Introducing the course Using Actional® to Monitor and Manage Sonic®

By Arjun Sengupta

Managing a complex SOA infrastructure is a challenge. When a process fails to meet agreed-upon service levels, the source of the fault is often difficult to locate within a large distributed system. Operation Teams for the Sonic® ESB and SonicMQ® products need a way to detect these problems, discover their underlying causes, assess their impact, and resolve them. But how?

The Actional product has the answer. Progress Actional is a SOA management product that empowers administrators, helping them analyze problems in their SOA and make decisions. The Actional product integrates with a Sonic deployment and provides end-to-end visibility across the SOA infrastructure. It detects service-level violations and traces dependencies among services and components, displaying them visually and allowing administrators to take countermeasures.

The new course Using Actional to Monitor and Manage Sonic demonstrates how the Actional product can be used to oversee a Sonic SOA infrastructure. Compatible with the Sonic 7.6 and Actional 8.0 products, it provides an overview of Sonic and Actional architectures and how the Actional product reads and displays the different pieces of a Sonic deployment. The course shows how to install Actional components in target locations and how Sonic components can be configured to work with the Actional product. It also covers some basic monitoring tasks such as viewing service traffic in a Sonic deployment, detecting SLA violations, auditing steps in an ESB process and more.

The lessons in this course include:

Using Actional to Monitor and Manage Sonic is for administrators responsible for managing a Sonic deployment. The course is available as Web-based Training in the Progress eLearning Community at https://wbt.progress.com. It will be released as a one-day Instructor-led Training course in late July.

Arjun Sengupta is a Senior Instructional Designer with Progress Software

Updated course: Managing Operational Visibility with Actional ® V2.0

By Elaine Rosenberg

Designed for developers, administrators and architects who will be working with the Actional Management Server, this course teaches you how to monitor the service activity of your SOA. You will also learn how to create run-time policies that map to Service-level Agreements (SLA), all of which help administrators and stake-holders of the enterprise SOA achieve success in deploying their business use cases. You will also learn how to troubleshoot problems that may arise with services in your SOA and how you can extend the functionality of Actional using plug-ins.

Summary of updates

This course has been updated to support the following Actional products:

• Progress^® Actional^® Enterprise 8.0
• Progress^® Actional^® Application Development 8.0
• The content for this course has been updated to reflect the latest user interface for the Administration Console for the Actional Management Server. The changes to the interface include:
• Timeline view that is standardized across all pages which includes timeline navigation with granularity of a minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter
• New UI for Path Explorer view
• In addition, there is new content in this course that teaches you how to use application logging to capture and evaluate log4j messages.

Course overview

In this course you will see numerous demonstrations for using Actional to perform key configuration and monitoring tasks. In addition, the course involves many hands-on exercises (Try Its) that you perform in your live version of Actional.

The lessons of this course include:

Course delivery formats

This course is available as three days of Instructor-led Training. For the self-paced learner, it is also available in the Progress eLearning Community at: http://wbt.progress.com.

Elaine Rosenberg is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software

FUSE™ goes green with travel-less virtual training offering

By Adrian Trenaman

FUSE training courses are now available via online delivery in a virtual classroom setting. This new format allows developers and architects to attend and experience a full-on training session without having to incur the costs of travel and hotel expenses.

Instead, attendees sign in online to a live WebEx session, where they can follow theory, see live-demos, and ask questions, all with a live instructor. Each tutorial session is followed by an exercise session where students get to try out what they've learned on their own machines. Throughout the day, a FUSE engineer is always available on a dedicated IRC channel to answer questions and help out with problems.

All training materials – from slideware to sample code and exercises – are made available electronically via the Progress eLearning Community (PEC), with paper copies distributed to attendees in the week after the course.

The first course to go online – FUSE ESB 4 and Camel for Developers – has been very popular, with excellent reviews from attendees across Europe and the US. Students found that that online experience was every bit (if not more so) compelling as the traditional classroom.

Additionally, attendees found that they were more likely to communicate and share problems and solutions over the IRC than they would if working in the same room.

Consultants who have delivered training in the virtual classroom are pleased with the new approach as it forces them to be clear, concise and to the point because they have to keep the material engaging and relevant.

Although this new format lets us reach out to even more FUSE users than before, we will, of course, always support customers who want customized, in-house training sessions and workshops.

For more information on FUSE virtual training courses, please visit: http://fusesource.com/enterprise-support/virtual-training/

Adrian Trenaman is a Distinguished Consultant with Progress Software

Introducing the completely revised and expanded SonicMQ® administration course

By Peter Tran

SonicMQ is Progress Software’s enterprise messaging middleware product based on the JMS (Java Message Service) specification. It is used to build large distributed messaging systems, enabling organizations to exchange mission-critical information; for example, purchase orders, sales invoices, stock trades, market updates, and confidential messages.

Progress Education is pleased to announce the release of a completely revised and expanded course, Progress SonicMQ System Administration, based on the SonicMQ V7.6 product. It teaches system administrators how to secure, configure, and manage SonicMQ-based messaging systems.

What the course offers

This course consists of eleven lessons and features practical examples, step-by-step demonstrations, task-based procedures, proven best practices, and hands-on exercises designed to help you master the foundational tools and techniques of SonicMQ administration.

Completely revised lessons

Seven of the lessons have been completely revised to include more in-depth instructions, value-added best practices, and hands-on exercises:

Newly added lessons

In addition, four of the lessons are completely new, three dedicated to security and one covering managing and monitoring SonicMQ components:

With three lessons dedicated to security, the course presents a layered defensive approach called defense in depth. In this approach, you build layers of security into your system; thus, if one layer is breached, the other layers can still protect the system. The end result is an effective bulwark against the potential third-party tampering, intrusions, and attacks on your messaging systems.

Whether you are new to SonicMQ administration and need to get up to speed on deploying and managing messaging systems, or would like to refresh and enhance your skills and learn about the new features available in the SonicMQ V7.6 product, you will find this completely revised and expanded Progress SonicMQ System Administration course valuable.

Course delivery formats

This course is available as online learning with a subscription to the Progress eLearning Community. It is also available as four-day Instructor-led Training. You may also request an instructor-led training class taught by a Progress Sonic consultant at your own location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.

Peter Tran is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software

Educational Videos on OpenEdge® Architect Now Available

By John Sadd

The first entries in an ongoing series of brief recorded tutorial videos on OpenEdge Architect are now available on the Progress Communities website. The videos can be accessed via the OpenEdge product area of the Progress Communities.

Architect is the complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for OpenEdge application development first introduced in OpenEdge Release 10.1. Using Architect, you can migrate and maintain existing applications, including applications first developed in OpenEdge Studio; create and maintain new ABL applications; test and debug your application code; and create new user interface forms using the OpenEdge GUI for .NET support and Architect’s Visual Designer tool. Architect is built on the industry-standard Eclipse platform, and so includes a host of features and options that will reward your investment in learning the ins and outs of this comprehensive toolset. The videos are designed to help you with the first steps in that self-education process.

The videos are organized into two groups. The Getting Started collection includes five sessions to get you started with OpenEdge Architect if you haven’t used the product before. Topics include:

• Setting up your first Architect workspace and project
• Defining workspace database connections
• Setting properties for your project
• Building and running your project
• An introduction to the Architect ABL Editor.

This first set of five sessions will get you up and running so that you can bring your own application code into Architect and begin to understand how to organize it into projects, how to apply a few of the most important settings to specify your preferences and application environment requirements, and how to start to take advantage of the many advanced features that Architect provides in the ABL code editor.

The second group, called the Using Architect Collection, currently contains more than a dozen sessions in the following topic areas:

• Using and customizing perspectives and views
• Migrating and maintaining procedures built in OpenEdge Studio tools such as the AppBuilder™
• Using the Architect ABL Editor
• Using the Architect ABL Debugger
• General interest topics such as the Quick Access feature

Each video is brief – typically around seven minutes – and introduces a very focused topic, so that you can learn enough to try out what you’ve seen with your own application code. The videos don’t constitute a tutorial as such, so you can view them in any order that’s appropriate to you, depending on what you already know about using Architect. And there’s no larger exercise or sample code base that you have to download and work with. Once you have seen what a video covers, you can take that knowledge back to apply it to your own application.

The videos are complementary to other materials you can access through the Evaluation Center link on the same OpenEdge product page, including the OpenEdge Tour, a series of high-level video presentations introducing the major feature areas of the OpenEdge 10 product, including Architect; and the Architect Tutorial, a hands-on step-by-step tour of the Architect development environment using a sample application.

Over time we’ll be adding more videos and other related materials to this area on Progress Communities, to drill down in more detail into the topics introduced in some of this first series of sessions; to explore additional topics; and to cover new product features in OpenEdge 10.2B and additional future releases.

John Sadd is a Progress Engineering Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist with Progress Software

Progress training receives more awards

By Bryan Davis

Progress Software’s trophy case became that much more crowded recently with the announcement of the Society of Technical Communication’s International Competitions results.

As is with the STC-Boston competitions, awards are given at the International stage in three levels: Distinguished (the highest), Excellence, and Merit.

This year, Progress received three awards in the International competitions:

Online Communications Competition

• Managing Operational Visibility with Actional – Excellence
• Introduction to the Progress Sonic Workbench Development Environment – Excellence

Technical Publications Competition

• Advanced Progress SonicMQ System Administration – Merit

“These latest awards are particularly satisfying because they were judged against entries from around the world,” said Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier. “With every award we receive, Progress training is becoming more and more synonymous with excellence.”

Since first entering the competitions in 2002, Progress has now won a total of 42 awards and three Best Of Show awards between the local and international competitions.

The STC organization is dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication and is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 14,000+ members include technical writers, editors, graphic designers, multimedia artists, Web and intranet page information designers, translators and others whose work involves making technical information understandable and available to those who need it.

All International award winners were displayed at the 2009 STC Technical Communication Summit, in Atlanta, Georgia, US, in May.

Bryan Davis is the Principal Editor for Knowledge Services at Progress Software

Curriculum At-a-Glance

Progress, Actional, Apama, AppBuilder, AppServer, DataXtend, FUSE, WebClient, Progress Dynamics, SmartObject, OpenEdge, Sonic, SonicMQ, Sonic ESB, Sonic Orchestration Server, ProDataSets, and WebSpeed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one it its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright © 2009 Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

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