What Bruce Eckel really taught me.

I remember on the late 90's when I was in college we were going to start learning Java. Java 1.1x was on the market for some time and version 1.2 was very new and we were very excited to learn that version of Java.

The teacher told us we can download an eletronic book from the internet called "Thinking In Java" by Bruce Eckel. This was a great book and was a free download, so everyone on the class got it.

But the first pages of the book has a strange dedication:

Dedication:

To the person who, even now,

is creating the next great computer language

What? The author wrote a huge book about Java on and the first pages of it is promoting for someone else to create another computer language? Instead of saying "Java is great", "you rock by using Java" or "nothing can beat Java", the author is trying to say that there is something better coming on the future. 

That was a huge lesson for me. Java is a great computer language and I think it had evolved over time like no other language. I think that Java is "open enough" to be used freely and that's why it had defeated several other languages on the market. 

But Bruce Eckel taught me on the phrase the basic of computer science. Everything is changing, everything is evolving, when you think that nothing can beat a specific technology, someone else will prove that you are wrong. 

So today, when I see Android, iOS, C#, Java, or something else, I remember Bruce Eckel's book dedication and it the end I have the certainly that "nothing is here to stay" and I need to always keep my eyes open for change.

Blueworks Live and Websphere Business Modeler 2013 Wish list

Dear Santa:

I know you are somewhere in the north pole making toys for the next Christmas, but for this time I want to request your elves to do some development work and try to improve a software that I like a lot which is “IBM Websphere Business Modeler” (WBM) and “BlueWorks Live”. 

WBM is a great “on premise” tool for process diagram, documentation and simulation, while Blueworks is an excellent tool for the cloud.  Both have their good and bad, but it will be great if you can found a way to make them work together. 

These are things that I miss about Websphere Business Modeler (WBM) on Blueworks:

• WBM has two ways of showing a process graphics, swim lines and from “left to right”. On Blueworks you can only see it in swim lines.

• On WBM you have freedom to move the lines (connection lines) of the activities. Blueworks is very hard on that. WBM has “Auto-layout Left to right” and options to shrink and expand the canvas size. (Link: Websphere Business Modeler - Spliting the Line  (June 2013))

• On WBM you can document more things about the roles involved in a process.  Blueworks seems limited there (Link: What is BlueWorks Live missing against Websphere Business Modeler - Part 1 (May 2013))

• On WBM you can document a lot of things about the “Business Item”. Blueworks has a very basic glossary.  (Link: The crime against BPMn that works (May 2013))

• The WBM Reports Template manager for reports may not be the best thing on earth, but it offers a lot of functionality when you want to generate al document process doc/pdf file to share it.  

• In WBM you can play a lot on how you want to process to be displayed. Colors, tags on the upper and bottom parts of the activities.

o   Ex: Show the activities that the Human Resource Manager does in green color.

o   Ex: Create a color for a custom variable on the activity tasks

If you have some hard working elves I will like to request some improvements for Websphere Business Modeler too.

• Update the eclipse version

• Add Rational Team Concert client/support, or maybe real IBM BPM Process Center support.

• Improve the Reports Template manager. Make it easy to use.

• Don’t be afraid to steal some ideas from Blueworks and IBM BPM (Lombardi). Came on, you are Santa, we know it is not it is not stealing :)

o   Blueworks export to PowerPoint looks very cool.

o   Blueworks collaboration rocks

But I know Santa can do miracles, so why don’t make a challenging wish list then.  Let’s make WBM and Blueworks live together.

• Real integration between WBM and Blueworks.  Turn IBM Blueworks into the server repository for WBM just like it was Websphere Compass. (Link: Exporting from Websphere Business Modeler to .bpmn and Importing to BlueWorks Live. (May 2013))

• Turn WBM in the alternative for the customers that don’t want process modeling on the cloud.

• Unify the drawing standard between Blueworks and WBM.  Improve WBM to support a closer BPMn 2.0 standard. (But not too much, the “business item” rules). (link: Websphere Business Modeler: The Business Items "Rules". (June 2013))

Ok, Santa, I’m stopping here. But I want to tell you that you have a real good product called IBM Websphere Business Modeler and has a lot of potential left. Use is as inspiration for Blueworks live, or keep improving it to support the IBM BPM and IBM BPA strategy.

Regards

 
Martín.