EXTOL Technology Blog

We use Eclipse pretty heavily here at EXTOL. In addition to using it as our development environment, we also use a lot of the Eclipse platform and tools in our own product. It really helps our productivity both by making it easier for us to write our code, and by allowing us to reuse 3^rd party code instead of writing it ourselves.

However, when new releases are made available, there is a whole lot of downloading going on. Each of our developers has to download the new Eclipse install, install it, and then download whatever other features they need from the update sites. Our Internet connection is pretty fast, but it still takes a lot of time. Time that would be better spent doing our actual work.

First, we started keeping the installs in a shared folder. That worked for just the installs. One person would download it first, and then the rest of us copy it from the shared folder. But that involves having  someone do the initial download and save first. No specific person is responsible for that, so it isn’t done consistently. Or, sometimes someone does it only to find that someone else already did. It also doesn’t solve the problem of the update sites. After installing, each developer still has to download all their features from them directly.

The next thing we tried was to set up a local copy of the update sites. Eclipse has a mirroring tool that can replicate an update site to another location. That was progressing pretty well, but then we thought about how disjointed it was doing manual downloads for the installs, this mirror for the update sites, and having to manage both of them.

I started looking into becoming an actual Eclipse mirror site. Hard drives are cheap, so storage space wouldn’t be a problem. But, we did not want to actually be a public mirror, since that would defeat the purpose of trying to save bandwidth. Then, after looking around a bit, I found this page. I saw that they accepted requests for internal only mirrors. That was perfect. I signed up, and a short time later we had access.

Then came the setup. They make it easy for you by using rsync to do the task, and they also provide a configuration script to get you started. Since the total size was over 100GB, I had to break it into chunks to download over a few nights. In that script, I would enable a few more pieces each night until it was fully synced. From then on, it would just download the changed content each night.

One problem we ran into, though, was that once the whole site was synced, we noticed it was missing some pieces. After further investigation, and an email to the Eclipse webmaster, we found out that what they were calling the full sync was not actually a true full sync. They cut out some of the subprojects because some of the mirror sites were worried about the space that was needed. The webmaster offered to put us on the true full sync, which was much larger. But, by today’s standards, it is still not all that much data. It is currently about 360GB. My laptop that is a year old has more than enough space to contain that. I don’t know what people were worried about.

In any case, our true full mirror is now up and running, and it saves a huge amount of time for us. Now when a new release is available, the rsync automatically gets it. Our developers then download it from our local mirror in seconds, instead of the minutes it used to take. The update sites are also pointed to our local mirror, so those downloads also complete in a fraction of the time it used to take. Finally, our automated build process can also use the local mirror. That lets us set up those builds to automatically get updates, but still have a fast turnaround time.

Integrating with customers, suppliers, service providers, and applications is important to EXTOL’s daily internal operations, just as it is with your company. And probably just like your company, to manage those operations we initially relied on various disparate manual and/or home-grown semi-automated yet labor-intensive processes that inevitably involved no-longer-necessary and overlapping (if not outright redundant) activities. It wasn’t planned like that − it just sort of happened.

We’ve learned many lessons while “dogfooding” our internal operations. Before using our own product − EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) − to streamline those operations, the first (and most daunting) task was to untangle the jungle of existing processes in an attempt to understand their ultimate goal. Read more…

For those old enough to remember this reference (and for those young enough to know how to Google it), sometimes I feel like the Lorne Greene of EXTOL. Not in his role as the patriarch of Bonanza’s Cartwright clan, but rather as the dog food pitchman.

The series of 1980s TV commercials for Alpo^® dog food featuring Greene closed with the veteran actor claiming that Alpo is so good he feeds it to his own dogs. Hence, the notion of using one’s own product became known as “eating your own dog food”. Or so the legend goes. [A less-tasteful alternative account of the phrase’s origin has the president of a rival pet food corporation eating a can of his company's dog food at every shareholders meeting.]

During my first eight years with EXTOL, I was blissfully unaware of this term. But when I assumed the newly-created role of Special Projects Coordinator four years ago, Tony Baran (our co-founder, President, and CEO) caught me lingering at the coffeemaker and directed me to lead the effort to “eat our own dog food”. I mustered my best blank stare, nodded assuredly, scurried to my cubicle, and Googled that phrase (actually, I had one of my younger officemates show me how to Google it). Only then did Tony’s mandate to “streamline our processes by eliminating error-prone re-keying of transactional and/or persisted data by automating the exchange of information between applications, databases, spreadsheets, and other sources” − I’m paraphrasing here − make sense. And oh yeah, “use EXTOL Business Integrator to do it”. Aha! − we would “eat our own dog food”.

While “eating your own dog food” now has been elevated to acronym status, EYODF is more than a mouthful − I prefer the much more palatable and trendy “dogfooding”. While we don’t make (nor eat, for that matter) dog food at EXTOL, we do produce some seriously efficient business-to-business (B2B) and application-to-application (A2A) integration software that coordinates external partner interactions and internal business activities. And now we’re dogfooding.

In subsequent posts, I’ll share our experiences in using EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) to solve our company’s data integration, manipulation, and migration needs. By telling our story and noting the lessons learned (mostly the hard way − those are the best-remembered lessons), we hope you can use EBI to your best advantage to tackle similar projects in your organization. You have them − just look around.

And please, if you care to share your stories with us, do. Who knows: maybe we’ll send you a can of Alpo.

In addition to the EXTOL Blog and EXTOL Forum destinations, EXTOL also provides another valuable destination from the www.extol.com Web page– EXTOL Customer Zone.

EXTOL Customer Zone can be accessed via link in the top right corner of the EXTOL home page.

Customer Zone is a registered-user destination with information on many customer-related topics. From the Customer Zone page, you can link to information on topics such as:

• EXTOL University Presentations
• Customer Education Webinars
• HIPAA Migration Information
• Portal Migration
• Technical Documentation
• Webcasts
• Whitepapers
• Knowledge Base/Incident Views

Many of the above topics provide access to historical product information as well as currently active topics such as HIPAA Migration Information for EXTOL’s support of the X12 5010 standard.

In addition to product information, you can access information on incidents you have submitted. This information, available via the Knowledge Base/Incident Views link provides a current status of your submitted incidents.

I could further detail all of the content available on Customer Zone, however my goal is not to detail each piece of information available, but rather make you aware of its existence.

New to Customer Zone? No problem. Simply click the Register link on the Customer Zone login page. On the subsequent Webpage, provide all required information and click Register. Within 24 hours, and often much quicker, an account will be created for you and an account notification e-mail sent to the e-mail address provided during registration.

Camels can be stubborn and angry animals if you don’t take care of them. Lucky for you the EXTOL development team has figured out how to tame them. And we even taught them how to work with data! 

Everywhere we look today we can see patterns. They’re in your shirt or tie. You witness traffic patterns (big or small) on your way to work. There are even patterns of integration – Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). These patterns allow you to define standard ways of dealing with messaging systems. Examples of these patterns include content-based routing and wiretapping.  Read more…

Successful EDI implementations must begin with the development and employment of efficient object naming conventions using “best practices”.  This will avoid aggravation and redevelopment at a later time.  “Doing it correctly the first time” is a most-relevant piece of advice.  This is of particular advantage when creating files (tables) to store EDI data (the implementation and deployment of EDI interface / staging files and in support of both inbound and outbound EDI transactions).

Read more…

My favorite part of building software is web development.  I have been involved in building Web Services for EBI, Dashboard development for EEI and EBI, and I’m continuing to work on the web-based administration console for EBI 3x.   A new project has cropped up where I get to do more web development.  I’ve researched new frameworks that are available, and I’ve discovered that web development just got a lot more fun!  Read more…

Tweeting… it seems that everyone is doing it these days.  But, what are we tweeting about?  Is it really useful, serving a valuable purpose or does it just add to the noise of the social arena within the Internet?  Does it really change another’s life or perspective knowing that their friend is “sitting on his back porch”?

Recently, I was in a discussion with a colleague exploring the impact of mobile devices as a means of monitoring system operational health and activity.  We cited the merits of having a smart-phone and being able to check on the status of a back-end system’s activity.  We thought about the content that would most interest system managers: resource status, hung processes and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Read more…

“Not much, what’s SAP’nin’ with you?”  That’s just a little “inside joke” when we’re working with customers who use our SAP interface with EXTOL products.  And yes, EXTOL does have an interface that enables EXTOL products to work with the SAP application.

But, what actually is SAP and why is it necessary to have an EXTOL interface? Read more…

Adobe^® Captivate^® is a rapid authoring tool for creating E-Learning content such as software demonstrations, quizzes, simulations and soft-skills training.  A major advantage to using Adobe Captivate is the Flash Output it creates. Most computers have a flash player; therefore it is viewed with ease. Also, no programming or multimedia skills are necessary to create with Captivate. As the world is becoming more digitally enhanced, E-Learning is becoming more prevalent. EXTOL is beginning to venture into this demonstration and training medium.

Read more…