Ongoing work on Ozone

[Jason Wagner]

The question of Ozone's future keeps coming up, and the answer is "yes!"  That fact has not been well communicated on these groups, though, so I'll speak to some of what's going on. 

I work for a different organization as the technical lead on one of the largest deployments of OWF 7 out there.  Note that by "different organization", I mean that my management chain doesn't merge with the core Ozone's team until you reach people who spend a lot of time in the White House.  I'm not officially part of the Ozone program, but due to our heavy investment we're partnering with the Ozone program to reignite the development.  So, everything I say is unofficial, not necessarily representative of the program, outsider's viewpoint, #insert <misc_disclaimers>.

Why does work appear to have stopped?

One word:  Funding. 

The team producing Ozone had almost all of their funding shifted to the implementation of one specific instance known as the Applications Mall (AML).  That's why you'll see that term pop up in some of the open source code and repositories.  Attention follows money, so the attention has been on that.

What's is the current version of Ozone?

There are currently many versions that I trace to a few lineages.

OWF 7.0.1:  Latest FOSS releases of OWF.  Several projects have forked from this point.

OWF 7.1-7.14, Marketplace 7.0-7.14:  Limited distribution continuations of the OWF 7.0.1 lineage that came out of the AML effort.  Never officially released as FOSS.  There may be a "7.Final" release at some point, but it's uncertain.

Ozone 8: A second-generation implementation of Ozone to make it more modular.  Roughly, work began in September, 2012 and stopped in late sprint 2013.  In September, 2013, it was officially stopped.

Ozone Platform/Next-Gen Ozone: The active re-implementation of Ozone.  The terms "V2 Architecture" was an early working name.  It was compared to "Ozone 9" in a presentation and that name pops up referring to this effort, but it should not be used.

What's the next version of Ozone?

The Ozone Platform(OZP) is the future and only one with certainty. 

There may be a 7.Final release that combines the AML work and several performance and stability enhancements made on forks of the 7.0.1 code, but that's far from certain.

Why is it being re-written?

To eliminate technical debt and open up the ability to address long-requested features that weren't possible with the existing architecture.

OWF is two things-- a heavy-weight, portal-like "webtop" for displaying widgets and a set of APIs for doing inter-widget communication.  To use IWC, you had to live in the webtop.  The singular webtop had to be all things to all customers-- massively customizable for users with gigantic screens and powerful computers, but also run on low bandwidth and small screens for mobile and users with old technology.

What's different about the Ozone Platform?

The Ozone Platform separates the webtop and inter-widget communication (IWC).  The IWC exists independently and can talk across multiple browser tabs/windows.  The webtop becomes just another application that uses the IWC services and happens to contain other applications.

How are applications different than widgets?

The terminology is still in flux, and the program is working on a guide.  Here's how I use it:

• Application:  Any application that the Ozone Platform knows about.  Usually implies a web application that uses the Ozone APIs and interfaces.
  
• Webtop: A portal-like container of other applications.
  
• Widget: An application designed to be run inside of a webtop.
• Inter-widget Communications (IWC): A virtual network that exists completely within the browser.  It allows applications to share data and events without going back to the server.

Why isn't this effort doomed to the same fate as Ozone 8?

Primarily because development is being done in a true open source fashion.  In the past, previous systems were largely the work of a single contractor team that developed internally and then made the code public.  The customer, contract, and contractor interactions made this a huge bureaucratic obstacle to transparency and accountability.

In addition, previous efforts could be characterized as "distributed requirements gathering, centralized development".  The model is now closer to "distributed development, submit your requirements as code".

Explain "development is being done in a true open source fashion"

All development is being done in the open.  The master repositories for code, design, and tasks are in the Ozone Developers organization on Github.  We're using open source tools and standards whenever possible.

We are already prototyping a distributed development effort.  There are 4 core development teams across multiple government organizations contributing to the development.  This forces more discipline on standards and interfaces as well as decoupled design of the software, which was the source of a lot of technical debt in previous incarnations.

How do I run the prototype?

As of July 2nd, 2014, there's no single prototype for the Ozone Platform.  The various projects on Github can be run individually, and should have notes on how to do so within them.

When will there be a prototype?

Keep in mind that while OZP had seeds that go back to December 2013, the big push really only kicked off in May 2014.

We're aiming for a rough prototype to come together by September.  The goal of this prototype is to get initial feedback from developers on the API changes and from users from the subtle but vast differences in user experience that comes from having multiple windows (e.g. where do you put the launcher?  is a launcher even necessary?).

What pieces can I poke today?

• The ozp-documentation project contains platform-wide documentation and tasks and acts as the best "hub" to explore the platform from.
  
• The ozp-iwc project has the most demoable content.
• The ozp-controller-jvm project is a backend that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
• The ozp-controller-node project is supported by a partner organization (not a core team) that aims for extreme scalability.
• The aml-center project is potentially the next generation of Marketplace.  It will likely be rebranded away from AML to avoid confusion.

What about project X in the ozone-developers organization?

There's dead code in the project list right now.  Anything prefixed with "owf8" is dead.  The "owf7-refactor" repo is a community contribution of performance enhancements for OWF 7 that may be released as part of 7.Final.  Otherwise, look at the Readme and harass folks if one doesn't exist.

But what about...?

Everything is still in flux, and the core team is still getting it's rhythm going.  More info will follow

How can I contribute?

It's open source. Pick a task, fork the repo, implement it, and send us a pull request. 

For more formal arrangements, contact the Applications Mall PMO.

--
Jason Wagner

jason....@gsmconsulting.net

[Thom DeCarlo]

Jason,

Thanks for the update! I've been using and promoting OWF locally, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone benefit from the efforts expended on the framework.

-Thom

[Doug Hodson]

Jason,

I second the update, thanks.  I just became familiar with Ozone today, and after poking around a bit, became concerned that it was looking at a dead project... but your update explains situation well.

Doug

[Aall Spemmer]

Can you explain a few things about the new intended architecture?

1. What is the purpose of the controller projects and how do they relate to the webtops?

2. Is the hub-ui project intended to be the launcher from which users launch their application/webtops?

3.  How will authentication work in OZP? I ran the the sample webtops and there was no login or authentication.  In OWF you log into the one webtop to access your widgets.

4. Do you have any other documentation or presentations that you can share that would explain the vision for OZP and the intended architecture?

5. You mentioned contacting the "Applications Mall PMO" for more formal contribution arrangements.  Do you have contact information?

[Jason Wagner]

My apologies for the slow reply.  Replying inline...

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Aall Spemmer <sssm...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you explain a few things about the new intended architecture?

1. What is the purpose of the controller projects and how do they relate to the webtops?

The controllers are the server-side code that supports the Ozone Platform.  Since the value of Ozone is almost entirely browser-side, we intentionally ignored the backend for the initial push in favor of simply using static data for demos and testing.

This avoided the classic temptation of mirroring the same object model on the front and back end.  For example, it turns out that the backend doesn't need to know about "dashboards", the key/value storage used by the IWC data.api is sufficient.  These will simplifications make the backend easier to implement, perform faster, and scale better.

 

2. Is the hub-ui project intended to be the launcher from which users launch their application/webtops?

It's an entry point into the system.  The webtop has its own launcher, but with OZP supporting applications that run outside of the webtop, there needs to be an entry point for users to start from.  Marketplace is one place.  The HUD explores a different way to enter the ecosystem of OZP apps.

 

3.  How will authentication work in OZP? I ran the the sample webtops and there was no login or authentication.  In OWF you log into the one webtop to access your widgets.

It'll be there.  Since we're running with no backend, all operations are implicitly for the exampleUser.  Authorization and authentication will be supported just as it was in previous versions.

 

4. Do you have any other documentation or presentations that you can share that would explain the vision for OZP and the intended architecture?

Yes, and some of them might even be accurate.  The documentation is being formalized and will be placed on the github site, "real soon now".

Short, 50k foot, non-authoritative, not-a-promise overview of what an OZP deployer should expect:

- Deploy a single backend supporting the entire Ozone Platform.  There will be a JVM option and the database will likely favor a no-SQL database like MongoDB.

- One-time migration script from old to the new.

- Pick and choose from a suite of applications:  Webtop, Center, HUD, and possibly others.

- An adapter that will wrap widgets using OWF 7 interfaces that allows them to use the new OZP IWC.  There will be limitations.  It won't allow OWF 7 widgets and OZP applications to talk to each other, for example.

 

5. You mentioned contacting the "Applications Mall PMO" for more formal contribution arrangements.  Do you have contact information?

On Wednesday, July 2, 2014 8:16:44 AM UTC-4, Jason Wagner wrote:

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Jason Wagner

jason....@gsmconsulting.net

[andyst...@gmail.com]

Mark,

One is being worked on right now that does that.  We're still plugging away at it, but it will be part of the first release of OZP, which is slated for spring 2015.

On Tuesday, November 11, 2014 11:47:09 AM UTC-5, Mark Conover wrote:

How far away is OWF from leasing an inter-widget communication (IWC) that works across multiple browser windows and tabs?

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Jason Wagner

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