Romulus

Wapiti presented at VI OWASP Spain Chapter Meeting

David del Pozo González — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:23:43 GMT

Last Friday Informática Gesfor made a presentation of Wapiti in the VI OWASP Spain Chapter Meeting which took place in Barcelona. OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is one of the most important organizations in the field of security. David del Pozo González (Informatica Gesfor), as developer of Wapiti, made a presentation about Wapiti and Romulus Project. He talked about Romulus Project which has the important goal of securize the web applications built with Roma Metaframework, and it has been acomplished in a great part thanks to Wapiti. The presentation also showed the features of Wapiti, how it works, the way to extend it and a practice case of use. But the most important is that we offered to the OWASP community the opportunity of knowing Wapiti and the participation in its evolution and event attendees had a good impression of Wapiti.

The event was attended among others by Richard Stallman who presented the "Free Software, Your Freedom"; Fabio Cerullo who presented "OWASP: The most important risk in web applications 2010"; David del Pozo González who presented "Wapiti: Security for web developers in Romulus Project"; and Christian Martorella who presented "2010 y yet using brute force: Webslayer". Vicente Aguilera Díaz, as president of the OWASP Spanish Chapter, made the introduction and close of the event.

Roma Workshop in Madrid

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:23:47 GMT

Date: 18th of February 2010, 15.30 h - 19:00h

Place: Escuela de Ingeniería de Telecomunicación (Auditorio, Building C), UPM, Madrid

Registration: http://www.amiando.com/romaworkshop

Software, documents and other stuff, ready for download!

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:56:24 GMT

Today, we are excited to announce that a new section of downloads is available. In this section, users can find all the software developed within the project as well as public documents and dissemination material of Romulus.

From the software page, users can download different products developed within Romulus:

Roma Framework and IDE4Romulus allow developers to increase the productivity of the web software development, focused on Java, based on a domain driven design, MDA techniques and a metaframework.
MyCocktail and DERI Pipes improve the software productivity by using mashup oriented development.
Wapiti and ATP4Romulus help to enhance the quality of software development.

Also, all the public documents of the project can be downloaded from the documents section. These documents contain information and the results of the research realized within the project. This section is organized by the different topics of the project:

Publications, presentations and other dissemination material of Romulus are also available to be downloaded from this section.

We encourage you to enjoy with this new download section.

New version (2.2.1) of Wapiti

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:24:31 GMT

A new version (2.2.1) of Wapiti is now available for download. In this release, identified bugs have been fixed and some improvements have been performed. The most important of them are:

Nikto attack: This new attack checks the security of the page by using the Nikto database.
Internationalization: Now, Wapiti is available in three languages: English, French and Spanish.

Wapiti is a black-box testing tool that allows you to audit the security of your web applications. It does not study the source code of the application, it scans the web pages of the deployed web applications, looking for scripts and forms where it can inject data. Wapiti acts like a fuzzer, injecting payloads to see if a script is vulnerable.

Download the last version of Wapiti

Released TevereFlow, the first workflow engine with a Web Editor

Luca Garulli — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:34:08 GMT

Starting from December 22nd 2009 is available the new version of TevereFlow.

Tevere Flow is a light-weight Workflow engine built using the Java® technology. Just download it and create your process using the Web interface. You can use Tevere as embedded or as external engine by using the provided Web Services API.

Tevere was built using Roma Framework under the Romulus consortium an it's currently used in several production systems.

Main features:

Open Source Apache 2.0 license
Web User Interface using the Ajax technology
Stand-alone application: just download and start it
Fully Transactional supporting any RDBMS or db4o ODBMS
Set of built-in commands available (email, web service invocation, etc.)
Auto-resume of failure activities
User and profile management
Activities can be written in Java or using any supported scripting language such as Javascript and Ruby
Integration via Java APIs or WebService

New brochure about Wapiti

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:00:44 GMT

A new brochure about Wapiti Security Testing Tool is now available. Gesfor has just launched this brochure that contains information about this open source project for marketing purposes. Wapiti allows to audit the security of web applications and detect potencial vulnerabilities with a black box approach (launching attacks in the same way as a real attacker would do). Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has recognized the usefulness of this tool including Wapiti as Alpha OWASP Project and distributing Wapiti in the OWASP Live CD Project .

Brochure of Wapiti

"Semantic Powered Development tools" document is now released

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:53:19 GMT

In the last months our work about Semantic aspects has been focused on the development of the methodology called Linked Data Driven Software Development (LD2SD).It is a light-weight Semantic Web methodology to turn software artefacts such as data from version control systems, bug tracking tools and source code into linked data. Once available as linked data, the related information from different sources is made explicit, allowing for a uniform query and integration.

The purpose of this research has been to carry out semi-automated annotation of resources and issues related to the development process. The goal is to provide added value regarding the software development process in order to make
it more effective and efficient. The main input data sources (Software artefacts) that are managed are bug reports (via JIRA),
contributions and dependencies (via Subversion), the source code (in Java), developer information and other related artefacts.

We have just released the results of our work in the document "Semantic Powered Development tools". It contains all the information related to the LD2SD that has been developed within the project.

European Commision Presidents application demo

David del Pozo González — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:54:21 GMT

The European Commision Presidents application is a demonstration of what is possible to do with Roma Metaframework and the new version of Janus Wizard. This wizard generates automatically the code necessary (with the information extracted from a domain POJO) to create a Rich Client Application communicated with the server side though REST Services or DWR.

An important functionality, that also is generated automatically, is a faceted search thanks to the integration of Exhibit library. This search is performed completely in the client side and it allows users to search through many criteria. Besides the library provides an excellent rendering extensions, Janus automatically configures it and if the POJO contains dates, they will be rendered in a timeline, and if the POJO has addresses, in a Google Maps component.

From the point of view of the visual aspect, the application uses YAML which is a powerful (X)HTML/CSS Framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts, with it, the developer can change the layouts of the pages from the initial configuration made by Janus. But Janus has also thought in the users with no knowledge of HTML and CSS and provides the JQuery UI ThemeRoller tool, which allows users to change on the fly the visual aspect of the application in a graphical way and then you can download the new theme and put it in the application easily.

The Romulus developer team encourage you to see the European Commision Presidents application and to download the Roma MetaFramework in order to you can try the benefits of develop with Roma Framework & Janus Wizard.

Eclipse Plugin version 1.4.1 released

Emanuele Barrano — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:34:03 GMT

Eclipse Plugin 1.4.1 released

New Features

Roma <Meta> Framework v.2.0.2 supported
ATP4Romulus Integration

EclipsePlugin-1.4.1-linux.jar

EclipsePlugin-1.4.1-win32.jar

Released MyCocktail Module and a new version of Service Registry Module

David del Pozo González — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:36:51 GMT

MyCocktail and Roma Metaframework are more integrated than ever. MyCocktail has been packed as Roma Module and now can be installed in Roma applications in order to consume the REST services published in them through the Roma Service Registry module. Once a REST service is registered, automatically is imported in MyCocktail and its data will be available to build mashups.

The Registry Module has been improved and now can register REST Services, the module also produces a subset of WADL which defines the service in machine-readable format. This WADL format can be read from MyCocktail to import new services. MyCocktail now have two different distributions, the standalone version and the Roma module version. The Roma module version of MyCocktail is available in Romulus repositories and can be installed using the Roma Wizard.

NetbeasPlugin 1.1 beta released

Emanuele Barrano — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:44:21 GMT

NetbeansPlugin 1.1 beta has been released

New Features:

Generate Default Persistence
Generate Default I18N Entries
Extension-By-Composition Hierarchy View
- Class Refactoring Support
- Field Refactoring Support
- Method Refactoring Support

Netbeans Plugin 1.0 beta released

Marco Castaldi — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:58:42 GMT

NetbeansPlugin 1.0 beta has been released

Roma framework developement plugin is now available for netbeans 6.5.1 ide.

Features already implemented:

- Roma projects Generation
- Add Modules on Roma Projects
- Multi-editor tab for Roma Project Classes

Eclipse Plugin version 1.3.2 released

Marco Castaldi — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:54:02 GMT

New features:

Refactoring Support:

• if a rename, of a domain class, is performed, it will perform the renaming of the CRUD classes associated with domain classes.

Default Class Persistence Generator:

• new command able to generate default entries on the file package.jdo that contains a default persistence description of the domain class on which the command is applied.

Defauls I18N Entries Generator:

• new command able to generate default entries on the I18N files in order to automatic internationalizate fields and methods of the domain class on which the command is applied.

Romulus in the JITEL conference

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:11:22 GMT

We are glad to notice that two articles about our research have been accepted to be presented and published in the next JITEL (Symposium on Telematics Engineering, 8th edition).
This conference will take place in Cartagena (Spain) from 15 to 17 September 2009 where new researches and advances will be presented.
The first article that we are going to present has been written by Pablo Martín, Guillermo Hernández, Carlos Ángel Iglesias, Luca Garulli and Giordano Maestro. It is about Janus, the new View Generator of Roma Framework that allows user to create new views based on templates.
The other article is focused on Semantic description of Web applications through microservices explaining our research about this topic. It explains the research realized by José Fernández-Villamor, Mercedes Garijo Ayestarán and Carlos Ángel Iglesias.

For more details, visit the official page of the Symposium (Spanish)
JITEL (Symposium on Telematics Engineering, 8th edition)

Romulus Demonstration at Internet of Services Collaboration Meeting

David del Pozo González — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:19:45 GMT

Last week Romulus was present at Internet of Services Collaboration Meeting. The project was presenteat in serveral Collaboration working groups of this meeting (Service Engineering and Data Management) and also during the first day of the meeting, a Romulus Demonstration was shown to the participants. This demo showed how to create a Roma Application in a few minutes and then how to extend it with REST services in order to make mashups with MyCocktail tool. The demo has been uploaded to YouTube and it is accessible through the following link.

Eclipse Plugin version 1.3.1 released

Marco Castaldi — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:43:45 GMT

The Eclipse 1.3.1 comprehends:
- Refactor Support: it provides the refactoring of linked resources in a Roma projects

- class rename

renaming of associated files in the project and i18n files

- field rename

renaming of fields present on annotations, xml files, i18n files

- method rename

renaming of methods present on annotations, xml files, i18n files

- ATP4Romulus integration

- generate tests, previous configuration

- clean tests

- run tests

- i18n tab included in the multi-editor

- insert, edit, delete i18n fields

Presentation of Romulus in the INFODAY CHALLENGE 1

Carlos A. Iglesias — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:52:15 GMT

This thurdsay, 4th June, Romulus will be presented in the INFODAY Challenge 2 at the E.T.S.I. Telecomucniación (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Spain. The INFODAY ICT Challenge 1 is organised by CDTI, the Spanish NCP.

Technical meeting in Madrid / Segovia (Spain)

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:12:32 GMT

On 22^th , 23^rdand 24^th of April took place a technical meeting in Spain. This meeting was celebrated in two places. On 22^th and 24^th, all the partners met in the UPM University (Madrid) and on 23^rd in Segovia, a historical town close to Madrid declared Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO.

In this meeting, some important topics about the Romulus project were discussed. The meeting was divided in different bilateral sessions between the related partners upon the subject. One of the principal topics was Janiculum, the new implementation of the View Aspect of Roma Framework based on JSPs that allows a new powerful way to customize user interfaces. Also, the integration between the different technologies of the project as Roma with Liferay and the other developed tools was a hot spot. The current status of the demonstrators development was evaluated and the next steps were defined to integrate the different parts and technologies.

At the end of the meeting, an action list was defined in order to accomplish the objectives of the project in the next months.

romulus in lankibide

Innovacion Grupo Gesfor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:13:01 GMT

On April 28, 2009 has been a presentation of the "Contenidos a la Carta" project in Bilbao, within LANKIBIDE Day, a Basque Technology Forum to promote cooperation between SMEs, and that comes with the support of the Program Bultzatu de la Diputación Foral de Bizkaia. Its main objective is to create a Basque Technological Forum, whose mission is to promote new practices of collaboration and interoperability among SMEs, in order to provide an environment of cooperation among organizations, to promote innovation and development of Bizkaia, by promoting a cohesive and sustainable development.

The conference was organized by ESI-Tecnalia under the Project LANKIBIDE, and aims to publicize the progress of research on the practices of collaboration and interoperability for SMEs.

The presentation can be downloaded here

New release of Wapiti

David del Pozo González — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:55:22 GMT

The version 2.1.0 of Wapiti has been released and is avaliable from Wapiti Web Site. The new main features are:

Web pages scanner is faster with the httplib2 library.
Blind SQL Injections detection was implemented.
Addition of more patterns for detecting file handling vulnerabilities in PHP.

On the other hand, we are glad to announce that Wapiti reached 20,000 downloads from SourceForge a few days ago. This encourages us to further improve the application. Thank you everyone for downloading Wapiti.

Romulus on Makabyte, the biggest Italian Java Community

Marco Castaldi — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:06:51 GMT

Mokabyte (www.mokabyte.it) is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, free online and real books, tutorials, articles and more. MokaByte has become the largest independent Java community in Italy, with more than 30.000 subscribers to the monthly newsletter.

Mokabyte started supporting the Romulus project since the beginning, following the project development and the produced results: the good results obtained by the first release of the Romulus components increased the Mokabyte's interests in the Romulus topics, as shown by the interview to Luca Garulli, CTO of Asset Data and Responsible of the Technical Board of Romulus.

In the next months Mokabyte will dedicate different articles to Romulus, especially on the Semantic Web and Mashup Integration topics.

Stay tuned.

Marco Castaldi, PhD

Wapiti in OWASP Live CD

David del Pozo González — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:28:52 GMT

Wapiti (web application vulnerability scanner co-developed within Romulus) was recently integrated in the OWASP Live CD Project. It is an OWASP project which belongs to the "Release Quality Projects" category, the greatest one for an OWASP project.

This project collects some of the best open source security projects in a single environment. It is a excelent tool for Web developers, testers and security professionals since they have access to a full security testing suite. The project allows users to test various security issues in web applications and web sites, to access to security documentation and to enhance users web application security knowledge with an interactive learning environment (WebGoat). You can download OWASP Live CD in two formats, ISO image and VMware image.

Technical Meeting in Rome

David del Pozo González — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:55:12 GMT

On 22^th and 23^th of January took place the Romulus meeting in the city of Rome. It was very productive, all partners presented the achievements in the first year in each WP (work package) and the work for the second year of the project. This post is a summarize of the meeting package by package.

For WP1 (Project Management). GESFOR presented the work made in administrative management. With respect to quality management, UPM will release a new version of the Quality Plan for improving the quality.

In WP2 (Requirements and Evaluation), IMOLA presented the results of the evaluations and proposed that partners extend the number of tests and their coverage, mainly for Java developments.

Regarding with WP3 (ROMA Metaframework), Asset Data showed last development within ROMULUS project, the main ones are: plugin architecture, logging aspect, Tevere workflow, Janiculus (the new View Aspect) and Jena Semantic Aspect.

For WP4 (Romulus Data and Services Mashup for Enterprise Integration), each partner involved in this part presented their researches: DERI and UPM in Data level Mashups, LIFERAY and GESFOR in Portal Mashups, GESFOR and DERI in Integration Web Services Mashups and IMOLA and ICI in Integration Enterprise Mashups.

With respecting to WP5 (Rich Client Web Technologies, Security and Reliability), Liferay presented the scripting technologies and the integration of scripting languages in portlets and the communications between them. ICI presented several JavaScript libraries to use in the development of the client side of the applications. GESFOR showed Wapiti, the security auditor application for Romulus applications and its plans for 2009, the development of Segovia which will include the representation of security reports, separating this part from the security tool. With respecting to reliability, UPM explained ATP4Romulus and the work for this year. It is suggested to include this application in Segovia, as well as a providing feedback about the current advance in the fulfilment of DoW metrics.

In the WP6 (Vertical Demonstrators) GESFOR presented Musiteca and Scrooge demonstrators and Asset Data presented Cornelius. It is suggested to extend Cornelius in order to integrate it with Data Mashup to show statistics, Tevere workflow and Liferay.

Regarding with WP7 (Dissemination and Exploitation), the general agreement is to continue organizing workshop or participating in it for the dissemination of Romulus in order to catch users to the developers community.

In conclusion, the partners should schedule the work packages in which they are the leaders and identify the current status and the work for the second year according with the presentations made by all the partners in this meeting.

New Romulus Release!

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:02:03 GMT

During the last year, we have been studying different methods and creating new tools to improve the productivity and reliability of web software development using Java technologies. Finally, today we announce the first release of the Romulus' software that includes the following projects:

Roma Framework, a meta framework that allows you to develop enterprise level Java applications in a easy way, focusing on the domain.
ATP4Romulus, a novel open-source tool for the automatic and semi-automatic test case generation for the Romulus Framework.
IDE4Romulus, a plug-in to integrate Roma Framework with Eclipse. It allows creating new Roma projects, adding new modules aspects into a project, CRUD auto-generation...
Mashup Builder, a web application that facilitates the Mashups creation. It is able to integrate 8 different web services using a graphical interface.
Wapiti, a Web application vulnerability scanner with a black-box approach that can detect the most common vulnerabilities: XSS, SQL Injection, File Handle Errors...
JavaTeam Liferay Portal, a forge portal based on Liferay, a platform that allows users to make a collaborative development. It integrates some Romulus tools and provides some social functionalities.

Now, we are working on improving this software in order to release new versions with new functionalities in the next months.

You can download this new release from the download page.
Enjoy it!

Wapiti in OWASP

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:39:26 GMT

We are glad to announce that Wapiti (Web application vulnerability scanner), project co-developed within Romulus, have been admitted as a (provisional) alpha OWASP project. OWASP is a worldwide open community focused on improving the security of application software. It has become a reference group in the security area. This good news encourage us to continue to follow in the same way, improving it and adding new functionalities.

You can see our project in the OWASP page.

New Romulus' documents are now available

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:55:25 GMT

During this first year of project. we have worked in different areas in order to achieve our proposed goals. We have created and improved some software tools which help to develop and test applications faster and easier. To realize this work we have studied different technologies and researches and we have created a big set of documents with our researches and conclusions. Now, these documents about our work are public and everyone can download them. Their topics are very diverse. You can download a complete report about Roma Metaframework, a document about mashups or another about testing and security as well as the requirements document and other documents related to Romulus project. By now, there are 10 available documents. In the future, new documents are going to be released with our new researches.

You can download them from the documents page

Romulus Mashup Builder

David del Pozo González — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:37:17 GMT

Romulus Mashup Builder is a web application that provides a graphical user interface for building mashup easily. In few minutes you can combine information obtained of REST services, this information can be modified with operators and later presented with a wide variety of renders. For example, Flickr, Google, Yahoo or Delicious services can be mixed to get a mashup.

The mashups can be exported in several formats:

HTML
JavaScript
Google Gadget
Netvibes Gadget

All this process is developed with a graphical user interface and it is as easy as to drag and drop some components and to combine it. The time of develop a mashup is reduced considerably thus the productivity is noticeably improved. This application is based on Afrous.

In the following video is shown a demo of Romulus Mashup Builder

Romulus Mashup Builder
Cargado por romulusproject

In the demo is shown a simple blog web application developed with Roma Meta Framework. Using a REST service the information of this application is recovered by Romulus Mashup Builder. This information is processes with a sorting operator and it is ordered and later is rendered using a Pie Chart Reder. Finally the mashup is exported as Netvibes Gadget and the demostration finishs with the gadget shown into Netvibes page.

New Wapiti page under Ict-Romulus domain and new beta release

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:31:31 GMT

In the last weeks, we have added some interesting new improvements to the Wapiti project as new html reports, an important internal refactoring and improvements of the existent algorithms. This project, written in python, allows to audit the security of web applications with a black box testing approach. Now, we launch a new page about this open-source project, created byNicolas Surribas, under Romulus Project domain: http://www.ict-romulus.eu/web/wapiti This page contains different useful sections for users and developers (now, attacks can be extended). The principal page contains an overview about the use of this security testing tool. In the wiki page, this information is explained in detail. Here, you can find information related with the use and extension of the project. There are other typical sections of this type of projects: a forum, where users and developers will discuss the related topics, a features page and a roadmap page. One of the most interesting sections is the Online demo, in this page, you can check the security of your applications (only a url per request). A detailed report page with information about the founded vulnerabilities will be shown as result. Another announcement about wapiti project, this night will be release the new Beta Wapiti 2,0 version with the new integrated functionalities: report generation, improvement of algorithms... This version is a beta of the next 2,0 final version.The detailed features are specified in the wapiti page.

Romulus talk in the Liferay European Symposium

Alberto Montero — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:38:46 GMT

This week (September 23rd - 24th) took place in Frankfurt (Germany) the first Liferay European Symposium. For two days there was intense interchange of knowledge and experiencies of many portal applications developers (near 200) from many european companies and groups.

In the agenda there was time for a talk about Romulus, and its efforts and developments for helping developers to be more productive. The talk was a general overview of the project, but also showing the progress and some of the latests achievements.

Data Level Mashups: awarded

Giovanni Tummarello — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:29:49 GMT

DERI's Pipe's Project (formerly Semantic Web Pipes) has been awarded 3rd prize at the Triplification challenge

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML.

DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed.

DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use, thus making it an innovative integration component for data level mashups.

DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results.

Contribution in Wapiti Development

Alberto Pastor Nieto — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:52:40 GMT

Wapiti is an open source Web application vulnerability scanner that scans applications with a black box approach, it realizes different test with a fuzzer strategy in order to discover a wide set of the most common vulnerabilities. Now, it can detect File handling errors, code injections (SQL, XPath and LDAP), persistent and non-persistent XSS attacks, external command execution and HTTP Splitting attacks.
This project, created by Nicolas Surribas under General Public License is a good starting point for our target in the security testing because it is focused on the application layer and checks the most common vulnerabilities, so Romulus has started to contribute with its development. In the first phase of our contribution we have implemented the report functionality, now, Wapiti can show a report with a visual chart, a summary table and a list with every found vulnerability detailed. We have planned other improvements to this software, and we are going to work together with the project creator. As Wapiti is programmed in Python, it will be integrated in Romulus using jython, an implementation of Python language written in Java and maven, tool that simplify the management of Java projects. In future versions, Romulus will provide a complete security testing toolkit and Wapiti will be a part of it.

Two screenshots of the report:

Report1

Report2

Service Engineering Working Group Meeting at Vienna

Carlos A. Iglesias — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:13:11 GMT

Service Engineering Working Group Meeting at Vienna

Vienna, 29/08/08.

The Service Engineering Working Group of FP7 EU Project has hold a meeting, organised by the University of Vienna. There were attendants from COMPASS, DEPLOY, DIVA, MOST, PERSIST, ROMULUS, SCUBE, SeCSE and SHAPE projects, as well as from the EC.

As a result of the meeting a collaborative book will be edited. The main idea is to define an illustrative use case, and show the different service engineering techniques of the projects, when they are applicable and what they propose. The details of the book will be discussed in next general meeting at Brussels.

Technical Meeting in Galway

Pablo Martín — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:35:31 GMT

The Galway meeting was a success and a very productive meeting. Some important points were discussed.
The first day Liferay partner gave an outline of some new functionalities in Liferay 5. 0 which can be useful for Romulus purposes. The main ones are:
    -Liferay Social Networking. Ability to join friends and see their activity. It will be evaluated for its usage as developer portal in WP2.
    -Compliance with Portlets 2.0 (JSR-286). It is remarkable the standardisation of portlet intercommunication, portlet filters and resource serving. It will be evaluated for its usage in WP5.
    -Persistence of data. Two available resources, Service Builder (static data model) and Expandos (dynamic data model). (A.1).
    -Stable theme architecture.
Assset Data presented last development within ROMULUS project. The main ones were:
    -Scripting Java6 Module, a new aspect for including scripting languages, implemented with Java 6 scripting engine, in order to support WP5 (A.2).
    -ETL Xpath Module for data adaptation, which could be valuable for WP4. (A.1)
    -A Reporting Aspect, based on Jasper Engine and a JFreeChart module, which provides reporting facilities, and could be used in WP7.
    -A Service Aspect which exports functionalities as web services, and a workflow module based on Tevere, which could be used in WP4. (A.3).
DERI presented a general introduction to semantic technologies and, in particular, the project Sindice, a scalable semantic search engine, supporting RDF and microformats, which provides the needed infrastructure for DERI's semantic empowered tools, as well as Semantic Pipes, which will be used for Data level Mashups.
Regarding Data level Mashups, since Asset Data has presented ETL Xpath Module, and Liferay has presented the framework Expandos, it is suggested to analyse their requirements in order to be supported by the Data level mashup approach. (A.1)

The second day GESFOR presented a general policy for setting up an open source community, which is based on creating an open source project at sourceforge. In it, stable versions of Liferay and Roma will be integrated together with the rest of software developed in the project. It is outlined the need of managing the update and maintenance of Liferay and Roma without impacting in ROMULUS.
Regarding the license, it was proposed Apache2, but the final decision was delayed (A.5).
It was agreed to use Maven for the integration of functional and security tests.

For the WP1 were exposed the following points:
Gesfor presented the reporting guidelines. It was agreed to simulate of the first 6 months.
Some actions are missing, as sending signed consortium agreement by ASSET and Liferay (A.13)
DERI proposed to review the reporting sheets (A.14) and it was agreed to review them based on DERI sheets (A.15).
Gesfor requested partners to send the first payment bank statement (A.16).

For the WP2:
UPM and IMOLA presented an approach for internal and external evaluation. GESFOR proposed to refine this approach in order: (i) not to overlap with T1.3 and (ii) define, according to the DoW, the external reviewers (user group, etc.), process (questionnaires), and dates, including the evaluation of the demonstrators. (A.17).

Work package 3 presents the extensions of ROMA metaframework for ROMULUS. In particular, the following tasks have been carried out:
    -Mavenize Roma
    -Transaction Aspect
    -Analysis of the HTML module, which will be carried out by Gesfor
    -Implementation of Service Aspect with Apache CXF
    -Integration of OpenID
    -Integrate 'forgot password'
    -Integration plugin mechanism
Furthermore ASSET proposed a Semantic Aspect based on DERI Semantic techonologies presentation (A.26) and Cornelius, a vertical app which could be integrated in the demonstrator. UPM presented initial ideas for the methodology.
Regarding to the Semantic Empowered Development Tools, also for the work package 3:
    -DERI presented the current status of the WP, where an ontology, BAETLE has been extended for ROMULUS. This ontology captures information of Bug databases, and currently is integrated with JIRA. A pluginfor JIRA has been developed which provides semantic notifications about bugs. Liferay and Asset Data are required to install it (A.6).
    -Databases are exposed through its conversion into RDF (based on Baetle) with a tool called D2RQ, and the search engine Sindice provides integration of this published RDF.
At least, inside RAD tools section of the WP3 IMOLA presented initial ideas for the plugins. Some of the needs are advancing on the research about the mashup oriented development approach (A.18)

In the WP4 Gesfor introduced the concept of mashups and an initial mashup taxonomy for ROMULUS, as well as relevant tools for building mashups.
Imola presented their work on Enterprise mashups and the role of JBI, REST, and some of the functionalities to be requested. The JBI compliant ESB should be decided (A:19)

Inside the 1.WP5. "RIC Technologies. Security and Testing" ICI and Liferay presented a review of scripting technologies and proposed the integration of BSF or JSR-223. ASSET explained that their aspect supports JSR-223 with Java6, although BSF is integrated with many languages (A.20).
In the other hand Liferay presented how a portlet can be developed with a scripting language and the roadmap of the task.
Gesfor gave an introduction of secure software engineering and the approach for ROMULUS, based on annotating the domain. In addition, it was presented several alternative APIS to be integrated in a Security Aspect (HDIV, ESAPI, JAAS, ...) and several security testing tools were reviewed. Finally, a security audit of ROMA was presented.

The dissemination plan (from the WP7) was presented by Deri. Also Gesfor announced that it will work on the marketing material

In closing, Gesfor presented the meeting conclusions and a review of the work plan for the next 6 months. These conclusions have been collected in this post. Next meeting will be in Rome in mid September. Then, a meeting for preparing the meeting review will be scheduled in Madrid or Brussels. Next regular meeting will be in Romania, to be hold during the Romulus Workshop.

Technical Meeting in Galway

Carlos A. Iglesias — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:08:12 GMT

Galway, Ireland, 16-17th June. Last June, all partners met in the DERI head office in Galway (Ireland). Several important technical topics were discussed. Every partner exposed its related works and the tasks schedule was defined in order to release the first version.

ROMULUS at the SEminar on Emergent Web Technologies at UPM

Carlos A. Iglesias — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:50:17 GMT

Alberto Montero, from Liferay will give a lecture at UPM about the Future of Portal Technologies and ROMULUS, inside the Seminar on Emergent Web Technologies

Romulus is presented at ICT FP7 Event 1st Call

Carlos A. Iglesias — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:48:15 GMT

Claudio, Luca an me are attending the FP7 Event. The room is strange. There are hundreds of people reading their email and working, and at the back, shadowed speakers speaking for not more than 2 minutes. Lots of new projects.

We have had a first contact with the project Protest, related with testing in order to share our approaches.

You can find our flyer here: ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/ssai/project-romulus_en.pdf

Technical Meeting (Feb)

Carlos A. Iglesias — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:53:04 GMT

Madrid, February. Last February 21th, some partners (Gesfor, Liferay and UPM) met in UPM University (Madrid). The topics covered in this meeting were OWASP Security Recommendations and the new trends in Web Applications Developed, focused in Ruby on Rails and Grails. Also, other topics about project achievement were disscused.

Predictions of Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 and Romulus

Carlos A. Iglesias — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:55:50 GMT

Reading the 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008, it seems that ROMULUS is addressing some of the coolest topics of the year:

Security will be a major concern with Web2.0 and SaaS trends.
Demand of solutions for extracting and consolidating info from wikis and blogs
Appearance of enterprise mashups

ROMULUS will address these topics from a developer point of view, in order to make easier the integration of security and enterprise mashups in the daily work of the software developer. The idea of consolidating information of wikis and blogs about bugs, feature requests, ... and send it proactively to the project which are using it is also very appealing.

Kick off meeting

Carlos A. Iglesias — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:54:53 GMT

Madrid January 14th, 15th. Kick-off meeting. Romulus partners have attended the project kick-off meeting organised by Gesfor and hosted at UPM (Madrid, Spain). Two long (but productive) days discussing and planning in order to fulfill the project objectives. This first Romulus Consortium Meeting was focused on early steps of the project.