Publish Documentation without Proprietary DTP Software
The DITA Open Toolkit, can create and transform DITA XML files into various useful, readable text formats. It’s been around for a while, but as you may know, it’s a lot of work to customize and efficiently use this toolkit. We’d like to announce our customized version of the toolkit: the SOPERA DITA Framework for processing and publishing user documentation. It’s a really nifty little framework that generates neat PDFs, Eclipse Helps, and HTML files from DITA maps and topic files without recourse to any commercial, proprietary DTP software applications. That’s right, for free!
Try it, Test it and Send us Feedback
Go ahead and try it out if you want to by checking it out of googlecode from here: sopera-dita-framework. Before you start, please do read the readme.txt file and the accompanying project wiki pages. Granted the content is sparse but we’ve busy been trying, testing and playing with our framework so that we’ve fallen behind in documenting its usage and utility but we’re working on it. We’d also appreciate your feedback.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung DITA, DITA OT, dita topics, ditamaps, Proprietary DTP Software, User Documentation
Updated SOPERA SOA Tutorial
If you’ve been following our blog posts, you’ll have read the Helios is Out post, dated 28th June 2010. We mentioned in that blog post to all users that in order to access the tutorial all you had to was simply download the Eclipse SOA package and from the Eclipse IDE GUI menu, select Help > SOA > Install New Tutorials. For those of you who did download and install it, we mentioned in the Eclipse Help, SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car Example (accessible via the Eclipse Help in the IDE) that we’d be collecting your feedback in order to improve the quality of the tutorial. We’ve done the following:
- Tested the use case scenario in the tutorial
- Streamlined the content
- Added screencasts
Installing the Updated SOPERA SOA Tutorial
To install the tutorial, uninstall the existing version and install the update, start the Eclipse IDE:
- Click Help > About Eclipse > Installation Details.
- From the ensuing list, select SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car (OSGi) and click the uninstall button.
- Next, click Help > SOA > Install New Tutorials. This opens a new window: SOPERA SOA Tutorial Discovery.
- In the SOA Tutorial Discovery window, check the option SOPERA SOA Tutorial: Rent a Car (OSGi) and click Finish.
You’re all set! We hope you enjoy the tutorial. Please send us your feedback via the SOPERA Forum.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung
SOPERA ASF on Mac OS X
Yes, it’s true! You can now install and run SOPERA ASF with very little effort on your Mac OS X. For information on prerequisites, installation instructions and tips, see Mac Quick Start.
Please send us your feedback on the article and let us know if you are interested in finding out more about running SOPERA on Mac OS X.
NOTE: There are two support categories defined by SOPERA, Supported
and Certified. The Mac OS X is neither supported nor certified by SOPERA.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung Mac OS, Mac OS+SOPERA ASF
Extending our Reach
SOPERA’s SOA open source software is based on a building a community for developers. SOPERA has created a partner program to extend our ability to reach members of this community. Our partner pogram offers strategic alliances and enables us to offer customized and innovative solutions.
Types of Partnerships
SOPERA offers a partner program with various options for cooperation. Here is a short list of what our partner program covers:
- System Integrators
- Master Resellers
- Independent Software Vendors
- Technology Partners
For more information, see Partner Program.
Anne Aloysious Ereignisse, Strategie partner
SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter 1.0 Launched
We’ve launched it. Now, we think it’s time you tried it out! After all, we posted a number of blogs on our SOA + BPM solution. Now, you can download the very first version of SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter from our downloads page at Product Downloads: SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter 1.0.
A Short Product Usage Tour
For more information on how to use the features in SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter, read the previous post on Using SOA Services Within Your BPM Processes.
Feedback
Once you’ve downloaded the product, watched our screencasts (see, previous paragraph) and tried it out all by yourself, please do send us feedback by leaving a comment on this post.
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung adapter, BPM, Intalio, SOA
SOPERA and Intalio
The case for using BPM in your SOA environment has long been discussed as an important milestone event in the history of SOA. Experts in the field have convincingly made the case for incorporating BPM and SOA.
What does this have to do with SOPERA? Well, we are currently working on an exciting project to extend and improve our efforts to further integrate with Intalio BPM.
If you’ve been using SOPERA ASF and have Intalio BPM (Server and Designer) you can with this add-on make use of both Intalio’s BPM processes and SOPERA’s SOA services. Now you can have your business analyst map universal, concise, and easily comprehensible BPM processes and use the SOPERA Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to connect or build the underlying application services.
With this integration in place, you can now install both SOPERA ASF and Intalio BPM Designer in the same Eclipse IDE and use the processes and services in it as shown in this figure.
This add-on enables calls SOPERA services from within your existing business processes with all the advantages that SOPERA provides such as:
- Service Registry Look-up (Location Independence)
- Policies
- Security Features
- Transport Independence (for example, HTTP, HTTPS, and JMS)
And finally and most importantly, our ESB hides the underlying implementation technology of your services (such as JEE, .NET, or SAP to name a few examples) from your business processes.
If you want to see a feature preview in action, take a look at the following use case scenarios in these screencasts:
Coming Soon!
- Visual Service Registry Integration with Drag & Drop capabilities
- BPMN Pools with Associated Authentication Information and Policies
- Easy-to-follow Tutorials and Examples
This integration can be used by existing Intalio customers and will be part of an enterprise-level SOPERA BPM offering.
Stay tuned!
Anne Aloysious Entwicklung BPM, Intalio, SOA, SOPERA ToolSuite