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Oracle Open World 2009 highlights

Sitting in my hotel room after the keynote by Larry Ellison that had my ‘all time favorite action Hero and now governor’ Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest, I was thinking about the highlights of this conference. One of them, obviously, was seeing ‘Arnie’ on stage.

But, on a serious note, there were several highlights as well. Let’s look at them in no particular order.

DOAG 2009: Day 1

Today was the first day of the German Oracle User Group. It is a very large conference. This year, they decided to make the conference international: People from different countries were invited to speak in english on the conference. I started the day by attending two sessions by Clemens Utschig.
The first one was titled “SOA and the Enterprise, thoughts beyond technology”. This was an interesting presentation for several reasons. First of all, it is very good to see that Oracle starts to pay attention to the architecture that is involved in practicing SOA and BPM. Secondly, because of the content. A quick summary of what stood out most for me:

The definition from the OASIS reference model has a couple of interesting notions. In the presentation he picked out three interesting quotes from the reference model:

• What is SOA: “Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. “
• What is a service: “A service is a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified by the service description”
• Capability: “The purpose of using a capability is to realize one or more real world effects”

Secondly he stated that in the US, the business needs to be aligned with IT. But in Europe IT needs to be aligned with the business. In other words: in Europe we think organizational change first, before we do technical stuff. In the US that is the other way around. This is very interesting if you think about the home base of the big tool vendors….
Last but not least, he stated that introducing SOA and BPM will not only change how the process and IT flows, but also the culture in an organization. This is very much in line with what Approach is doing in the SOA/BPM area: we focus on Business- IT – People alignment and started a user experience group recently.

Clemens’ second presentation showed SOA Suite 11g. Interesting observations:

• The rule engine Oracle acquired is going to be used for Oracle Apps only
• B2B adapter is part of base SOA Suite
• Customization will be applicable to BPEL

There were a lot of tracks that I did not visit: Christian Shay did a session about Oracle and .NET, there are database sessions, Siebel, BI etc, etc. Enough for everybody’s taste!

1st international SOA Symposium

Yesterday the first international soa symposium started. The location is very interesting: the Ajax soccer stadium. The line up is great: Thomas Erl, David Chappell, and Dirk Krafzig are among the speakers. The content is very good. For the first time in a long time, I had trouble choosing the right track because I would like to follow all of them!
It was also the first time we (Approach) were sponsoring an event. We have a great spot for our booth. It is a nice mix of tool vendors, consultancies and customers at the conference.
The keynote yesterday was by Thomas Erl. He addressed three groups: He appealed to vendors to stick to standards, to the Industry to make standards understandable and to practitioners to make a distinction between different disciplines of SOA.

We are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA
The first session I attended was by Paul Brown, a well known author from Tibco. The presentation was well organized, and he made relevant observations. The thing that stood out for me, was that he approached the problem of SOA and BPM from the business. He talked about the current silos and stated that these would not go away, just because we are doing soa, or as he eloquently put it “we are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA”

Another track I was interested in, was the SOA and Web 2.0 track. I attended two sessions. (For some reason, the first one was in the track “SOA Industry”). It was presented by Edwin Sanders and he talked about user interface services. The concept and architecture was interesting, his approach lacked any acknowledgement of common user experience principles. Either the product (corizon) lacks this vision, or the presentation was just unclear. I hope for them, it is the latter…

The presentation by the Burton Group about user experience was very focussed on User Experience. Anne talked about persona’s, Donald Norman etc. Unfortunately the relevance for SOA was explained very clearly. I believe there is a strong link, hence our user exerience service….

In general the sessions and content is very interesting. It would be nice if the program would mention the company the speakers represent. This is very relevant when you select the sessions that you want to attend.

I am sitting in our booth, typing this. I am looking forward to another interesting day. For me this is already a success and I hope that this conference will be continued next year.

Mike in the Approach Booth

Aqualogic @OOW2008

Yesterday, I attended two sessions about former BEA Aqualogic products: Oracle BPM Suite new features, and Oracle Service Bus deep dive.

Oracle BPM (F.K.A ALBPM F.K.A Fuego)
The new 100 day release from Oracle will be called Oracle BPM Suite 10gR3. This is in accordance with the numbering schemes of the rest of the products in the Middleware stack, so that is nice. The session was fun to attend: there were three guys presenting and they had a demo. One of the things that always stands out with the BEA products, is that they pay attention to the user experience of the product. It showed in this session: they were talking about the different persona’s and scenario’s for the product.Very much to my liking!
The new release focuses on three items: making stuff easier, more collaborative and social, and more intelligent and powerful. This is approached from the point of view of the knowledge user (end user of the product), the business analyst (who designs the models) and the IT/Operations.

Knowledge worker

• Office plugin. One of the new features that make it easier for the knowledge user is a plugin for Office. This makes it possible to start a process from your office application, rather than going to the workspace, create a new process and attach some files.
• New box layout based on a usability study. The dashboard can be different, based on different roles that you define for the knowledge worker
• Integration with Webcenter Interaction with Activity streams
• Federation of process engines possible: you can have one Workspace, hooking up to different Process engines.

Business Analyst

• There is going to be one way integration from Oracle BPA suite to Oracle BPM Studio. To be honest, this is an improvement because it means that business analysts no longer need to design the process in Oracle BPM studio, they can use Oracle BPA suite for that. Oracle BPM studio is based on eclipse. That is a very cool developers tool, not a tool that business analysts will particularly like….
• Business rules can be changed @runtime, from the Process Administration Server. Versioning of the rules is part of that
• BPMN support is very much improved, not just the rendering of it.
• Improved support for XPDL 1.0 and XPDL 2.0. By the way: in Oracle 11g BPM Suite 11g the product will move away from XPDL as the native format and will use BPMN 2.0 instead.

IT/Operations

• Process level debugging
• Eclipse 3.3 support. By the way, this will be migrated to JDeveloper in 11g
• Performance optimization options per process (e.g. greedy execution or not)
• support for attachments in PAPI-WS

This release should be coming pretty soon, and looks very good to me.

Oracle Service Bus (F.K.A ALSB)
I also attended the session “Oracle Service Bus deep dive”. The most important new feature is support for JCA adapters. ALSB is a very nice service bus, and the session highlighted some of the features and terminology. The title was a little bit misleading. It was not a deep dive, more an introduction. People that already know the service bus did not get a lot out of it, I think. The presenter was fun though, and it is always good to get a summary like that as a reminder.

Overall I think that good things are happening with the products from the Aqualogic family.

Oracle & BEA: Single BPEL & BPMN runtime!

Finally, we have an official statement about the product strategy that Oracle defined for the BEA weblogic, Tuxedo and Aqualogic!

Here is a summary, with the highlights from our point of view.

SOA Suite

Weblogic server will be the strategic JEE application server. Oracle application server will be supported mostly for Oracle Applications. SOA suite will still run on any JEE platform.
Service Component Architecture (SCA) will be the platform for SOA.
The ESB will be a combination of ALSB and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, combining the XQuery capabilities and other features of ALSB with the good features of Oracle. Basically, ALSB will be re-engineered so it runs on SCA. The Oracle ESB features will then be added to the ALSB.
Not surprisingly, WLI is not strategic, Oracle BPEL PM is.

BPM

Oracle will converge the Aqualogic BPM runtime and BPEL runtime to a common BPMN and BPEL engine to support four patterns of BPM: human centric, document centric, decision centric, system centric
The most important thing that was the plan to converge the runtime of Aqualogic BPM with the Oracle BPEL runtime. This is very good news, since there have been problems translating the two. They will keep to design time offerings: BPA suite for formal modeling, Aqualogic BPM designer for agile modeling.

Portals
Here the same thing happens: BEA products are merged with Oracle products. BEA WL portal is not strategic, Webcenter is. BEA Aqualogic Interaction is not strategic either, some of the components like Ensemble are though.

All in all, most of the choices make a lot sense to me. I am anxious to see the convergence of BPEL and BPMN with ALBPM and BPEL PM. The downside is, that there are now even more products in the stack. This makes it even harder for customers to make the right choice…. I wonder how BEA developers and architects feel about the choices that have been made.

By the way, another nice result of this merger is the new architect space on OTN. Go check it out!

ODTUG 2008 day 3: JDeveloper and BPA Suite

The third day of the conference, I decided to go check out some of the features of JDeveloper11g. The first session was done by Susan Duncan and Lynn Munsinger. The session showed the integration with Subversion. They had a very cool format: Susan was the PM who talked about the features of JDeveloper and some best practices with subversion. Meanwhile Lynn created an application that she checked in. Susan and Lynn then created a conflict in a JSPX file. Some of the cool features that they showed us were:

• XML aware merging in JDeveloper. This is really helpful, especially because a lot of the files in Java development are xml. One really cool part was that the visual editor actually showed the place of the merge conflict visually!
• Chat client in JDeveloper. I am not sure I will ever use it, I like my own chat client just fine. But the ideas is nice and you can use your own chat provider.
• Incoming changes from other developers. You can poll the svn repository for changes. They thought about this feature: you can set the timing in the preferences, so you don’t slow JDeveloper too much

The session was fun and informative, despite some technical difficulties they suffered.

The second session was about reusability features in JDeveloper. Shaun O’Brien talked about the resource catalog, libraries, page fragments, task flows, and page templates. I really like the taks flows: I think this is an important improvement in JSF, and I hope this will be added to the specification. The resource catalog, the templates and the possibility to compose components by combining existing ones are powerful concepts as well. The presentation lacked a demo, though.

The last session was really up my alley: a session about the BPA Suite. There were only a few people in the room, but we had a very interesting exchange of ideas. This was stimulated by the presenter, Ann Horton. She had a nice introduction and demo, and asked plenty of questions to fuel the conversation. I hope ODTUG will have more of these next year…

ODTUG 2008 day 1: WebCenter and SOA

Today was the first day of the conference odtug kaleidoscope 2008, if you don’t count the symposiums on Sunday. The keynote was presented by Vince Casarez, VP at Oracle and responsible for Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle Portal and Oracle Reports. He showed several demo’s of WebCenter 11g that contained BEA products, rebranded as WebCenter components. One example was WebCenter Interaction. It is the product that BEA calls “BEA Aqualogic User interaction” and is used to create enterprise portals, collaborative communities, and composite and social applications.
As a whole, the keynote was a bit confusing: it showed functionality for business users, developers and portal administrators. Using different components and tools. It was not always clear what functionality solves what business case. I guess that is typical for the current situation of the Fusion Middleware layer: With the acquisition of BEA, portal, web 2.0 and community software has been added to the already elaborate stack from Oracle. We will have to wait and see how the mixing and matching will turn out….

The in depth session I visited promised to talk about building composite applications using WebCenter, SOA and Web 2.0. Unfortunately they spent 45 (!!) minutes on generating business components from two database tables in JDeveloper. The interesting part of the session covered two topics: generating events to EDN and exposing BI components to WebCenter. Because they spent so much time on the Business components and the marketing lingo, they only had 10 minutes for these demos. So that session was disappointing.

The last session I attended was the session about AIA. This was actually a very good presentation. It gave an overview of the architecture of AIA. The presenter, Annaji Garimella, talked about the concepts of Enterprise Business Objects, Enterprise Business Services and Application Business Connectors. He also spent some time explaining the technologies that are used to realize these concepts. He concluded with governance options that are part of AIA. The only thing I missed in the presentation was a short demo, or example in JDeveloper. Other then that, this was a very good overview of AIA.

After this first day of the conference, two things stand out:

• Oracle is very busy integrating BEA Aqualogic in the Oracle 11g release, as opposed to first releasing Oracle 11g.
• ODTUG is moving on: the keynote was on WebCenter and SOA, not on Forms, Java or Apex.

Tomorrow the Oracle Ace Directors briefing takes place. I hope we hear something we can blog about…. preferably about the BEA acquisition.

Vote for sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Oracle has started an interesting experiment: people can post ideas for sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 and vote for ideas. As Justin Kestelyn posted in his blog there are 35 slots available for these ideas. I posted three ideas:

• Transforming business processes in BPA suite to running and executable BPEL processes
• Testing BPEL in the real world, use the Oracle BPEL Test Framework to improve the quality of your BPEL processes.
• Top ten tips: Best practices and design guidelines for services, events and business processes

If you are interested in the experiences and best practices of the consultants of Approach Alliance, you should vote for these topics. Lucas Jellema posted some interesting ideas as well, mostly about ADF and creating web 2.0 applications.

So go to Oracle mix and use your vote to influence the program at Oracle Open World.

I am very interested in your opinion about this new selection process; do you think this makes the conference better? Do you think it won’t make a difference? It is interesting that they picked Oracle Mix and not the Oracle wiki to try this, I wonder why….

User experience can’t be generated

Lucas Jellema posted a very interesting blog on the AMIS site recently about a topic that I love to argue about .

His claim is, and I quote: “My claim in this article is that there are very few ADF projects that will not benefit from using JHeadstart.” I disagree vehemently, I think there are several reasons why you don’t want to use it , both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective.
Let’s start with the IT perspective:

• you become dependent on the JHeadstart (consulting) team for version upgrades, they tend to lag a little behind. This might not be a big issue, but it is something that you should at least be aware of.
• Generating does not encourage separation of concerns: the same code can be generated into different pages and is not refactored by a developer (because it is generated). When you want to change this code, that is repeated everywhere in the application, you need to change it by hand everywhere or regenerate the page and lose post generation edits.
• you can not reuse generic JHeadstart components in other applications than in JHeadstart applications.
• It is designed to generate (relational) data driven applications very fast. In a SOA environment data is not in the form of relational tables and rows, but in the format of hierarchical XML data and objects.
• You edit properties not directly in the screen (direct manipulation) but indirectly in a property editor. It takes some (a lot?) of learning to estimate the effect of an edit.

However, this is not as important as the business reason.
An application that is used to bind customers to your company (marketing sites), saves operational costs by applying self service, or that is used in a mission critical situation (hospital environment, military type) has totally different requirements. The user interface can add real value to your application and organization in this case. It should be designed independent of the database or any other technical implementation detail! See for a good explanation of this concept this book.

In a SOA environment this becomes even more important. Because you have more information from different sources that you can combine (services), it becomes very important to think about the experience you want to give your users. If they don’t understand it, or they get lost, you can lose business.

Finally, software development costs are not the biggest IT costs in most businesses. Losing potential customers to competitors, maintenance of existing applications, license and hardware costs, correcting technical and business errors (for example incorrect orders), staffing and training the helpdesks etc, etc are a much bigger issue. Saving on your development by generating the most visible part can be a an expensive mistake.

There are different types of applications, of course. An application that is build to maintain some reference data in a database can easily be generated by JHeadstart or any other data driven tool. The question is, does this really save you any money?

My claim is: in most cases it will not

Oracle SOA Suite best practices guide

Justin Kestelyn blogged a little while ago about the release of the Oracle® SOA Suite Best Practices Guide 10g Release 3 (10.1.3.3.0). I did not find the time to read the entire guide yet (it has 272 pages in total), but you can easily use the guide as a reference to lookup information about transactions in ESB, file size limits, XML debatching with the File adapter, to name a few of the topics I did read.
The guide consists of two parts:

• Part 1. SOA Suite components. This part is not really about best practices, but explains the ins and outs of different SOA suite components. The term SOA Suite is not completely clear to me: in this case it is not what you download when you click on the link download SOA Suite. Maybe it refers to the concept SOA Suite. It covers Oracle BPEL process Manager, Oracle ESB, Oracle BPM Human Workflow (what a weird name is that???), Oracle Technology Adapters, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle B2B, but not Oracle rules, Webservices Manager or Oracle BPA Suite.
• Part 2. SOA Suite performance best practices. This is the part that really talks about best practices. It contains configurations and examples from real use cases. Both the problematic configuration and the solution are described. This is really helpful when you are designing your system, or when you are troubleshooting performance. It covers JMS to database adapters, Oracle BPEL process manager, and Oracle Human Workflow.

This guide is not a best practices guide for designing or managing your SOA, but it is definitely the source of information when you are working with Oracle SOA Suite 10g. If the answer is not in there, there usually is a link to documentation that already exists. So apart from the title, I am very happy with this document. It might be a good idea to print it, 272 pages is a lot to read from a screen…