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Best practices 3 – Oracle ESB and Mediator

This is the third post in our SOA and BPM best practices series. This blog provides best practices for Oracle ESB (Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g) and its successor (when it concerns routing and transformation): the mediator component in SCA (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g). The previous blog in this series is about Web Services best practices.

Installing JDeveloper 11g

Two things I ran into when installing and configuring Oracle Fusion Middleware JDeveloper 11g that are worth mentioning:

Best practices 2 – Web Services

This is the second post in our SOA and BPM best practices series. This blog is about Web Services and provides a mix of general tips and more specific tips for Web Services that are implemented using Java and JEE. You can find the first blog in this series here.

Approach. Decide upfront, based on the requirements and constraints, what approach for Web Service development best suits your situation: top-down or contract first, bottom-up, or meet-in-the middle.

• Top-down or contract first. The starting point here is the contract of the Web Service: its WSDL. You either design it or it is provided as a ‘given fact’. From the WSDL you generate the implementation. If the contract frequently changes, regeneration of the code can cause difficulties since the implementation is overridden. If you use this method, make sure you don’t change the generated artifacts.
• Bottom-up or implementation first. The starting point is the implementation; all Web Service artifacts“such as its WSDL’s “ are generated. This is a fast approach when you want to expose existing components as Web Service. However, you need to be careful because you have limited control over the generated Web Service artifacts and it is therefore easy to break an interface if the Web Service is regenerated.
• Meet-in-the-middle approach. Here you define both contract and implementation yourself and later on create the glue between them. In case of Java you can use JAX-WS and JAXB APIs and code to create this glue. This is a very flexible approach: you can change both the WSDL and the implementation. It requires more work in the beginning, but is easier to change later on.

Compliance. A Web Service that isn’t standards-compliant is less (re)usable. Make sure your Web Service is compliant to the WS-* standards by using the WS-I profiles (Web Services Interoperability Organization).

Exposing operations. Don’t expose all methods as Web Service operations by default when using a bottom-up or meet-in-the-middle approach. Only expose those methods that are actually needed by service consumers. This promotes encapsulation and prevents access to ‘internal’ methods.

Products. Nowadays most products and technologies support Web Services. Keep their pros and cons in mind when deciding what technology to use. Java for example provides better support and a better runtime for Web Service development and XML-processing than relational databases.

Large XML documents. Avoid creating Web Services that receive, process, and/or send very large XML documents. XML processing is resource-intensive and relatively slow and therefore not well equipped for handling bulk data. Use other technologies such as database technologies or ETL tools for that purpose.

Quality of Service (QoS). It’s easy to develop basic Web Services-but it’s hard to make them robust, secure, and scalable (enough). Address these QoS (or non-functional) issues in the beginning of the project instead of discovering that requirements are not met at the end of your project.

Annotations. Be careful when using vendor-specific annotations (as opposed to the general annotations defined in the JAX-RPC, JAX-WS, and JAXB standards). Although vendor-specific annotations such as those in WebLogic can be very powerful they break portability of Web Services and tie them to a specific runtime.

Migration to WebLogic. See this blog for migrating JAX-WS Web Services from JDeveloper 10g/OC4J to JDeveloper 11g/Weblogic. Note from the blog that a bottom-up approach was used. After migration the WSDL was changed (among others the namespaces were changed) causing the invocation to fail. This is a typical example illustrating the pros of using a top-down or meet in the middle approach.

Next post in this series will be about best-practices for Oracle ESB and Mediator (FMW 11g).

Cultural dimensions and adopting Agile practices

In this blog I want to prove that the extend in which Agile practices are adopted is strongly related to a country’s culture.
On two separate occasions: Gartner Xebia Agile maturity master class and Agile consortium Benelux / Agile Holland’s conference ‘Integrating Agile’ the 2 invited foreign speakers – Dave Norton and Rob Thomsett – emphasized that our country, the Netherlands (NL), is the ‘hot spot’ for adoption of Agile methods & practices. In their experiences and looking at the analyzed facts and figures, many companies in the Netherlands are practicing Agile methods or are seriously exploring the possibility to adopt them.
I asked both men if they thought this could have anything to do with our Dutch culture. For some time now, I’ve been playing with the thought that culture and agile maturity /adoption grade could have a link. They both considered this to be very well possible.
You might know Geert Hofstede’s comprehensive study on how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. I wanted to compare the outcomes of, this study to Dave Norton and Rob Thomsett ’s insights on agile adoption in the Netherlands and other countries. Do they relate?

Dimensions
According to this study there are 5 dimensions on which countries can be compared: Power Distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainly avoidance and Long term-orientation. Hofstede indexed the differences on a scale from 0 to 100.

Dimensions explained:
Power Distance Index (PDI) is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. (This represents inequality accepted from below, not from above)

Individualism (IDV) (its opposite is collectivism) is the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualistic side we find societies in which ties between individuals are loose: On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families. The word ‘collectivism’ in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.

Masculinity (MAS) versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders. It is considered another fundamental basis for any society in finding (other) solutions to corresponding issues. The assertive pole is called ‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole is called ‘feminine’. In feminine countries, both women and men have the same modest, caring values; in masculine countries women are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as men: masculine countries typically show a gap between men’s values and women’s values.

Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) deals with a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. It ultimately refers to man’s search for truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Cultures that avoid uncertainty introduce strict laws and rules, safety and security measures. On a philosophical and religious level, they have a belief in absolute truth; ‘there can only be one Truth and we have it’. Its members are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite types, members of cultures that accept uncertainty, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many trends to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions. Uncertainly avoidance has a lot to do with acceptance of change.

Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus short-term orientation: this fifth dimension was found later It can be said to deal with virtue regardless of Truth. Long Term Orientation is associated with values like thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and ’saving your ‘face’.

In this picture you can see a comparison I made using Geert Hofstede’s model:

To make this a bit more visual I made this graph:

In Belgium, power distance acceptance is high, in the other chosen countries below world average.
In almost all chosen countries, except for Scan, Germany and Belgium individuality is very high. In USA highest.
Masculinity in NL and Scan is extremely low, Germany and USA rank highest.
Uncertainty avoidance, and in my view therefore resistance to change, is highest in Germany and Belgium, lower in the Scandinavian countries and the other chosen countries score below world average.
NL scores about average with the world on long term orientation. Taking risk is more applicable to UK and Canada. Unfortunately no index figures are known of Scan and Belgium of this dimension.

Conclusions:
When we take into account what is said about the Netherlands in relation to Agile adoption / maturity and look at the differences between the cultural dimensions of the chosen countries we can cautiously come to a conclusions.
The chances for successful adoption on Agile methods & practice are obviously strongly related to a low masculinity index and low acceptance of power distance index (NL and Scan) and uncertainty avoidance (NL and Scan lower than world average)

In Belgium (high power distance) for instance, it’s much more important to first gain executive support for Agile practices. In the Netherlands you have to prove that Agile works and gives sustainability.
Belgium’s higher score on uncertainty avoidance suggests less acceptance to change. Belgian decisionmakers might have a higher need for clear measures, rules and more waterfall-like project methods. NL and certainly the UK and USA will be more open to other solutions. Germany is -’in between’.
In the Northern European countries, the practice of one of the Agile methods – scrum- is very common. Could there be a link between MAS score to the fact that in Norway 25% of the executive board is female? And in Denmark about 40%? This is a challenging idea. The degree of masculinity may be muted by a larger feminine participation and sponsorship from the boardroom for Agile development methods (executive support is in the top ten success factors for a project: No. 2 on the list in the studies of Standish University)

In conclusion, we can agree that, based on cultural differences in Belgium and Germany, chances for Agile project methods to be adopted are less than in the other six countries. Also the UK, the USA and Australia seem culturally less inclined to adopt Agile practices.
I think, keeping the cultural differences in mind, it can help us to find ways to tailor (training in) Agile methods and practices to fit within a culture.

Your opinion:
Now what do you think of the relationship between agile adoption and cultural differences? Do you work in one of the countries mentioned here? Did you actually experience the assumptions just mentioned, or do you have a different experience of your own? Please feel free to share your thoughts with me.

Best practices for BPM, SOA and EDA

While visiting ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 in Monterey and talking to fellow BPM, SOA and EDA adepts I got this idea about creating a best practices and lessons learned blog series. This first blog is dedicated to best practices in the BPM and SOA-space based on cases from a presentation by Lonneke Dikmans. Subsequent blogs will dive into best practices and lessons learned for a specific product, methodology or technology.

Case I: Introducing BPM. Mistake: Organizational impact underestimated. Explanation: Successful delivery of BPM project, business heavily involved. Never used because they realized after delivery that changes in both the organization and the software were needed. Best practice 1. BPM and SOA are about business, IT and humans. Observe how people work, don’t just ask them.

Case II: Notifications. Mistake: Dependencies between processes modeled directly in the processes itself. Explanation: Process flow sometimes is influenced by other processes. This was modeled into every process: this makes processes tightly coupled to each other and hard to change. It resulted in deadlocks. Best practice 2. Use events to notify running processes. Best practice 3. Monitor & avoid exceptions.

Case III: New technology. Mistake: Use BPEL as a general purpose language. Explanation: BPEL is a domain specific language; it was designed to orchestrate (web) services. Someone coming from a homogeneous -for example PL/SQL environment- in their back office, could decide to rewrite everything in BPEL, even the service implementations. The progress of such a project is very slow, and doing things that used to be easy becomes very hard. Best practice 4. BPEL is a Domain Specific Language (DSL); use BPEL for orchestration only. Best practice 5. Use an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to expose services to consumers including BPEL. Best practice 6. Use Java for service implementation. Best practice 7. Use PL/SQL for persistent data manipulation and data integrity rules. Best practice 8. Use rules when you need customization, inference or when business rules are volatile.

Case IV: Quality of Service. Success: involve administrators early. Explanation: Someone designed their first SOA project with quality of service in mind. In production all the non-functional demands were met. Best practice 9: Design architecture for Quality of Service from the start … but only what you really need! Not everyone needs clustering, fail-over, high-availability, and so on.

Case V: Domains. Success: combine a top down with a bottom up approach. Explanation: By defining 6 business domains and one supporting domain, the service taxonomy and event definitions were easier to keep track of. Also defining an owner for some of the services and design guidelines for services that cross domains become possible. Best practice 10. Use domains and layers to facilitate making a taxonomy of services and defining design guidelines.

Conclusion. Think big, start small. Meet in the middle requires aligning Business, IT and People. Architects can be intermediaries. Sharing knowledge and experience is necessary.

The next blog in this series will dive into Web Services best practices.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 is almost coming to an end at the time of this writing. After some chilly days the sun started to shine in Monterey and turned this great event into an even better one. As mentioned almost every day, ODTUG is one of the few conferences that has grown compared to last year. This was my first visit to ODTUG. I actually thought it would be as big as Open World But it’s about a hundred times smaller. And actually that’s cool; much more intimate. Here you really get the chance to speak to product managers, interact with peers, and meet lots of new and interesting people!

So what were the highlights?

SOA and BPM Symposium on Sunday. For the first time there was a separate symposium and track dedicated to SOA and BPM. It was put together by ACE Directors Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema and Mike van Alst. Although the APEX and database tracks attracted more audience, we had a very interesting and interactive day with a mix of newcomers and SOA-adepts. The day was split into a business and technology part. Breakout sessions were mixed with great presentations by Demed L’Her, Geoffroy de Lamalle, and Clemens Utschig. Read about the results -SOA and BPM approaches- on Oracle Wiki.

Fusion Apps demo. The first official demo of the upcoming Fusion Apps. It looked really smooth! It’s build on top of the new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g stack (WebCenter, ADF, SOA Suite). Lot’s of social networking capabilities and interaction. Expect to see more of this. Some technology stats: approximately 11,000 task flows, between 5 and 6 thousand tables, tens of thousands of ADF BC View Objects, and so on.

Oracle ACE dinner. Great dinner followed by a bonfire and s’mores on the beach!

Presentations in the SOA and BPM track. Lots of interesting presentations here. I was an ambassador for Lonneke’s presentation and did a presentation myself on SOA in a database-centric environment. Also great presentations by Roman Dobrik on BPEL development patterns, Chris Judson on canonical data models, Mauricio Naranjo on a government SOA project in Latin America, Samrat Ray on SCA in SOA Suite 11g, Mark Simpson on tools for business processes, and Lucas Jellema on SOA in an Oracle classic stronghold.

Meeting fellow geeks. You want to meet people that drive cars with license plates like “BPEL” or “WEB 2 OH”? Find them at ODTUG!

Great conference! Thanks to everyone and looking forward to meet everyone again at Oracle Open World 2009!

Passive adapters in Oracle ESB that won’t be activated

Configuring SOA Suite 10g for high availability (HA) isn’t the most easy thing to do. Several administrators I spoke with and worked with in projects brought this up. I really hope that FMW 11g -besides all the new functionality, enhancements and support for new standards such as SCA- also makes things like HA easier to configure.

One particular issue we recently ran into in one of our projects has to do with the use of non-concurrent adapters in Oracle ESB when upgrading our clustered environment from 10.1.3.3 to 10.1.3.4. Non-concurrent (or singleton) adapters are adapters that cannot run in an active-active configuration since the underlying infrastructure does not provide a good locking mechanism. Examples are file and FTP adapters. JMS and database adapters on the other hand support concurrency. For non-concurrent adapters you have to ensure that there is only one adapter instance active at runtime. Otherwise you could have two active file adapters both reading the same file, starting two ESB flows instead of one. Futhermore, you want to have fail-over. If the ESB RT (runtime) node on which the active file adapter is running (or adapter itself) fails, the passive adapter on another ESB RT node should be activated. In earlier SOA Suite 10g releases you had to install and configure a separate ESB RT for this (ESB Singleton) and deploy non-concurrent adapters to this separate node. Real overkill. Fortunately, in later versions you could deploy non-concurrent adapters to the existing ESB RT’s and configure these adapters in an active-passive configuration by setting the clusterGroupId property. The jGroups protocol is then used so that only one instance of all adapters that have the same clusterGroupId value will be activated.

When we upgraded to SOA Suite 10.1.3.4 none of our file adapters in the acceptance environment was activated anymore! After some investigation it seemed that ESB 10.1.3.4 uses its own jGroups configuration instead of the jGroups configuration as specified in the global jgroups-protocol.xml file (as was the case for ESB 10.1.3.3). That isn’t a problem by default. However, in our case both our test and acceptance environment are clustered and both run in the same network. The internal jGroups configuration of both test and acceptance by default probably use the same ip and subnet addresses. Meaning all adapters of all ESB projects in the same network with the same clusterGroupId are all put in the same active-passive configuration. For ESB project “A” only one file adapter instance for test was active, the same file adapters for ESB project “A” for acceptance were all in passive mode. Luckily you can specify the useJgroupConfigFile property for an ESB endpoint and set it to true to enforce using the jgroups-protocol.xml configuration file; as was the case in ESB 10.1.3.3. Then configure a different ip and subnet address combination for test and acceptance. That way the non-concurrent adapters in the same ESB projects but in different environments are separated when they have the same clusterGroupId. Another workaround would be to include the environment name in the clusterGroupId value, e.g. MY_ESB_TEST_ID and MY_ESB_ACCEPTANCE_ID.

Architecture in Practice

On May12th I attended a book launch and seminar called ‘architecture in practice’. I worked with one of the authors, Hans Tönissen, in a project. I met and corresponded with The other author, Guido Bayens, on several occasions. The day seemed a bit like a reunion because I met a few colleagues from my past employer too. That felt very nice.

Chairman of the day was Harry van Zon. He connected the different contributions of the speakers very smoothly. The day had six themes:

• The making of the book ‘architectuur in de praktijk’
• The function of architecture within (our) companies
• Professionalizing the function of architecture
• Connecting the architect and other professions within a company
• Innovation with architecture
• Developing architecture proposition

Architecture in practice – Architectuur in de praktijk

The book contains an easy to read explanation of different views on (IT) architecture. The authors have integrated a few of the approaches that are being used in the market today and looked for a way to connect these to TOGAF standards and methodology. I think they did a really good job!
When one looks at the many approaches and ways to do architecture, you realize that an architect can never have in-depth knowledge about all the approaches, let alone apply them. So you really have to work in multidisciplinary teams. I agree with this.
Hans and Guido are looking at the possibility to organize recognized certification for architects. Both are connected to the Novius Architecture Academy and teach there.

After ‘the making of the bookâ’ several other speakers enlightened us with their insights.

Professor Theo Camps elaborated on organizational issues and architecture and talked about the difference between architecture as an art and architecture as a craftsmanship.

After lunch I had to choose between four parallel sessions: The first choice was between ‘developing architecture’ at a large Dutch insurance company or ‘architects and projects’ at the Dutch Railways, the second choice was between ‘governance and change with architecture’ at Province Flevoland and ‘the making of a business architecture’ at Holland Casino. Difficult choices!

Knowledge & skills of an architect

After a short break at 3 pm, we split into different smaller groups to discuss certain topics. I joined the group that discussed what qualifies an architect. We talked about whether an architect should be a generalist of specialist, what rolls he/she has to fulfill, and what knowledge, skills and behavior is needed. Furthermore we identified what you could do (practice) to gain experience and what instrument could be used. Great discussion and very practical suggestions! This is the conclusions we reached:

Knowledge and awareness

• Knowledge of how to get from strategy to design
• Overall business knowledge (generalist) with some knowledge of some domain-specific issues (specialist)
• Knowledge of the (type of) organization
• Awareness of the state of affairs / maturity of architecture and informal structures
• Awareness of the phase the organization and architecture (role) is in
• Knowledge of the roles that are present within the organization
• Affinity with ICT (preferably not too technical)

Skills

• Ability to work together to reach consistency
• Ability to connect architecture with business strategy
• Ability to create a platform for consistency
• Ability to translate architecture into principles and instructions
• Ability to consider organizational design as a constraint
• Ability to direct
• Ability to communicate
• Ability to act as an adviser or partner to C-level management and senior partners of the organization

Behavior

• respect for specialization and understanding of the specialist
• Courage to pioneer
• Patience, continued willingness to teach and explain
• Align with business
• Continue learning

Means

• Getting applicable experience (with change) by doing just that
• Change jobs every 5 years
• Give presentations
• Selling architecture within your own company
• ‘Catch-up talks’ with colleagues
• Take up more difficult or complicated cases
• Horizontal and vertical networking
• Inter vision with colleagues, coaching and training

As I said, I was part of the discussion group, and I agree with all of the ‘features’ mentioned. As an architect you need to have many competencies and skills, but you don’t need to know about everything. With your communication skills, eagerness to learn and ability to connect you will succeed.

The day ended with some networking and I spoke to several nice people. It was a very interesting and nice day. Thanks!

Web Services article on OTN

Oracle recently released Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) 11g. OEPE is a certified set of Eclipse plug-ins that is designed to help develop, deploy, and debug applications for Oracle WebLogic Server. I wrote an article on OEPE’s Web Service capabilities, and more specifically its support for the JAX-WS and JAXB standards. The article includes a step-by-step tutorial, explains different approaches to Web Service development, and concludes with several best practices. You can find the article on Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

Head, heart and hands

Although I realized that it could be a little bit too technical for me, some titles of presentations intrigued me so much that I decided to attend the SOA practitioners Forum by Software AG in April. The fact that my colleague was planning to attend this meeting as well, gave me even more reasons to go. It is always very enjoyable to go to an event with a coworker.

SOA is dead
The sessions ‘SOA has come of age’, ‘enterprise architecture’ and ‘the lifecycle governance’ interested me a lot. The presentation ‘SOA has come of age’ treated the notion that ‘SOA is dead’. Anne Thomas Manes and others wrote many blogs stating this. Nothing new to the people that keep in touch with market development. The speaker pointed that part out very well, quoting Gartner and others. He tried to prove the maturity of SOA with some customer based figures from his own company. Hardly sufficient evidence, but it explained the focus of his company.

enterprise architecture
The enterprise architecture part was presented by an English speaking French woman who talk without a microphone while looking at her own slides behind her. So, this was very hard to follow and again treated from a tool perspective.

bridging the gap
It struck me that every presenter seemed to try to bridge the gap between IT and Business. Considering from whose viewpoint you’re looking at this gap, there seems to be push or pull mechanism. In Anglo American countries it is the opinion of the IT world that Business has the responsibility to align IT to Business (IT pulls). In Germany and the Netherlands IT feels the responsibility to align Business people to their IT (IT pushes).

I filled in the questionnaire and gave some advice: use microphones, make challenging statements, allow attendees to ask questions during the sessions to make the whole more interactive. And please don’t change anything to the friendliness of the hosts, to the catering and the accessibility of the location because these were great. Thanks for Software AG’s hospitality!