Posts Tagged ‘ALBPM’

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.

The feared “demo-effect” – bluescreen just before our OOW session

Yesterday I arrived in San Francisco to attend and present on Oracle Open World 2008. After a really nice dinner with most of the ODTUG presenters, I quickly went to sleep. The day after -today as I’m writing this blog-, Lonneke and I were going to present the Oracle versus BEA shootout session in Moscone West. Exciting, moreover since the session was fully booked, with more than fifty people on the waiting list. So naturally we wanted to prepare, test, and fine-tune our demo’s this morning.

The day starts good. I had slept for more than 10 hours, my jetlag -that I really felt during the ODTUG dinner- was reduced to a minor disorientation. So far so good. I met with Lonneke to go over the demo’s. First thing that happens when I start my laptop is that I see the feared bluescreen of death telling me that a fatal core dump has occurred (sounds just like Star trek). Meanwhile the presentation was only a couple of hours away. Aarrrgghhh! To keep in Star trek terms, I only needed to realign the dilithium matrix to stabilize the warp field to fix this “coredump”. My laptop caught the demo-effect in its worst form: half our presentation is demo and my laptop is dead! That’s when my heart rate doubled and my blood pressure went to a new all-time high. Lonneke -normally making jokes to cheer you up when something goes wrong- kept quiet this time and looked at me alarmingly. Luckily, restarting computers when they’re broken or don’t do what you want can result in miracles: no bluescreen this time. Guess my computer had a jetlag too. After fixing our BEA demo’s and a quick rehearsal we left for Moscone. Luckily, the demo-virus stayed in the hotel and all demo’s worked perfectly during our presentation!

Later on this week we’ll post more on our Oracle Open World. We’ll also post the demo’s from our presentation later on.

Lonneke at OOW 2008.

Collect all the ribbons and become a fout-star general!

Deep-dive into our OOW 2008 demo’s

Sunday Lonneke and I did the Oracle vs BEA shootout presentation. We compared products from both the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack (BPA Suite, BPEL PM and OESB) with their BEA counterparts (ALBPM, WLI and ALSB). If you attended the presentation and want some more info on the demo’s or couldn’t make it to the presentation, we’ll be at the Oracle ACE Office Hours in the OTN Lounge this wednesday from 4.00 to 5.30 pm. The demo’s include closed-loop integration between different components, creating custom adapters in Oracle ESB, performing data enrichment in ALSB, etc. etc. The OTN Lounge is a really cool place to hang out. It’s located on the 3rd floor of Moscone West. See you there!

P.S. Visit the Oracle Wiki for a complete listing of the Oracle ACE Office Hours.