Posts Tagged ‘BEA’

Oracle Service Bus article on OTN

The Oracle Service Bus article Eric Elzinga and I wrote is published on Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

The article is aimed at developers and architects who are familiar with Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (OESB) and are (fairly) new to Oracle Service Bus (OSB). The tutorials in this article highlight differences between these two products. The tutorials are based on a workshop in the WAAI community; a collaboration of Dutch consultancies (Whitehorses, Approach, AMIS, and IT-Eye). The goal of the WAAI collaboration is to share, bundle, and expand knowledge on the recent Fusion Middleware 11g release.

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!

Bea SOA symposium

Today I visited the Bea SOA Symposium in Amsterdam. It was a very well organized event, with a nice mix between customer stories (business case from Zwitserleven for example), partner stories and BEA product sessions. One of the interesting differences between the Bea SOA stack, and Oracle is the distinction between orchestration of business services and the orchestration or construction of composite technical services with BPEL-like tooling. In the Oracle SOA Suite, all process orchestration is done with the BPEL engine. If you have a business process with coarse grained services and workflow, you use BPEL. If you have a composite service, you define it with BPEL. I even heard someone argue once, that you should program user interface navigation with BPEL as well. Bea, on the other hand, offers two different products. Aqualogic BPM suite to model business processes and do BMP. WebLogic Integration to create composite services. This fits with a common notion that Massimo Pezzini also talked about: there are different types of process flows in an enterprise. In a way using two different suites appeals to me: you can map your tooling (development and administration) nicely to the different layers of process flows in your organization. This in turn, maps to the different skills needed to define the different types of processes. Business oriented people will feel more comfortable with BPM suite, technical (JEE developers) with WLI. On the other hand, it seems needlessly complex: Every time you design a process, you need to decide what tool to use. You need people that understand the BPM suite and people that understand the WebLogic Integration. You need to support and administer both platforms, pay licence fees etc.
If you have any thoughts on the subject, drop me a note or comment on the blog. I am very interested in ideas and experiences with both approaches.