Posts Tagged ‘openworld08’

BPEL, Beehive and Service Repository at OOW

This recap of some interesting OOW2008 sessions is posted a bit later than expected since my baggage -including notes- was stuck on the airport for a few days. Coincidentally my baggage was stranded at the same airport for which I codesigned the new baggage handling system. Maybe software can have a grudge against its creator after all? Luckily it was another terminal than the one I transferred through.

BPEL PM
There were several interesting sessions on BPEL PM by Clemens Utschig and Robin Zimmermann on the new features in 10.1.3.4, upcoming features in 10.1.3.5, and some useful tips and tricks for problem solving BPEL projects. A summary of the new and improved features in the Oracle BPEL PM 10.1.3.4 patch can be found here. The main objective of this patch is to make the BPEL Console a one-stop-shop. It therefore mainly introduces administrative improvements. The most interesting of these are:

Lost BPEL instances
Actually these instances are not lost, they just don’t show up in the BPEL Console. This is due to rollbacks in asynchronous process instances that are not yet dehydrated. This can e.g. be the case when a time-out occurs and the global BPEL transaction is rolled-back. The problem is solved by using a separate transaction for dehydration and not doing the actual instance’s work in the same transaction as the dehydration.

Deployment plans
This looks very much like the deployment plans already available in Oracle ESB. These plans are used to extract most of the configurable process information that differs per environment. Such information includes URL’s and ports of invoked services, adapter-specific information like inbound file names, JNDI locations of JMS queues, database adapter names, etc. etc. Ant tasks can be used to deploy BPEL processes to a target environment with the configuration of that specific environment. This information is wrapped in a BPEL suitcase. Part of the environment-specific information -not all, especially adapter-related information- could already be externalized using customized Ant builds. When an ESB is used to wrap adapter functionality, the need for deployment plans is not as urgent.

Other improvements in the 10.1.3.4 patch include improved visibility of engine threading model, improved statistics collection, minimization of XML coding errors through compliance testing and enhanced debugging of XML payloads, improved automated recovery agent (this feature was disabled in previous releases), and collection of support information when creating service requests.

Note that some of the latest 10.1.3.3 MLR’s are not included in the 10.1.3.4 patch. You’ll need to apply patch 10.1.3.4 followed by some additional MLR’s to update to the newest version. A preview of the new 10.1.3.5 features are also available in the PDF.

Some other cool stuff presented at OOW2008:

Beehive
Oracle Beehive is launched. Beehive is an integrated, open, and secure collaborative platform. Sort of a new and improved OCS, but then build from scratch. It provides seamless integration with -and abstraction of- all kinds of collaborative tools and technologies such as mail, file system, content management, feeds, calendar, mobile devices, chat, protocols, etc., etc. This is done through the notion of team and personal workspaces. Beehive also includes a Web based interface. Integration with existing user-interfaces or building more advanced user-interfaces can be achieved through its Java API and/or WebCenter Suite. That way you would have a WebCenter frontend communicating with a Beehive backend. See the Beehive website and the Beehive forum.

Enterprise Repository
Some products that were lacking from the Oracle stack prior to the BEA acquisition were related to governance. In the beginning of smaller, integration-aimed, and not enterprise-wide SOA projects technology usually poses a bigger risk than governance. However, in the course of SOA-projects lack of governance quickly becomes the main risk. Next to the runtime Service Registry product from Systinet, Oracle Web Service Manager, and the Enterprise Manager SOA Management Pack that Oracle offers, governance support now also includes the former BEA product Enterprise Repository. This product supports and enables governance at design-time. With this product you can -among others- “harvest” BPEL projects to retrieve artifacts such as processes, WSDL’s, XSD’s, and so on. Enterprise Repository creates a taxonomy out of this and graphically presents this. This way one can see for example what XSD is used by what processes, what policies are attached to what processes, and if these policies are met. Later versions will automate the retrieval of runtime information to automatically determine whether policies such as service response times are met. Publishing repository information to the development environment instead of the other way around should also be possible in future releases.

And this was just a small portion of all the OOW2008 news! See OTN for more information!

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.

Vote for sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 (2)

Lonneke Dikmans already blogged about the possibility to submit and nominate sessions for Oracle OpenWorld 2008. This is one of the ways to get involved in the Oracle community through Oracle Mix.

I submitted an idea called “Putting SOA to Use“. This session is based on experiences from a customer-case in which a Service-Oriented Architecture is implemented using Oracle technology such as BPEL, ESB and WebCenter. Read it and if you think it’s interesting vote for it!

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….