Posts Tagged ‘SOA’

Deployment of BPEL processes to SOA Suite fails after upgrade to 10.1.3.4

If you apply patch 10.1.3.4 to Oracle SOA Suite and use OID as security provider then you might run into the following problem when deploying your BPEL processes from JDeveloper or custom Ant scripts:

A problem occured while connecting to server [host] using port [port]: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (com.collaxa.security.DomainPermission [domain] read)

If this is the case then open Enterprise Manager and check that the deploy_service application (which is a child application of orabpel and new in SOA Suite 10.1.3.4) is configured to use OID as security provider instead of file-based JAZN. Restart SOA Suite and deployment should work.

SOA and Agile

On the weblog I posted on a presentation about SOA and Agile during XP day Benelux I got some nice responses. We at Approach think it is very important for the maturity of IT and SOA to share opinions and knowledge. That’s why I elaborate further on this topic here in this posting.

Most people still seem to be searching for answers about what SOA has to do with Agile and vice versa. Most discussions start high level but quickly go down to the nitty gritty technical details and use a lot of three letter acronyms. There are not a lot of people in the Agile community that think SOA can be Agile (as meant by the Agile Alliance). On the contrary: most people say that SOA is an open invitation for Big Upfront Design and therefore can’t be Agile.
So(a), let’s talk about SOA and Agile by looking at the 4 core values from the Agile Manifesto:

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This statement is about the development process. This can be applied to any architecture, including SOA. There are, obviously, some processes and rules about tools in place when working in a SOA. For example: If you need a change in a service that other service consumers are using, you need to make sure you don’t break anything when you implement the change. This sounds very similar to changing an interface in a Java program: you need to make sure you don’t break any other classes that are using it.
Agile development has some good ‘processes’ in place for that: test driven development, to name one.

- Working software over comprehensive documentation

This statement is about focus: do you spend most of the time in a project in designing and documenting your code or do you create self documenting code and only write documentation that is actually needed by the stakeholders. Again: this has nothing to do with architecture. Of course, if you want to reuse services, you need documentation and some thought about the interface. Writing testcode for the services you have built is a very good way of documenting services. To reuse service, they need to be working. Again, no clash here.

- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

This statement is about the contract for developing software. A lot of fixed price contracts go over budget. It is very hard to calculate cost exactly at the beginning of a project. Again, this has little to do with architecture. One of the nice things of SOA is decoupling of code. This makes it easier to change, and easier to prioritize: we talk about a business service that adds value to the business. Implement the most important services first. Value can be measured in different ways: for one specific customer to reach enterprise wide goals or to reduce risk.

- Responding to change over following a plan

The reason for SOA is agility, flexibility: by decoupling service providers from consumers, it becomes easier to change implementations. By using standardization it becomes easier to change. By using separation of concern, it becomes easier to change. Etc etc.

Conclusion:
The first three statements from the manifesto are about developing software and apply to any architecture, including SOA. The last statement is striking: SOA is all about change… The way you implement it, should be about change too. So to me, SOA and Agile are a very good fit.

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 at Amsterdam Arena.

This was the first symposium that is aimed to be held annually. It was very well organized. The food and beverages were great. I attended both conference days at 7 & 8 October and made arrangements and decorated our booth on Monday afternoon because we were silver sponsor. My colleagues and I decided to stay at our booth for half a day each to meet and talk to interested customers and fellow practitioners.
The first afternoon session I attended was by Dirk Kraftzig: “Conway’s Law and SOA Governance”. Very interesting subject, I thought. This law says that organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Dirk mentioned the law but didn’t elaborate on it. Instead he spoke about 3 business cases with (of course) 3 different solutions.
Next session: “Using Rest and WS-* Together for SOA” by Mark Little. This session was being recorded on video but the cameraman was late. After a 10 minutes delay Mark started his presentation and had to rush to present his slides. What stayed with me was that he wanted to bridge the divide between REST and WS*. I heard a word that sounded like ‘whistle’ for the first time. After the session I asked what it meant because I’m not that deep into IT. WSDL, well…Mark emphasized specifically that REST is not the same as HTTP and showed a model with 7 levels of ‘coupling’. From extreme physical coupling to totally decoupled.
The last session was by Thomas Erl ‘Introducing design patterns’. Thomas gathered proven and field tested design pattern that are sufficiently generic solutions for service-oriented architecture implementations. Some copies of this catalog (900 paged book) were made available at the conference. He advocated that every business domain should (or could) have its own SOA for this is more feasible because there seems to be a SOA fatigue atmosphere . And of course Enterprise wide SOA is very difficult to implement. Some of the patterns sounded to me to lead to ‘fine grained ‘ services.. Away with enterprise SOA and course grained? No, Via (patterns of) cross service transition, data model transformation and rules centralization this could be solved. A bit opportunistic, imho but nevertheless very interesting.
After a book launch and closing keynote there were panel discussions I didn’t attend. In between sessions and in the morning I met some nice people and talked to several acquaintances. I was a nice day.
It was very difficult to choose what sessions to go to on the second day of the symposium. I attended the following sessions:
1. ‘The IBM SOA Governance and management method’ by André Tost: Thorough planned / planning, procedures and responsibilities.
2. ‘Understanding Service Virtualization: taking control of your services by Chris Madrid: Technical; fast talking and information overload.
3. ‘Are Your business processes ready for improvement?’ by Laurent Tarin: BPM trough BPE (ILOG).
4. ‘Addressing SOA fatigue’ by Anne Manes: No nonsense and very understandable, like hearing Anne speak.
5. ‘SOA and EDA benefits and best practices’ by Manas Deb and Clemens Utschig-Utschig: Event handling in SOA, getting used to two different ways to pronounce English in one session
After that, again a book launch; several co authors spoke about their contribution and again I had to tune in to different ways of pronunciation because these co authors come from different continents. Via satellite we could hear Peter Fingar about his book about ’shift 3.0′. The day was closed with 3 panel discussions. Afterwards we cleaned out our booth and went to a Thai restaurant in the center of Amsterdam. We decided not to attend the three day workshops following the symposium.
This was the very first time I took part as sponsor-participant instead of customer-attendee and really enjoyed myself.

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.

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.

Events and SOA

In my opinion events are just as important in a SOA as services. I think it’s not possible to achieve a “real” SOA without addressing events separately, just as we do for services. It can be somewhat confusing that events have there own acronym emphasizing their importance, namely Event Driven Architecture (EDA). Some coin this as the upgraded version of SOA, or SOA 2. How we love 3 (or 4 or 5) letter acronyms Most of these different acronyms only add to the confusion, so I prefer sticking to SOA and emphasize events as integral part of it.

So why are events important?
A service-oriented approach should result in business-value (ROI), otherwise SOA only introduces technical complexity through additional middleware. One of the ways to achieve this is through business-IT alignment. Events play a major role in both of these worlds (business and IT).

Business
Businesses deal with (and are causing) events all the time: a customer moving to a different address, a new purchase order, receiving an invoice from a supplier, sending a bill to a partner, and so on. Entities in a business’ ecosystem such as employees, partners, suppliers and customers all react to these events. They initiate new processes, perform activities, propagate events, and so on. It is therefore logical to incorporate events when modeling business processes, which are at the heart of SOA. Just as in all modellng practices, one wants to model and focus on important aspects. In case of SOA this includes processes, services and events.

IT
From a technical point of view events can achieve asynchronicity and de-coupling. By using publish/subscribe and queueing mechanisms, software components are not required to know of each others existence. They simply subscribe to a topic and act based on received (and subscribed to) events. The other way around, if components have some (intermediate) result or state, they can share this with the rest of the world by publishing an event and then forget about it. These components don’t need to know what other components are interested in this information. Of course you’ll need some glue (i.e. middleware) to implement this.

So what does this mean concretely in a SOA-project? For one thing, besides trying to identify what types of services you have (business services, composite technical services, etc.), also investigate what types of events can be identified. There should be an event-registry besides a service-registry. This does not need to be a full-blown tool at first but can simply be documented using Excel in the beginning. Also define the relationship between processes, services and events. What services publish what type of events? What processes are initiated by what events? What running processes are influenced by what events?

Eliminating paperwork by combining digital imaging tools, content management systems and SOA

It was once said that the advance of ICT technologies such as e-mail would reduce the cost of handling documents and be beneficial for the environment. It would result in less printed paper, right? Everything would be done digitally, right? Well, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Even while technology exists to store most information digitally, lots of organizations still have an archive filled with all kinds of printed documents (invoices, orders, etc.). This is costly (you have to build, rent and/or buy archive space) and not really ‘CO2-neutral’. Especially in case documents are delivered electronically.

One of the related problems is that the process of electronically storing documents has to be compliant with a growing number of standards and laws. ‘Just’ storing documents manually on a file system won’t do.

In a customer case the following technologies are/will be combined to accomplish certified electronic storage of documents:

• Scanners with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software
• Process orchestration using services
• CMS (Content Management System)

How are these technologies combined?
Once documents arrive they are scanned. The OCR software outputs an image of the document and extracts metadata into an XML file. An automated process picks up the XML file, transforms its contents to a canonical data model and invokes a custom SOAP service, also passing the file location of the associated image. The invoked service then uses a Web Service API to store the image into a CMS database and uses the XML data to create and store metadata/attributes for the document.

Why are these technologies complementary?
While a CMS provides reliable and robust storage of electronic documents and provides multiple interfaces (both programmatic and UI-based), process orchestration and SOA implement traceable, auditable and robust processes governing the retrieval and storage of electronic documents. This in turn enables official certification in which stored documents are also ‘legal’ documents.

In this particular case Oracle products are used: the SOA Suite and Content Services (part of Oracle Collaboration Suite). But the same principal can of course be implemented using other technologies available on the market.

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.