Java without the OS: JRockit Virtual Edition (VE)

Am I the only one that's never heard of this before? The Oracle JRockit team is looking at eliminating the OS from the stack required to run Java. This product will be called JRockit VE (not out yet)

Virtualization is rampant with the customers I work with, and in many cases there's no need for a host OS any more. Since the JVM is just another virtual machine, it makes sense in a lot of ways to eliminate the host OS from that stack too.

Oracle won't release this separately, but instead it will underpin Weblogic Server Virtual Edition.

From my notes:

• Will only be available in virtualized environment, and only headless virtualized environments
• Only runs a single Java application
• Expected in CY 2010
• Typical overhead from Linux VM is 1 GB -- overhead from JRockit VE is 2.5 MB
• Supports offline configuration and patching -- not possible with Linux today

This ties in nicely with the appliance push that Oracle is making, by eliminating the host OS building appliances should be quite simpler.

Where do I get my beta copy?

Coolest Thing From OpenWorld 09 So Far: Oracle CEP 11g

I've been most interested so far this year by Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP). This is a product that came over from the BEA acquisition. I'd seen some of it in the past, but everything I've seen so far this year is very impressive.

CEP is a pure-java OSGi container capable of processing a million events per second on commodity hardware. The events can come in from a variety of sources and get processed by something called CQL which is a SQL like language for detecting patterns in events.

The possibilities are unending when you consider all of the devices capable of generating events: GPS devices, cell phones, RFID, temperature sensors, smart meters, etc.

One Thing From James Gosling's Oracle OpenWorld Keynote

He showed a graph of log(CPU clock speed). It was essentially a linear line from 1975 until about 2003. Since then it has been about flat, even down a little bit. Then he overlayed a graph of the # of cores * log(CPU clock speed). After a few years of flat the linear increase resumed again. Chip companies are finding it easier to increase cores than to increase CPU speed.

He then projected this trend out to 2030. The result is a CPU with > 5000 cores.

Hmm -- Maybe I better go buy that Scala book for the plane ride home.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g upcoming features

Friday we had a nice update from Demed L'Her from the SOA product management team. The next (and first) patch set should include:

• Singleton Adapter Service -- allows you to lock down inbound adapters to a single server in a cluster
• Pre/Post processing hooks in the file adapter
• SAR export -- the idea being here that since you can dynamically change policies and other aspects of a deployed composite, this feature will allow you to export the code as it is. One point we discussed was the need to diff this with the code from source code control. this should be possible by importing into JDeveloper.
• Web-based screens to edit business rules and DVM values
• Monitor express -- this allows you to monitor processes at a system level via pre-built monitoring dashboards in BAM

More features that will come a little later:

• Slick SOA Composite/Spring integration
• BPEL 2.0
  
• 10g to 11g instance migration -- this is a big one for those trying to migrate away but that have long-running BPEL processes.
  

I have to mention that they are also working on the developer install experience. This will be a while but will be much appreciated.

Oracle BPM 11g Sneak Peek

Oracle puts together some great labs for Oracle OpenWorld, often of software that's not even GA yet. I got to spend an hour today with a preview release of Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) 11g.

It's impressive stuff -- they've built the UI in JDeveloper, but if you were familiar with prior releases of the former BEA product ALBPM you'll find a lot that's familiar in the designer:




However, under the hood they've moved all of this BPM technology totally over to the FMW 11g technologies such as SOA Composites and ADF Task Flows. The result is an impressive combination of Oracle's latest SOA technologies with the business process modeling. For example all human tasks are now managed by the BPM Worklist app that's part of the SOA Suite:








Another impressive feature is Process Composer, which is a lightweight web-based modeler to modify processes for less technical users:





It also has some slick simulation functionality which looks a lot like what BPA Suite has:





Finally we also got a look at the Enterprise Manager 11g features:





This allows you to track an instance through all of the SOA components and monitor against SLAs.

All of this should be out "early next year".

Oracle OpenWorld Packing List

My 5 essential things when packing for OOW 2009:

1. Good Shoes - No matter where you're staying, OOW is slowly annexing every hotel and meeting room in the city. Expect to walk between venues a lot. Sure there are shuttles, but by the time you wait for a 50 foot bus to crawl through the 40+ thousand extra people on the streets you're usually better off walking.

2. Extra Laptop Battery - There are exactly 23 accessible power outlets in all of Moscone, good luck finding one amongst the masses. I hate taking notes on paper any more though so an extra battery can help you get through the day.

3. Google Maps - San Francisco can be a confusing place. Google Maps on your smartphone cannot only save your butt, but help you find nearby food and drink.

4. Backpack - See #1, lots of walking means a very sore shoulder if you're carrying a heavy bag over your shoulder

5. Red Bull - my typical OOW day starts at 9am and goes until 2am, so whatever you need to stay awake, go for it.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch Day

Today is the much awaited launch of FMW 11g. Summary of today:

• Charles Phillips did his little Complete, Open, Integrated spiel. I wonder if he does this in his sleep. It's a compelling story. The "integrated" part is far from realized yet. If it was I'd be doing something else besides integrating Oracle applications for a living.
• The new tagline is "Foundation for Innovation". I can already see the buses in front of Moscone.
• FMW 11g is available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/index.html (just Weblogic and JDev for now) -- rest is available on edelivery.oracle.com
• It includes: Weblogic, SOA Suite, CEP, Webcenter, IdM, Portal, Forms, Reports, Discoverer, Infrastructure (OID), ADF/JDev (been out for a while).
• Kurian spent a lot of time on the metadata dictionary. This wasn't new news to me, they've been talking about this since OOW 2007. It's a bold idea, let's hope Oracle follows through with a solid implementation.
• Duncan Mills did a ADF demo -- slick but nothing real ground breaking. Also showed an IM client, team tools, and bug tracking integrated into JDev.
• Kurian discussed SOA changes -- integration of SOA, event based computing, business process management into single architecture (really? how much of this is marketing and how much is real?). SCA, JAX-*, WS-*, WS-I
• Kurian introduced Unified Business Process Management platform -- again is this actually out now or coming soon?

Presentation running over -- have to watch the rest tonight and process everything. Back to my day job.

Update: Everything else is up now on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/htdocs/111110_fmw.html

More Google Chrome Market Share Data

8.26% over the past month on javacrawl.com:

That's pretty good, even for a technical audience. That's down from it's peak last September.

Google Fusion Tables vs Oracle (duh)

This is classic(ly stupid): http://www.itworld.com/saas/69183/watch-out-oracle-google-tests-cloud-based-database. Anyone who spends two seconds looking at Fusion Tables would see that it's an interesting Web 2.0 competitor to Microsoft Access. Anyone who knows anything about databases know that comparing Access and Oracle is like comparing my Jetta to a semi truck. They both traverse roads, they both carry passengers and cargo, they both run on fuel. That means they're competitors right?

Whoever this Stephen E. Arnold guy is he doesn't know what an Oracle database is for.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

For those of us that inhabit the Oracle Ecosystem, the Fusion Middleware 11g release is an enormous shifting tectonic plate.

I went back and looked at my notes from Oracle OpenWorld 2007. That's November 2007, more than 18 months ago. Virtually our whole ACE Director middleware session was focused on upcoming features of the 11g release. On July 1st Oracle FMW 11g will be launched. Unforunately I have no advance information of the exact makeup of the upcoming release. Based on almost 6 years of experience as an Oracle partner, I'd be quite shocked if Weblogic, SOA, WebCenter, BI, UCM/ECM, Forms, Reports, Parfait, Beehive, OIM, OVD, OAM, Portal all came out at once. (one of those is fake) So life as an Oracle-focused SI are gonna be a little weird for the next few months. As exciting as all the new shiny toys are, at what point do we put our relationships with our clients on the line by recommending 11g over 10.1.X? Such is the life of an Oracle SI.

Meanwhile, after a brief slowdown, business on the SOA/Integration front is full speed ahead. We've seen more interest in Oracle SOA than ever before. Former/current BEA and Sun customers have been beating down our doors (thanks Larry), and we're seeing an uptick in interest in AIA.

I haven't blogged in a while, twittter is just so much easier to keep updated. Blog posts take a an awful lot of time to compose compared to 140 character tidbits. My twitter user name is @jcjones1515 if you're interested.

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide

Late last year I was involved as a technical reviewer for a new book from Packt Publishing for Oracle SOA Suite developers. Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds are the authors.

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide has now been published. If you are looking to get into the world of Oracle SOA, this is a great guide to get started. It covers all aspects of Oracle SOA 10.1.3.4: Service Bus, BPEL, Business Rules, BAM, Web Services Manager, Human Workflow, Adapters, testing and more. For a full table of contents see the official Packt page.

I just want to say congratulations to Matt & Antony. The whole process has been quite a learning experience for me, and I have a lot of respect for the work by all involved.

 

WSSE Headers in Oracle BPEL

Adding and extracting SOAP headers in BPEL is pretty easy and pretty well documented (a good explanation here).  You can use this to extract or add WSSE credential headers fairly easily.  However, if all you really want to do is add WSSE headers to outbound calls there is a much easier way:

         <partnerLinkBinding name="RI_CustomerManager">

            <property name="wsdlLocation">RI_CustomerManager.wsdl</property>

            <property name="wsseUsername">USERNAME</property>

            <property name="wssePassword">PASSWORD</property>

            <property name="wsseHeaders">credentials</property>

<!-- below needed in 10.1.3.4 -->

            <property name="wsseOASIS2004Compliant">true</property>

         </partnerLinkBinding>

        

The portion in blue above is only necessary in 10.1.3.4

Blackberry Curve 8900 Review

I've spent about a week now with my Curve 8900 and thus far I'm very impressed. Coming from my Pearl the screen, browser, UI, camera, music player' and just about everything is much improved.

Going to a qwerty keyboard from the SureType keyboard after 2 1/2 years has been an adjustment for my thumbs, but I think I'll get over it.

The google apps all work as expected and the addition of GPS makes the Maps app all the sweeter. I also found a nice twitter client called TinyTwitter.

The 8900 comes with wifi support and setting up my home and work networks was a breeze. The jury is still out on UMA. It was super easy to set up and I now use it both at home and work. My inbound sound quality was great but I've had mixed feedback from those on the other line. It may have been something going on with my DSL connection or wifi network.

I'm glad blackberry finally figured out that people want to use normal headphones with their phones and included the appropriate jack. I'm not thrilled about the move to microUSB, only because it means all my miniUSB cables don't work.

I would say battery life is a little worse than my pearl, but with a bigger brighter screen, a wifi and GPS radio I guess that's to be expected.

All in all, it's a great phone.

Technology RFPs

[[blogger.com has been working just fine. Do not adjust your dial.  This is my first post since September.  I've been spending my free time reviewing an Oracle SOA book (more on that later), remembering how bad I am at Linear Algebra, and working out (ugh)]]

At Zirous we do a fair amount of local, state, and federal government work, meaning we respond to a lot of RFPs.  If you're not familiar with the RFP process it basically goes like this:

• A government agency issues an RFP which either contains 1) A small number of vague requirements because no one at the agency has a detailed idea of what they actually want to do or 2) 150 pages of requirements of which the agency plans to do about 5% but some magazine, vendor, or sales guy told them they really need.
• This RFP also asks for a fixed bid quote which you are held to down to the penny, but the agency is free to "interpret" your bid to include pretty much whatever they want.
• Bidders usually get one shot at written questions, which the agency will misunderstand or answer vaguely or incompletely.
• Vendors will be given no more than 34 mintues and 16 seconds to produce a response which can go over 100 pages.
• 22 printed copies have to be delivered to the agency and attach every product manual in triplicate. 
  
• After all of this the agency will take 3 to 22 months to make their final decision of which vendor to select.

...but I shouldn't complain.  A lot of our business at Zirous is derived from RFPs, and we're getting very good at winning RFPs.   Don't get me wrong.  I don't hate the player, I hate the game -- this is a terrible way to procure software and IT services.  You are not buying a fleet of cars or 6 forklifts.  There is too little feedback in the RFP system for getting something as complex and flexible as enterprise software.  Selecting a vendor whether it be to buy software or procure services should involve a free flow of information back and forth.

I know that the idea is to make an objective decision and eliminate sweetheart deals.  Anyone who has done a few RFPs knows that ultimately it's a subjective decision.  No matter how many scoring spreadsheets and formulas they use, the people on the selection committee will go with the software or solution or vendor they "like" the best.  Who they "like" is often deterimined before a single score has been calculated.  The hard part for us as a hopeful vendor is figuring out what the committee is looking for.  If you've been on the other side of this process, I'd love to hear from you...  

OpenWorld08: Elvis Costello

The customer appreciation event last night was as usual a total blast.  We mostly shuffled our way as close to the stage as possible and caught some good shows.  Gin Blossoms were good.  I'm not a Seal fan but Elvis Costello was maybe the best concert I've ever been to.  We were about 10 rows back.  

I'm back at the airport and yet another OOW is in the books.  As usual it was fun, exhausting, and invigorating all at the same time.  Went to the SOA CAB meeting this morning and everyone looked pretty exhausted.  Learned some good stuff though and had some good discussions.