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.

OpenWorld08: Oracle on Amazon EC2

This may be the biggest news of the conference this week.  Most Oracle products are now certified on Amazon EC2.  According to the licensing doc, for products that are Standard Edition or Standard Edition One, 1 CPU = 4 virtual cores.  For EE products 1 CPU = 2 virtual cores, which is equivalent to the rules for Intel processors.

Additionally there are AMI (Amazon Machine Images) available for download w/ standard configurations.  Unfortunately it looks like there are no Middleware images yet.

OpenWorld08: BPEL 10.1.3.4 and "Lost Instances"

Clemens did a great session yesterday afternoon on SOA troubleshooting.  He gave a nice overview of the threading and transaction architecture of BPEL and ESB.

He addressed the famous "lost instance" issue with BPEL, which can happen when errors occur inside a BPEL process before it's had a chance to persist itself to the database.  Of most interest to me is the fact that in 10.1.3.4, the dehydration of the audit trail data will occur asynchronously in a second JTA transaction.  The only issue we have with going to 10.1.3.4 for some of our clients is it is missing some important bug fixes from the 10.1.3.3.1 branch of the code.  Clemens mentioned that MLR 1 (for 10.1.3.4) is coming soon to resolve this issue.

OpenWorld08: SOA in EBS 12.1

Sat through an interesting session yesterday about some of the SOA features they are embedding into the next EBS 12 release.  Essentially they are wrapping all of the existing interfaces (PL/SQL, Open Interface Tables) with a thin web service layer to provide a SOAP/HTTP interface.  They also have a method for adding your own custom APIs into this system.

An implication of this is it eliminates the need for the Oracle Apps Adapter for those who are moving to EBS12.1.  

One of the things we discussed during the Q&A is the fine-grained nature of the existing APIs and the need to wrap these in your own custom interfaces.  This is a very common issue and this doesn't really help this at all.  

OpenWorld08: Monday Keynote (aka, the Chuck and Chuck show)

Coming in I wasn't expecting any big announcements today.  Anything major will probably come Wednesday at Ellison's keynote.

Some OOW stats: 43,000 attendees this year, 310 buses, 20x300 foot wide HD screen, $100M economic impact on Bay Area

Michael Phelps made a cameo it only lasted about a minute.  

Oracle Beehive was the one major new announcements.  This is integrated collaboration tool.  Oracle has tried this before (Collab Suite) to a pretty poor result.  This seems to be built on top of a bunch of the FMW stack: ECM, WebCenter, and BPEL.  One thing they did get right this time is embrace that Outlook 2007 and most folks are more comfortable in there.  It also incorporates aspects of the Identity Management Suite, including the IRM technology of revoking access to documents.

Also some discussion of Oracle VM.  Only interesting thing I caught was that RAC will be certified on VM configurations

OpenWorld08: My Oracle Support (Metalink is dead?)

Chuck and Chuck just annnounced "My Oracle Support".  Please Please Please tell me that this means Metalink is dead. Metalink is possibly the worst website I've ever used in my life.

OpenWorld08: Oracle BPM/BPEL Strategy

One of the interesting tidbits from yesterday's briefing was that Oracle is going to converge the BPM and BPEL runtimes into a single business process engine that can execute both BPEL and BPMN2.0.  They've positioned BPEL as the tool for system level integration, while process level integration will be focused on Oracle BPM.    To me this means that the human workflow components of BPEL may be phased out.  What I've heard from the Zirous folks that have used BPM is that it has superior human workflow capabilities.