The Why move to SOA Suite 11g blog post, showed me that one of the important benefits of the OFM 11g release slipped to the back of my head… Pat Shepherd actually throws in a bonus – 11th reason:
BAM has been rewritten entirely in Java offering platform choice and better performance
From the integration point of view it is great that BAM is now available on the J2EE stack (instead of MS ISS). This will lower the costs for companies that want to use BAM besides the SOA Suite. Not only brought this down the requirements for the machine it is running on (I was able to run BAM server besides the rest of the SOA stuff and JDeveloper on my laptop – although it wasn’t the most performant system ever witnessed). Besides that the cost of managing the platform will be lower since there is only one type of application server involved.
MS is still needed for BAM…
For those who want to get rid of MS asap, there is sad news: Microsoft Internet Explorer is still needed in this release. This is due to the fact that al those great graphs that can be created, use ActiveX controls VML (Thanks Sanjay). VML is a Microsoft and Macromedia specific XML language to produce vector graphics. The open standard for vector graphics is SVG (W3C SVG home).
BAM links
The BAM User Guide can be found here. Beside the documentation there are already some interesting blogposts on BAM in 11g Release 1 available.
As a last word I’d like to add that with the 11g release of BAM i’m much more comfortable with putting BAM into play at a customers site.
After a restore of the Application Server and Oracle SOA Suite we were unable to start OHS (Oracle HTTP Server). The result of opmnctl status was:
Processes in Instance: <<>>
---------------------------------+--------------------+---------+---------
ias-component | process-type | pid | status
---------------------------------+--------------------+---------+---------
OC4JGroup:admin_group | OC4J:admin_apps | 241672 | Alive
ASG | ASG | N/A | Down
OC4JGroup:default_group | OC4J:oc4j_soa | 409618 | Alive
OC4JGroup:default_group | OC4J:home | 340092 | Alive
HTTP_Server | HTTP_Server | 462964 | Down
The command opmnctl startproc ias-component=HTTP_Server resulted in:
Error
--> Process (pid=13365)
failed to start a managed process after the maximum retry limit
The log file /opmn/logs/HTTP_Server~1.log. Was not very helpfull:
--------
09/08/19 10:25:37 Start process
--------
ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin/apachectl startssl: execing httpd
After a lot of Google, OTN and searching on our server we found out that the owner and rights for the .apachectl somehow got lost during the back up (compression?) or restore operation. On UNIX the HTTP server should run as root. Changing the ownership and rights as described in the link solved our problem:
- Change to root user
- Navigate to
ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin and execute the following command:
chown root .apachectlchmod 6750 .apachectl- Exit root.
SOA Suite 11g
Searching the web for more information on Fusion Middleware and Oracle SOA Suite 11g, I found that
Getting started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g will be released within the coming weeks. This hands-on tutorial covers step-by-step material to train new and experienced SOA developers, in both the basics of SOA Suite, SCA and the more advanced aspects. More details on the book can be found
here.
Expect a review of this book on this blog as soon as I get my hands on it.
The results of a recent Forrester survey show that Enterprise Architects have a strong influence on technology purchase decisions. 75% of the respondents said that Enterprise Architects need to sign-off these decisions.
Besides that 85% of respondent sees Enterprise Architects influence on purchase decisions of technology infrastructure as at least important.
Architects however did not inflate the importance of their role, responsability, and the importance of it. CIO’s and other IT executives rated their influence more highly than Enterprise Architects themselves.
Need for governance processes
The results show that most organisations have a meaningful governance process in place to keep purchase aligned with technology strategy. Companies that don’t have Enterprise Architects consulting, reviewing, or otherwise involved are significantly behind their peers. This also goes for the ones that don’t have formalised processes for the acquisition of technology.
Gartner has taken a look into the recently released Fusion Middleware 11g R1. They see Oracle refining and reasserting its middleware strategy with this release. The nuance has also been brought in this blog before:
The stated objective for OFM 11g is to be “complete, integrated, hot-pluggable, best-of-breed,” all of which are achieved in OFM 11g to a degree, although each will require additional investment from Oracle over time.
To customers it is important to notice that OFM 11g is the foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA), Oracle’s next generation of packaged business applications. This leverages the need to create an excellent product for Oracle, because it has to eat it’s own dog food here. One can expect that Oracle will continue investing in this set of products.
The only uncertainty is to what extent the acquisition of Sun Microsystems will impact the large range of products in OFM. This introduces some challenges, resulting in changes in some of the OFM products (no severe cases expected here).
iPod for the enterprise
Oracle refers to a strategy like the recently introduced “database machine” as the iPod for the enterprise. First product in this range is a highly optimized database appliance, with pre-installed, pre-configured RDBMS in a hardware arrangement, including processing and storage capabilities.
This is a new direction for Oracle. With the Sun acquisition Oracle is no longer dependent on partners for the technology, knowledge, skills and hardware. It is expected that a middleware appliance will be available within a year. Here the Sun statement “software is free” could be turned to “hardware is free”. Oracle afterall stays a software company and could provide hardware for their customers convenience.