deltalounge

Yesterday Clemens Utschig posted a list of SOA Suite 11gR1 Patchset 2 ~ 11.1.1.3.0 (SOA) features. He says it is a non-exhaustive list. It contains features like:

• Full and complete support for BPEL 2.0 (designtime and runtime)
• Reintroduction of “BPEL domains” – that are called Partitions because there are already WebLogic Domains
• Enhancements to BPEL’s transactional behavior and audit-trail
• Full BPMN 2.0 support – part of BPM 11g which runs on top of 11g PS2 SOA core

Update: for the Java developer

In an additional post the features for the Java developer were announced. These include:

• Support for interface.java as a first class citizen next to interface.wsdl
• Full support for Spring as component implementation
• Support for EJB bindings (binding.ejb)
• Invocation of a composite service

As I recently blogged the book Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 – A Hands-On Tutorial has my interest. Last week my copy arrived.

In a blogpost Clemens Utschig writes about this book:

Heidi and her team have done a tremendous job to structure the labs and hands-on exercises in a didactic, explanatory way – with solutions all the way through. This way the book serves not just as a tutorial, but also as a reference bible when it comes to implementation of specific features and concepts.

Being familiar with the labs and hands-on for the SOA Suite from the earlier versions up to 11g R1, and having read the first four chapters, I agree with Clemens. It is a good tutorial, and learning path that includes some great tips on how to overcome the pitfalls you could run into.

SOA Suite 11gR1 Book resources

To get an impression of the book you can download a sample chapter here (pdf). There aren’t any errata (yet).

Artifacts for the tutorial part are available for download. An overview of the required software can be found on the Release Downloads for Oracle SOA Suite pages of OTN. These include the link for download.

SOA Suite patch set 5 – also known as SOA Suite 10.1.3.5 – is available, as is mentioned in this blog post. The patch can be downloaded here. We have been waiting for this patch as described earlier. The release document can be found here.

Metalink doc.id 745094.1 promises that 10.1.3.5 is the SOA Suite 10g release that wil be supported on WebLogic 10.3. Where older release were supported on 9.2 (although for 10.1.3.4 requiring the patch 490612 and patch 7337034).

So far the Metalink note has not been updated and is still stating a “planned” support. It could be that it is still a little premature to draw conclusions, since the released downloads and documentation pages haven’t yet been update with the information on this release.
Beside that no information on support on WebLogic 10.3 was found in the release documentation. The OTN downloaded page still features SOASuite10133OnWeblogic.

There are two places to determine the version of the SOA Suite you are running:

• The SOA Suite welcome screen
• Oracle patch utility

SOA Suite welcome screen

This is the page that is displayed when you navigate to:
http://your-SOA-Suite-host:its-port/
It contains a part that looks like this image:

Oracle patch utility

For a more detailed look we turn to the Oracle patch utility OPatch. The OPatch utility is located in the /OPatch directory. It is run with options and command-line arguments. A User’s guide can be found here.

The lsinventory command reports what has been installed on the system for a particular Oracle home directory, or for all installations. A result for using this command is shown in the screenshot:

One can use this info in combination with metalink.

Overview of SOA Suite versions

An overview of all release downloads can be found on OTN.

As in previous releases there is a Human Workflow component in the SOA Suite. Basically this component supports the interaction of humans with the process, like approval, exception management, and other activities to advance the process. The image gives a global impression of the component.

What is new in Human Workflow 11g

The Human Workflow has become more of a separate component compared to the previous SOA Suite release. Where it was more tightly integrated with BPEL. This is considered a good thing, since it can be used from other components than BPEL.

Like with all the new stuff in the 11g R1 release there is now End to end instance tracking through BPEL, mediator, and workflow. Which makes debugging and application management a lot easier. Another step forward is that the engine can be configured, monitored and managed from Enterprise Manager.

There are also serious enhancements in the task routing possibilities. Oracle Business Rules can now be used to define complex task routing scenarios. In previous versions these were custom coded or created in BPEL. On the security side finer-grain access-level policies have been added. This allows you to define who can see and act on different parts of a task.

New worklist application

The most visible enhancement is the new worklist application. In previous releases we would advise customers to not use the worklist application, because it used “old” technology, it was ugly, and it was supposed to be an unsupported demo. Now the interface is up to par.

Judge for yourself with this screenshot that was taken while playing with the purchase order demo / tutorial. Besides that there is now also better support to auto-generate Task Display Forms. If yoy want to learn more visit the Developer Guide or play around with the samples for Human Workflow .

Within a week from the launch of FMW 11g I was able to to get a good first impression of this milestone release. We attended the SOA Suite Foundation training that was lead by Oracle PTS. Basically this leads you through the OrderBooking order demo / tutorial. This gives a good impression of the foundations and possibilities of SOA Suite 11g.

Integrated

One of the key marketing terms for FMW 11g release is integrated. And indeed Oracle has made a great step in integrating SOA Suite components, as well as integrating SOA Suite with Weblogic server and it’s (monitoring) tools. However note that even if in the licensing Oracle Service Bus is in the package… It is still a separate product in this release. OSB is a sparate download and has to be installed next to the SOA Suite. Off course since it’s BEA background it has integration with Weblogic.

Part of the great stuff can be seen in the screenshot. It shows the flow through the composite application. After the message is received, it is routed by Mediator (former ESB). Which does it’s magic and sends it to two adapters ( in this case a file and a BAM adapter), and a BPEL process. The BPEL process in turn calls a decision service as implemented with Oracle Rules, and a JMS adapter.

This one common console to view status of both BPEL and Mediator (formerly known as ESB) is a great enhancement. A so called ecid (a global ID ) is used for this end to end tracking. This has really been brought to the next level. However I was a little disapointed that OSB has not been integrated (yet, as we were told) in the integral monitoring using ecid’s.

Composite

The SCA part is a great aid to create and manage composite applications. SCA is based on the idea that business function are provided as a series of services, which are assembled together to create solutions that serve a particular business need. These composite applications can contain both new services created specifically for the application and also business function from existing systems and applications, reused as part of the composition. SCA provides a model both for the composition of services and also for the creation of service components, including the reuse of existing application function within SCA compositions.

The included screenshot gives a good overview of how a composite looks. The example contains Mediator (purple), BPEL (blue), Human Task (green), Business Rule (yellow), and Adapter (white) parts.

Please note that a composite applications, don’t have to be a SOA applications. Using all kinds of adapters in a composite looks great… and from an architectural perspective it could be argued that it is wise to only allow (web) service adapters to the Service Bus (that could be implemented with OSB).

Once again Mike van Alst got me thinking on some aspects of implementing and managing SOA environments. In his blog post Mike states that he is moving away from the idea that SOA is process driven. I recognize the problems with long running process he describes. These have a great effect on maintainability and manageability of the (BPEL) processes and SOA software infrastructure.

At this time I’m still favoring a process driven approach over an event or message driven approach. The process driven approach has an intrinsic value that none of the other come even close to. It is as close to the day to day operation of an organization as you can get. This implicitly closes a potential gap between business and IT. When choosing a message or event driven approach other mechanisms have to be introduced to bridge this.

To get perspective on the matter, it is important to realize that the arguments presented aren’t on the design, but on the management part of the cycle. Besides that they deal with a subset of all business processes: long running business processes, and especially those that have a high volume of instances.

Decomposing the process, and arranging the parts using another approach than a process orchestration tool moves us away from the Process Centralization pattern. In short this reopens the problem that process logic is not stored in a central location. Which also has a negative impact on management and maintenance of the solution to be implemented.
So there’s the challenge to separate the concern for the process logic, and on the other hand have a platform the accomedates upgrading both your (BPEL) processes and the underlying software infrastructure.

For those of you who didn’t notice… It is discover beta documentation week in the Oracle blogosphere. All were found somewhere here.

Anyway these give a great preview of Fusion Middleware Performance Guide (Release 11.1.1) and the next version of JDeveloper, including some SOA Suite documentation.

Update May 27th, 2009 Fast paced… the documentation has been removed If any of you have downloaded PDFs please let me know.

Update June 8th, 2009 So far I received a PDF copy of the Fusion Middleware Performance Guide (Release 11.1.1). If you are interested let me know.

Update July 1th, 2009The production documentation for 11g Release 1 is now available.