deltalounge

Oracle released the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Administration Guide 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.1) documentation. It is part of the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Documentation.

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is system management software that delivers centralized monitoring, administration, and life-cycle management functionality for the complete IT infrastructure, including systems running Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.

Wishing you and your loved ones all the best for 2012!

That you may enjoy life’s little (and not so little) miracles each and every day.

Oracle WebLogic Server 12c (12.1.1) is available for download. The main themes of the new release are according to Oracle:

• Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity
• Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization
• Integrated Traffic Management
• Enhanced Availability and Disaster Recovery
• Much Higher Performance
• Seamless Upgrade

WebLogic Server 12 is available as installer or ZIP distribution. Download WebLogic Server 12c. Other useful links:

• The documentation library, including the Installation Guide.
• Blog post by Arun Gupta on using the WLS 12c – Using Zip Installer
• Markus Eisele already published already quite some 12c post on his blog.

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (12.1.1) available

Shortly after WLS 12c Oracle also has released OEPE 12.1.1 – Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. It is certified on Windows 7/XP/Vista, MacOS, and Linux. OEPE is supported on JDK 6.

• The installation guide for OEPE.
• The installer is available both as ZIP and Full Installer. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse full installers include Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle Coherence 3.7.1.
• OEPE Homepage

Update: WebLogic 12.1.1 VirtualBox Appliance available

With OTN Virtual Developer Day a WebLogic 12c VirtualBox appliance became available. On the appliance there are Labs and other Java development tools like: Hudson, Subversion, Maven, NetBeans IDE, and Eclipse (including OEPE).

Still wanted to share some thought and ideas with you I took from the LAC 2011 – the largest symposium in The Netherlands on architecture in the digital world. The larger part of this post is taken from the key note on Speed and Innovation through Architecture by Jan Bosch. He states:

Speed trumps any other improvement R&D can provide to the company.

Speed and time to market deliver far more value than increasing the efficiency of a process. This especially holds for non-repetitive process like (software) product creation. To increase the speed and reduce time to market we should focus on the following aspects:

• Small teams
• Architecture
• Release process

Small teams

Small teams work on the people side because a team member can experience the fruits of his or her individual efforts while on the other hand they contain the rewarding social element of camaraderie. Both are necessary for people to see their work as fulfilling.
On the process side, small teams increase speed because of the lowered need for coordination within the team and the existence of complexity. A team larger than three is required because of the need to learn from each other, the ability to deliver significant work and enable preservation of knowledge from the feedback the team has encountered. To get speed in the team at a high level the team needs to be self directed and managed.

Architecture – Keep it simple

First and foremost make sure your architecture enables you to simplify things! Keep in mind that rules and constraints can create complexity. And that is something you wanted to avoid when you started with architecture in the first place.

Architecture provides simplicity, compositionality and is designed in parallel with software development

An example would be to limit the number of things a team has to worry about during development. This could be done by applying the 3 API rule and there are other ways as well. Allways ask the questions whether the architecture enables the development team to perform.

Release process

In order to get speed into your development process you need to know/measure what people do, not what they think. Factor out opinion and chose data. To get proper results here you need a short PDCA cycle. Check and measure to get results back into your development process. This requires that you release early and often. Which in turn demands automated deployment and test.

While doing some research on the web I came across a Service Component Architecture Diagram Generator. The script generates diagrams for applications based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) model. This can be a great aid to understand the relations between components in large BPEL or SOA applications.

Download the tool here. The readme is over here. The script runs on Linux/Unix and has primarily been tested with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g applications but should work with other BPEL or SOA frameworks.

Recently McGraw Hill published the Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g Handbook. It is available on their site and at Amazon.com.

Here is the table of contents with the links to the free chapters:

Part I: Introduction
1. BPM – Background
2. Standards in BPM
3. BPM Suite 11g – Overview

Part II: Mastering Oracle BPM 11g

4. Quick Learners Guide to Oracle BPM 11g
5. Business Process Modeling and Implementation using BPMN 2.0
6. Mastering Business Rules
7. Advanced Human Tasks
8. Developing Rich User Interfaces for BPM with ADF

Part III: Essentials of Oracle BPM Methodology

9. Planning a BPM Adoption
10. Strategic Analysis, Process Selection and Design
11. Technical Design and Project Delivery Strategies

While the NoSQL Database Community Edition still waits for final license approval, Oracle has released it’s NoSQL Database, Enterprise Edition 1.1.100. The download is available on OTN.

The Oracle NoSQL Database is a distributed key-value database. It is designed to provide highly reliable, scalable and available data storage across a configurable set of systems that function as storage nodes.

The documentation page is still rather empty. However Technical Overview and a Data Sheet are already available.

Oracle NoSQL is a key offering in Oracle’s portfolio of Big Data products. The product is based on the Java version of Berkeley DB, an open source database used in embedded systems.

Update

• The NoSQL documentation is available.
• A great in depth look into Oracle NoSQL. Also read the discussion over there.

Just uploaded the presentation I gave at the Seminar “Lean & Agile IT: beter resultaat, betrokkenheid en IT volwassenheid” (Dutch) on Lean Integration. Besides the aspect of getting a lean process to create integrations we also focused on how integration is lean in the sense that it can create value.

Just found out that there is a new site for SOA Suite 11g sample code. It is availble on Java.Net. Check it out for great examples.

Since I had to test some webpages with IE6 (please don’t ask), I wanted to use Windows XP Mode on my Windows 7 laptop (actually run it in VMWare as described here). Microsoft provides virtual machines (vhd files) to run in Microsoft Virtual PC.

Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 is released as an update for Windows 7, and has the Knowledge Base Article ID of KB958559. So I tried to install it. That went actually pretty well until I had to reboot my laptop. At about 98% of the update process during the reboot it gave an error and rolled back the update. The log showed:

Installation failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0×80004005: Update for Windows KB958559

Digging into the support forums and blog posts on the subject, the most common working solution I found to the problem was to uninstall VMWare and/or VirtualBox. After the uninstall you can install Virtual PC without the error and after that reinstall VMWare and/or VirtualBox.