deltalounge

A tweet by meneer pointed me to this promotional video:

Don’t think this will settle the score for Java. However it is a good distraction… What are your thoughts? Please leave them in the comments.

Previous I mentioned a preview of the 11g R1 PS2 new features. Here are a few links for this new release – 11.1.1.3.0:

• SOA Suite 11g R1 PS2 new features.
• Download page
• The documentation index will probably be updated soon.

Existing PS1 users simply apply the patch to upgrade to 11.1.1.3.0.

Other releases

• Oracle Service Bus OSB 11g R1
• Business Process Management BPM 11g R1

From the time the news that Oracle was going to acquire Sun there has been much debate on what this would mean for MySQL. Today Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, revealed the future of MySQL in a keynote at The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010. The simple message was:

MySQL matters to Oracle.

Prior to this keynote mister Screven told Reuters:

We are increasing our investment in MySQL… on every front.

Oracle is already the biggest player in the database market. With Microsoft’s SQL Server as the target for MySQL, Oracle believes it can boost it’s sales. From this perspective MySQL gives Oracle an entry to other parts of the market. While on an other aspect Oracle has improve the relation with Microsoft, since it’s Operating System Windows is the number-one destination for MySQL downloads! While Linux is the number-one OS for deployments.

InfoWorld also had an interview with Edward Screven before the keynote. Here are some quotes from the InfoWorld interview:

MySQL has some properties that Oracle does not,It’s small, it’s easy to install. It’s easy for developers to get going with it.

And on the open source community edition:

I don’t see foresee any substantial changes from how MySQL AB or Sun made the distinction [between what was in the community and commercial editions]. I expect that core features will end up in community edition. There will be some value-add, like monitoring or backup, that make sense in the enterprise edition.

and

It would be a mistake for us to starve the community edition because that would impinge upon the ubiquity of MySQL.

The MySQL community now includes several forks of the MySQL core tool like MariaDB and Drizzle. Both produced by ex-MySQL employees. These are experimenting with different data storage engines and other enhancements.

I think it will be hard for those guys to create a forked product with the kind of commercial support that our customers need for production applications. We’re really focused on ensuring that MySQL becomes a better product and appeals to our customers. What we’re fundamentally selling here is support.

Sources: Reuters and InfoWorld

Other Sources

• The Register: Oracle drops top architect into MySQL skeptic zone
• The Wall Street Journal: Here’s proof we’ll improve MySQL

Recently I was going through an SOA Implementation Survey when I saw the question as shown in the screen-shot. Well I’ve always been under the impression that Microsoft does have an Application Platform (although I must admit even after Google-ing I’m not sure what it is exactly), even for SOA. Did I miss something or is it occasionally just hard to come up with a good survey? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

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

Recently, in a press release, Oracle introduced Oracle SOA Governance. This component of Fusion Middleware consist of the following components:

1. Oracle Enterprise Repository – OER
2. Oracle Service Registry
3. SOA Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager (SOA Management Pack)
4. Web Service Manager

According to the press release it is already fully integrated with Oracle Amberpoint:

Oracle SOA Goverance 11g is fully integrated with Oracle AmberPoint, a leader in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Management. The new solution provides organizations more continuity of closed-loop governance processes across both Oracle and third party applications.

Besides that it is not clear to me what is new. The latest version of the Enterprise Repository was release a month ago. Any ideas? Please leave them in the comments.

On January 27th Larry Ellison and other Oracle executives outlined the Oracle Sun strategy in a live event. The webcast and sheets are available online. There is also a FAQ overview available.

Besides that there is the Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series. If you are into Java or Middleware developement, I think the message boils down to these few sheets:

Development Tools

Application Server

Glassfish and WebLogic will coexist and share logic/components.

SOA products

Oh, and WebCenter will be the strategic portal offering.

Previous post on the subject:

• Integration perspective
• Oracle gets MySQL for free

This evening while playing with WinDirStat (using the Portable Apps version) I took the following screenshot:

It shows the growth of Oracle JDeveloper in size, number of files, and subdirectories. The most recent version is more than twice as big as 10.1.3.3. Also notice the difference between a 11.1.1.0 with and without the SOA Suite extension (marked with FMW).
SQL Developer also shows some growth. A large part of this is because the JDK has been expanded.

To some of us it came as a surprise that SOA Suite design time stuff was no longer an integral part of the Oracle IDE. To use BPEL, Mediator, Human Task, and Adapters the soa-jdev-extension is required.

The SOA extension can be acquired using the menu Help | Check for updates, clicking Next, and selecting Oracle Fusion Middleware Products. Select Oracle SOA Composite Editor and click next to start the download. Since the extension is over 200 MB this could take a few minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection. When the download has finished, the version number details are shown and you’ll click finish to start using it.

Install from local file

If the download described above is not working for you, try the install from local file option.
Go to the Fusion Middleware Products Update Center to select the correct version of the Oracle SOA Composite Editor to go with your version of JDeveloper 11g. If you’re using JDeveloper 11g R2 you’ll find it here. The file is called soa-jdev-extension.zip.

Download the extension, and instead of selecting the Search Update Centers option during step 2 of the upgrade you choose the Install From Local File option and the appropriate file. This is displayed in the screenshot. From here on it is a Next - Next - Finish operation.

Other JDeveloper extensions

Other extensions like the AIA Composite Application Framework, PHP extension, and the SQL Developer extension can be found in the update center.

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