Quick tip: In case you need to uninstall JDeveloper for example when installing a new version of JDeveloper or WebLogic Server, here is how:
Locate and run from the JDeveloper / Middleware home (eg C:\Oracle\Middleware ):

• On Windows: \utils\uninstall\uninstall.exe
• On Linux, Unix and Mac OS: /utils/uninstall/uninstall

You can use the silent mode parameter: -mode=silent for the uninstall on all supported systems.

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To create Oracle BPM processess with JDeveloper you need to install the BPM Studio extension. This is similar to installing the SOA Suite extension.

Ensure that the desired version of JDeveloper is installed. You can download JDeveloper here. Should you be unsure on how to install JDeveloper check the SOA Suite quick start guide to guide you.

Install JDeveloper BPM Studio extension

Install JDeveloper in a seperate Middleware Home. When starting JDeveloper choose the “Default” role. To enable JDeveloper to perform development for the SOA Suite and develop and deploy SCA composites you have to install an extension called SOA Composite Editor. When you want to develop BPM processess you need the BPM Studio extension following these steps:

• Select Help > Check for Updates
• Click Next
• Select Oracle Fusion Middleware Products and Official Oracle Extensions and Updates and click Next
• Select Oracle SOA Composite Editor and Oracle BPM Studio 11g and click Next
• Check the update has finished and click finished
• Restart JDeveloper and you’re good to go

Should you choose to install these extensions from a local file make shure you have the correct version for your JDeveloper and SOA Suite install. You can find these extensions in the JDeveloper Update Center. There is also a JDev extensions blog.

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While preparing guidelines for the usage of the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) I was looking for a definition of a Service Bus. There wasn’t one on my blog yet (more posts on integration) so i decided to use the following and share them with you.

Forrester Service Bus definition

From 2009 Forrester has used this one:

An intermediary that provides core functions to makes a set of reusable services widely available, plus extended functions that simplify the use of the ESB in a real-world IT environment.

Erl Service Bus definition

Thomas Erl offers the following description of a Service Bus::

An enterprise service bus represents an environment designed to foster sophisticated interconnectivity between services. It establishes an intermediate layer of processing that can help overcome common problems associated with reliability, scalability, and communications disparity.

An Enterprise Service Bus is seen by Erl et al as a pattern. That is why it is even more important to share what that patterns is. Later on I’ll also shortly describe the VETRO pattern. Also a very useful pattern to use when comparing integration tools or developing guide lines.

Erl Enterprise Service Bus pattern

On the SOA patterns site we learn that an enterprise service bus represents an environment designed to foster sophisticated interconnectivity between services. The Enterprise Service Bus pattern is a composite pattern based on:

• Asynchronous Queuing basically an intermediary buffer, allowing service and consumers to process messages independently by remaining temporally decoupled.
• Service Broker composed of the following patterns
• - Data Model transformation to convert data between disparate schema structures.
• - Data Format transformation to dynamically translate one data format into another.
• - Protocol bridging to enable communication between different communication protocols by dynamically converting one protocol to another at runtime.
• Intermediate routing meaning message paths can be dynamically determined through the use of intermediary routing logic.
• With optional the following patterns: Reliable Messaging, Policy Centralization, Rules Centralization, and Event-Driven Messaging. Also have a look at slide 12 etc of the SOA Symposium Service Bus presentation.

VETRO pattern for Service Bus

The VETRO pattern was introduced by David Chappell, writer of the 2004 book Enterprise Service Bus.

• V – Validate: Validation of messages eg based on XSD or schematron.
• E – Enrich: Adding data from applications the message doesn’t originate from.
• T – Transform: Transform the data model, data format or the protocol used to send the message.
• R – Routing: Determine at runtime where to send the message to.
• E – Execute: You can see this as calling the implementation.

We also used this pattern to compare Oracle integration tools and infrastructure. It can be very well used while choosing the appropriate tools for a job and deciding on guidelines on how to use these tools.

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Just found out I forgot to publish the Mind Map I used while studying for my scrum master certification. The mind map is based on the scrum guide. Download the scrum guide mind map pdf.

Scrum Team

• Product owner: Responsable for maximizing the value of the product. She manages the Product Backlog.
• Development Team: Does the work to deliver the releasable increment. The team is self-organizing and because of that needs to be cross-functional. It’s size shoud be somewhere beteen 3 and 9.
• Scrum master: A servant leader who makes sure scrum is understood and enacted.

Scrum Events

• Sprint: Time-box (month) to create the useable, potential releasable product ‘Increment’. Can be cancelled only by the Product Owner
• Sprint Planning Meeting: Or actually a part focussing on the What and part on the How. On the what side focus on Forecast functionality based on the Product Backlog, Latest Increment, Projected capacity of the Development Team and Past performance of the Development Team. The How boils down to the so called Sprint Backlog.
• Daily scrum: is performed by the Development team and answers 4 questions in 15 minutes: What has been accomplished? What will be done next? What obstacles are in the way? And syncs activities and plan for next 24 hours.
• Sprint Review: Held to inspect the increment and adapt the Product Backlog. Time-boxed at 4 hours.
• Sprint Retrospective: Where the Scrum Team inspect itself on people, relations, processes and tools. Besides that it plans for improvements (adapt). Time-boxed at 4 hours.

Scrum Artifacts

• Product Backlog: with description, order/priority and estimate. Maintained by backlog grooming.
• Sprint Backlog: Monitor sprint progress on the (total) work remaining. Set of Backlog items selected for the Sprint + a plan for delivering the product Increment and realizing the Sprint Goal.
• Increment: The sum of all the Product Backlog items completed during a Sprint and all previous Sprints.

Definition of done

The definition of done is used to have a shared understanding of “done”. You can find a good definition of done example on this blog.

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According to research by the The Global Language Monitor:

SOA continues its reign as most confusing acronym

The Global Language Monitor is a company that collectively documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, with a particular emphasis upon the English language. GLM is known for among others its list of High Tech buzzwords. Here is their top 5 of Tech Buzzwords of the Second Decade of the 21st century, thus far (2010, 2011 & 2012) everybody uses but don’t quite understand (with commentary):

1. Big Data — Big Data is the biggest buzzword. It has been called the key to new waves of productivity growth, essential to the US place in global economics, and more. Now if only we could agree on exactly what this means and how we get there. (By the way, consider yottabytes: a quadrillion gigabytes. Hint: Just think a lotta bytes.)
2. The Cloud — The Cloud, in various manifestations has been ranked No. 1 for 2008, No, 4 overall for the decade, and now as No. 2 for 2012. Still all very nebulous.
3. The Next Big Thing — A cliche rendered nearly meaningless by the innumerable daily claims made by VCs, entrepreneurs, college drop-outs, etc. Actually, you can count the history of next big things on your fingers, and possibly toes.
4. Social Discovery — Webster’s 1910 definition. “Consisting in union of mutual converse,” might be an excellent corporate strategy.
5. Web 2.0 (3.0, and so on) — Ranked as the 1,000,000th English-language word in 2009, it just keeps morphing along.

The Most Confusing Tech Acronym of 2012: SOA (Solutions Oriented Architecture), continuing its Most Confusing Tech Acronym of the Decade reign.

Watch the Mashable video on this list:

Read the full version on The Global Language Monitor.

And a little on SOA

Despite all the effort by numerous people this also shows that it is hard to get a solid grasp of what SOA is. We showed that before by comparing some of the definitions on (web) services and processes. We might learn from this that it is even harder to have as we call it “the business” initiate SOA projects and programs. Even if together with the business we get a clear picture of the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture is, it remains a challenge to lead them through this stuff they don’t really understand. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments…

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The world’s largest conference dedicated to SOA, cloud computing and service technology will have it’s 2012 version in London! Hosting the 5th SOA Symposium and the 4th International Cloud Computing Symposium on September 24-25. This brings the symposium back to Europe after last years visit to Brasilia, Brazil. The SOA Symposiums website has been rebranded to Service Tech Symposium.

There are several blog posts on previous editions of the SOA Symposium available in blogs. During this years event the following books will be launched:

• Cloud Computing: Concepts & Technology
• SOA with REST: Principles, Patterns & Constraints
• Next Generation SOA: A Real-World Guide to Modern Service-Oriented Computing

Call for presentations

The 2012 program committee invites submissions on all topics related to SOA, cloud computing and service technologies. The primary tracks are:

• Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns
• New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models
• Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques
• Service Infrastructure & Virtualisation
• Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture
• Real World Case Studies
• Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques
• Interactive Services & the Human Factor
• New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques

Additional information the 2012 SOA Symposium Call for Papers are available online. Download the Speaker Form. All submissions must be reviewed no later than July 15, 2012.

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In this post we’ll share some VirtualBox resources that will help you to use Oracle virtualization product VirtualBox.

Installing an Operating System in VirtualBox

There are several great blog post on how to install an Operating System (OS) in VirtualBox. The install Ubuntu 11.04 in VirtualBox not only offers a good step by step guide to install Ubuntu, the steps also provide great insights when you want to install other operating systems. It is fairly easy to get from there to installing Windows8 in VirtualBox.

VirtualBox appliances and extending them

There are several great VirtualBox Appliances for Developers. Oracle offers for example both an appliance to test drive SOA Suite 11g and BPM 11g and a very recent appliance running WebLogic Server 12c , including a bunch of Java tools (including NetBeans, OEPE, Subversion, Hudson, Maven).

These VirtualBox Appliances can easily be extended for example with Oracle OSB as described in installing OSB on SOA Suite 11g appliance and extend SOA Suite appliance with Oracle Service Bus. The latter showing you how to extend the SOA domain and the first how to install OSB in a seperate domain.

Dealing with real world problems using VirtualBox

There a several examples on the web. I’d like to share three of them. The first shows you how to create a duplicate disk for use in an additional virtual machine. The second shows you how to update a Vagrant box.

On the side: Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to build configurable, lightweight, and portable virtual machines dynamically. It uses Chef or Puppet to provision them. Vagrant is used so other developers can get up and running in just a couple commands.

The third shows you how we solved VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004) :
VBoxManage.exe: error: Code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004) – File not accessible or erroneous file contents (extended info not available)

Have Fun!

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Trying to keep up with Java versions that are supported for JDeveloper and SOA Suite, like in JDeveloper now supports 64 bit Windows and Java. Redstack pointed me to the OFM supported systems configurations that show that Fusion Middleware is supported on JDK7. The XLS showing certification with OS etc can be found:

• Fusion Middleware 11g
• Fusion Middleware 12c

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One of the most important tips in succesfully implementing an enterprise or application architecture has always been to communicate it really well. Since human relations are at the heart of communication these should be studied and refelected on from time to time. In this post I wanted to share an opportunity on that for you; a very small course on human relations.

The first time I read about this course was in Terry Starbuckers blog post on One Of The Best Leadership Lessons Ever…..In Just 29 Words. It doesn’t take long to find out that this short course in human relations has spread over the internet. However it’s contents aren’t new or unique doesn’t make it less valuable or profound.

Short course in human relations

The 7 most important words:

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

The 6 most important words:

“I admit I made a mistake.”

The 5 most important words:

“You did a great job!”

The 4 most important words:

“What do you think?”

The 3 most important words:

“If you please …”

The 2 most important words:

“Thank you.”

The 1 most important word:

“We.”

The 1 least important word:

“I.”

I like it because it is simple, human and humble. Maybe you’d like to print the slide from Terry Starbucker.

Another list: 8 qualities of remarkable people

Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance. This won’t just shine through in their own performance, but also in that of their peers, department and organizations. Read about these 8 qualities in a post by Jeff Haden.

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Installing PS5 (11.1.1.6) can cause some problems when using Oracle XE as the infrastucture database. The solution is described in this SOA Suite / BPM blog by Niall Commiskey.

More tips on upgrading OFM 11g to patch set 5

My colleague Laurens van der Starre published a serie of tips and tricks on upgrading Oracle Fusion Middleware to PS5 on the Whitehorses blog.

More considerations on upgrading to OFM 11.1.1.6.0

There is an additional article on upgrading to OFM 11.1.1.6 on the Whitehorses blog. It goes into more detail on JDK 7 support, OWSM in SOA Suite, the combination of OSB en OWSM and for example the PSA (Patch Set Assistant) performance.

Java memory arguments in OFM 11.1.1.6.0

More on setting Java memory arguments in SOA Suite 11.1.1.6.0.

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