deltalounge

In today’s post you can find out why you need a changelog, and what activity to add to your upgrade roadmap.

After a recent upgrade of SOA Suite to a more recent patch level, we saw errors that some of us vaguely remembered. They were traced back to transaction timeouts in the BPEL Server. Searching Metalink, OTN, and of course Google we found out we had to change the transaction-timeout and min-instances in the orion-ejb-jar.xml. More detailed information on these settings can be found on in the SOA Suite best practises. However they are not in the spotlight of this post. So let’s go back to the main story.

At that time it seemed strange that the suggested values in the documentation, and as mentioned in blogposts, conformed with the ones we thought set in production.

Need for a changelog

Fortunately we have a changelog. We checked it, and indeed the values should correspond. We set these during a previous tuning effort. Time to check the actual orion-ejb-jar.xml in the production environment. Oops! During the SOA Suite upgrade our fine tuned orion-ejb-jar.xml was overwritten with one with default values

Recommendations

What can you learn from our experience:

• Maintain a changelog – also for configuration settings;
• Include a post upgrade action in your plan to check whether all tuning and other configuration settings are still at the appropriate values;
• Oh, and by the way, keep your test environment in sync with production (including all configuration settings)! So all this can be well planned and tested before the actual go live.

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 .apachectl
• chmod 6750 .apachectl
• Exit root.

There should be no problem running Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g on a laptop. However if it’s memory is on the low end of the spectrum, it can be challenging. One of the changes you can make, is reducing the memory allocated to the Java process for the WLS domain running the SOA Suite. These memory settings can be altered in the following file:

<your_WLS_home>\user_projects\domains\soa_domain\bin\setSOADomainEnv.cmd

Change the memory settings to:

set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m

Off course the values are dependent on the resources of your machine, and shoud be altered accordingly.

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.

flow trace

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.

FMW composite

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).

OFM11g release

The OFM 11g can be downloaded from:

• OTN – Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 (11.1.1) and
• Oracle’s edelivery

Enjoy all this great new stuff.

Update

More links:

• There are podcasts available on the 11g release by Fusion Middleware Radio
• A demo on ADF Desktop integration
• A demo in the DMS department

And those of you who want to read the press release go there.

Oracle JDeveloper 11g 11.1.1.1.0

We wouldn’t want to forget the latest JDeveloper release:

• JDeveloper download.
• New features index. Lucas Jellema already did some cherry picking on those in this blog post
• JDeveloper documentation.

This year Oracle organized their first OTN Virtual Developer Day . A virtual hands-on training in Java and Rich Enterprise Applications. The screencasts and “Hands-On Labs” are still available. The latter require an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account and charges can apply. The following sessions are interesting from an Application Server point of view:

Oracle WebLogic Server: Introduction and Roadmap

This session provides an overview of Oracle WebLogic Server concepts, and discusses the road map for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server infrastructure, explaining Oracle’s current offerings post-BEA-acquisition and where the product is headed. The screencast can be viewed: Part 1 Part 2
or downloaded:

• WebLogic Server Introduction – Part 1
• WebLogic Server Introduction – Part 2

Top 10 Productivity Tools for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server 10gR3

This session highlights the top 10 capabilities that will improve a Java developers working on WebLogic Server include features such as deep Spring framework integration and support, fast Java class swapping, deployment plans, HTTP pub-sub capabilities for Web 2.0 development, sophisticated debugging and end-to-end updates for Java EE 5.0 development. Learn what’s new and see it in action in this demonstration centric session. View the screencast: Part 1 Part 2
or download it:

• Top 10 Tips for developers on WLS – Part 1
• Top 10 Tips for developers on WLS – Part 2

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.

Although it wasn’t the first subject most people thought of, after the announcement that Oracle wants to acquire Sun Microsystems, both have a well equipped stack of products for integration, and to create the software infrastructure for a SOA. This post will go into that part of the acquisition in more detail. Based on web resources and analyst reports, we are looking for synergy and additions to the product portfolio.

Sun

Magic Quadrant dec 2008

Gartner sees Sun, with the Java CAPS products, as a visionair (other link). Primarily because of a lag of mind share of the CAPS compared to other suites in the market, and because of less focus on this open-source component compared to others, including Solaris, MySQL, and GlassFish. Sun is recognized for it’s open-source leadership, broad comprehensive set of enterprise application infrastructure technologies, and leadership in the Java Community Process.

In the most recent Forrester Wave for Integration Centric BPMS, Java CAPS is seen as a “competitive solution”. This is mainly due to lower scores in the areas of B2B, BPM, and the incomplete overall product strategy.

Oracle

Forrester Wave Integration-Centric BPM Suites Q4 08

Forrester regards Oracle as a repeat in the Leader category based on the comprehensive capabilities of its SOA Suite product. Trough the acquisition of BEA, Oracle inherited some key products such as the enterprise service bus and repository.

Besides the praise for the SOA Suite Gartner stresses the downside of this acquisition: The massive effort that will be needed to integrate BEA Systems’ technologies into Oracle’s original products. This will absorb a significant part of Oracle’s R&D resources. In addition there is not yet a clear migration path for existing customers.

Perspective

With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle gains the customers base of CAPS. Because of Oracle’s reputation in the market, it remains to be seen whether the leadership in both the open-source and Java EE community can be capitalized. But still, when Oracle owns Sun, Oracle will “own” Java EE, the platform of many, if not most, enterprise SOA deployments…

The downside of the acquisition, that R&D focus will be on integration instead of on development of new features and releases, will gain weight. Here consolidation will be in the way of innovation. Combined with the unclear migration path, this will affect customers in the process of choosing a suite of products to support them in their integration effort, or the software infrastructure to support a SOA implementation.

Not to long ago Oracle tried to acquire MySQL, and Sun got away with the prize. Few years earlier, actually in 2005, Oracle acquired InnoDB. This was seen as an effort to lower the valuation of MySQL by removing one of it´s primary storage engines. Which (under the assumption that the valuation of Sun wasn´t raised to much after they got MySQL) succeeded in the end, since they got MySQL in the package.
Anyway for MySQL adapts the good news is that MySQL probably will stay open source according to a founding developer of WordPress.

Questions

As with any merger a lot of questions will be raised that can be answered in the following months (or years). Will Oracle continue with multiple JVMs? Both acquisition of BEA and Sun brought one into the company.
Same goes for application servers… Oracle had one, bought one with BEA, and one with Sun. Oracle favored WebLogic over OC4J. But will Glassfish remain in the portfolio?

However most worrying point for Oracle´s customers will be how this will effect release dates of (long) promised features, and bug fixes. Just like the integration effort after the acquisition of BEA is doing right now…

And what has MS got to do with it…

Did I already mention that Oracle now has also acquired Open Office. This means that these two rivals have created a new field to play the battle of giants.

Update June 8th, 2009 Sun´s special stockholder meeting to vote on the adoption of the merger agreement is scheduled for July 16, 2009.