deltalounge

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

Some notes and dump of thoughts on the second day of the SOA and E20 Partner Community Forum. A day filled with interesting breakout sessions. Some of them were discussing roadmaps and future developments in the stack, and thus subjective to an NDA.

SOA platform

Again after this session I came to the conclusion that in my opinion BAM is used too little.

During the session was raised whether people in the audience were using non-Oracle databases as dehydration store and Meta Data Store. The mainstream is using Oracle as dehydration store. And although it is certified, it is advised to use Oracle as the database for this purpose. On the Application Server, given the maturity of the J2EE platform, there is less discomfort in operations to deploy the SOA Suite on a non-Oracle App Server.

ADF

Only today I found out that there is an interesting JDeveloper 11g extension. The extension validates ADF code quality. Seems an interesting extension to check code quality besides the already available Java tools.

BPM

When comparing BPEL and BPM and looking into when to use what tool, the following was stated: For all things with human interaction BPM is the tool of choice. In integration driven appraoches BPEL is the tool of choice.

In Oracle point of view BPM includes:

• People
• Systems
• Documents

without the need for separate platforms.

Example of a custom Spring Java worklist application for Oracle BPM.

This year, in partnership with InfoQ.com (the largest community site for technical architects), 1/4th of the SOA Symposium sessions was filmed and will be published on InfoQ. From early November InfoQ has started publishing these videos. At the time of writing the following videos are available:

• Cloudy SOA
• BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010
• Resurrecting SOA

Cloudy SOA

This session on Cloudy SOA by Mark Little covers:

an introduction to cloud computing pointing to the fact that the middleware needs of the cloud are similar to SOA’s, showing some of the benefits of running SOA along with the cloud, asking if cloud computing and SOA should evolve together and giving some future directions to consider.

BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010

Hanjo Normann’s session presenting the BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010 covers:

how to design a BPM/SOA solution including: modeling human interaction, improving BPM models, orchestrating composed services, central task management, new approaches for business-IT alignment, solutions for non-deterministic processes, and choreography.

Resurrecting SOA

Anne Thomas Manes in her Resurrecting SOA session goes into details on why she:

believes organizations need SOA more than before, but using a redefined SOA based on the SOA Manifesto, focusing on models, methodologies and patterns, not on technology, intended to produce the desired business and technical goals.

For a complete overview of SOA Symposium sessions on InfoQ check their SOA Symposium page.

Few weeks ago I mentioned the VirtualBox SOA Suite and BPM 11g R1 PS2 Appliance. In the last week we’ve been test driving it on several machines.

32-bits Windows7

We noticed that on some 32-bits Windows7 machines the WebLogic Server and SOA Suite fail to start. The reason seems to be that on some 32-bit Windows 7 machines the amount of memory that can be allocated to the VirtualMachine in VirtualBox is limited to 1500 MB.
VirtualBox explains:

The Base Memory sets the amount of RAM that is allocated and given to the VM when it is running. The specified amount of memory will be requested from the host operating system, so it must be available or made available as free memory on the host when attempting to start the VM and will not be available to the host while the VM is running. This is the same setting that was specified in the “New Virtual Machine” wizard.

This can cause a crash when starting the WebLogic Server since the SER_MEM_ARGS are set to:
SER_MEM_ARGS="-Xms512m -Xmx1536m"

These are set in the wls_env.sh which can be found in the /home/oracle/bin/. Altering the -Xmx to a lower value (lower than the amount you can allocate on your workstation) can solve this problem.

Oracle Service Bus

Since I’ve been involved in several projects in the last year that want to use both SOA Suite and the Oracle Service Bus (which at least from some perspectives is part of the SOA Suite) it was a bit disappointing for me that OSB isn’t included. I’ve been asking around for the rationale behind this choice without any satisfying answers so far. Please leave your thoughts in the comments or in this thread of the Oracle forums.

In June an AMI (Amazon Machine Image to use on the EC2 platform) for SOA Suite and BPM 11g R1 PS2 became available. In the last days it was announced that a VirtualBox Appliance is available. The timing, just before Oracle OpenWorld 2010 cannot be a coincidence…

This appliance contains a fully configured, ready-to-use SOA/BPM 11g R1 installation. It contains the following software:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 Update 4
• Oracle XE Universal database 10.2.0.1
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.3.0
• SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2
• BPM Suite 11gR1 PS2 (with bundle patch #1)
• BAM 11gR1 PS2
• B2B 11gR1 PS2
• JDeveloper 11.1.1.3

The download and setup instructions can be found on Oracle Technet.

To prepare your visit to Oracle OpenWorld 2010, this post provides some links to selections of sessions with a focus on eg BPM, AIA, et cetera. Here is my top ten:

1. Oracle AIA – Application Integration Architecture
2. Architects and architecture
3. BPM – Business Process Management
4. Cloud Computing
5. Data Integration
6. EDA – Event Driven Architecture
7. Fusion Middleware development
8. Java EE
9. Middleware for Enterprise Applications
10. SOA – Service Oriented Architecture

Plug

Okay, i’ll plug two sessions:

• Customer – S314708 – Transform Your Business with Oracle Application Integration Architecture | Monday, September 20, 14:00 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3011
• Colleague – S316135 – From Oracle Forms to a Service-Oriented Architecture with Oracle SOA Suite 11g | Tuesday, September 21, 5:00PM | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9

Have Fun

Although I didn’t attend the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in Prague this week, I was able to get a glimpse using twitter and some blogs. My main focus was on the Life after SOA: Next Generation Application Architecture track. In this post I’ll share some quotes and thoughts with you.

SOA Governance

On governance I like this quote from Anne Thomas Manes:

If you can’t manage and govern your services with a wiki, a registry/repository won’t help you, either.

This goes great with the statement that I’ve put on this blog before that it is not about the tool it is about people and process. Besides that managing a Service Repository also isn’t a Silver Bullet either, it has proven to be very useful for some of our customers.

BPM

Here are some quotes from Mike Rollings on BPM:

Too much focus on business process automation is detrimental to your BPM initiative.

Automation helps reduce human effort, but fixating on automation gets in the way of optimizing the business.

Automation can be an enabler for optimization, however it should never get in it’s way of become some kind of burden. Yes software can help, but software is a means to (process) optimization not an end or a goal.

So far, I am not sure where I stand on the following quote from Anne Thomas Manes:

BPM infrastructure tools: process modeling tool is key. But models are not to be created to generate code.

On one side I’ve worked with tools that generate good code from models. At the same time I’ve worked with analyst and other functional people that do not have the skills to create a model that will result in great software. Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comments!

In the blogpost on the release of SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2, I mentioned a link to the documentation index. Since it hasn’t been update by now, I suggest you go to the middleware documentation page. This page is more up to date and has the link to the web library and download address (Alert! approx. 860 MB) of E14571-01 – the Fusion Middleware Online Documentation Library 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3.0).

SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2 installation notes

Besides the reference in the documentation library to the Install Guide and the Quick Install Guide, there are several blogs describing the installation of 11.1.1.3. Which is actually a patch on 11.1.1.2:

• This post by Oracle ACE Eric Elzinga;
• The installation steps described by Theo van Arem;
• Installation of 11g PatchSet 2 on Windows by Niall Commiskey, members or Oracle PTS in EMEA;
• The one on Oracle blogs by James Taylor includes OSB 11.1.1.3

SOA Suite on Amazon EC2

This week it was announced that BPM 11g R1 is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This AMI includes SOA Suite 11gR1 Patchset 2 and JDeveloper with the SOA and BPM extension. In AWS filter on 64-bit and put soa-bpm in the search box. This should enable you to find oracle-soa-bpm-11gr1-ps2-4.1-pub. Some of the tips I posted on x SOA Suite in the cloud could be useful here as well.

On October 5 and 6 2010 the worlds largest SOA and Cloud Computing event will be held in Berlin; the SOA Symposium. The International SOA and Cloud Symposium brings together lessons learned and emerging topics from SOA and Cloud projects, practitioners and experts.

There is a call for presentations:

The SOA and Cloud Symposium 2010 program committees invite submissions on all topics related to SOA and Cloud, including but not limited to those listed in the preceding track descriptions. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, product demonstrations or vendor showcases will not be accepted.

All submissions must be received no later than June 30, 2010. An overview of the tracks can be found here. Other resources:

• My blogpost of the SOA Symposium 2009.
• Presentations from 2009.

To work with the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 11g (BPA) as a team, you need a central repository. This post will give you a quick insight in the installation steps of the Oracle Business Process Repository, as the repository for the BPA Suite is called. The complete installation and administration guide can be found here (as PDF). Turn to paragraph 2.4 if you’re installing on Windows of 2.5 if your installing on Unix/Linux.

Installation steps

• Create a database with the AL32UTF8 character set.
• Create two tablespaces ARISDATA and ARISINDEX using automatic, unlimited growth. Make sure there is a temporary tablespace called TEMP or alter the SET DL_TS_TEMP=TEMP. If you choose other names alter the SET DL_TS_DATA=ARISDATA and SET DL_TS_INDEX=ARISINDEX in the envset.bat or envset.sh. The envset file can be found in the \Setups\DBMS\Oracle of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD.
• Alter the envset.bat file to reflect the settings of your database:
  

  1 2 3 4 5 6

  REM The path 2 sqlplus.exe SET DL_ORA_BIN_PATH=   SET TARGET_HOST=localhost SET TARGET_PORT=1521 SET TARGET_SERVICE_NAME=ARIS

• Run the envset.bat (or .sh) and install.bat (or .sh) from the \Setups\DBMS\Oracle directory of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD.
• Run the setup.exe from the \Setups\Windows\Business Process Repository directory of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD. Choose the options to install with an existing repository
• Choose to run as a Windows service of you’re on MS Windows.

Other useful links

• Download Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 11g.
• Look into the certification matrix (XLS).
• Download the samples and the guide that comes with it.