deltalounge

The agenda for the SOA Symposium 2010 has been posted. Again there are very interesting sessions during this 2 day conference. The largest and most comprehensive in the field of SOA and Cloud Computing. The Real World SOA Case Studies track offers a great opportunity to learn from the experience of others. In this track you will find:

Real-life accounts of successful and failed SOA projects discussed first-hand by those that experienced the project lifecycles and have a story to tell. These veteran practitioners will provide advice and insights regarding challenges, pitfalls, proven practices, and general project information that demonstrates the intricacies of implementing and governing service-oriented solutions in the real world.

I will be presenting the first session in this track on Using a Service Bus to Connect the Supply Chain. If you have any topics or questions in advance that you think I should address, please post them in the comments. Hope to meet you in Berlin.

It is possible you noticed that after the installation of Oracle AIA 11g R1 starting the Managed Server of WLS takes more time than before the installation. This is not only due to the new Composites. There are also some settings you could change to reduce the time the Managed server to which you deployed AIA needs to start up.

Change JDBC settings

JDBC Settings

Change the settings of the following JDBC Data Sources that were created during the install of AIA of the AIA Demo:

• AIACentralDS
• AIADataSource
• FODDataSource
• FODDS
• LifeCycleDataSource
• mds-soa
• XrefDataSource

Data Source Settings

Login Delay

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

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.

The webcast of the SOA and Integration strategy was a few days later available as the overall strategy. You can find the entire webcast here.

SOA Platform

The combined Oracle Sun solution focus boils down to the following bullets:

• Oracle SOA Suite continues as the strategic product.
• Sun JCAPS continues to be supported and maintained
• GlassFish ESB continues as an open source project
• A bridging technology is planned to support collaboration between JCAPS and Oracle SOA Suite.
• Key functions from the Sun SOA products will be incorporated in the Oracle SOA products.

Portal technologies

Oracle WebCenter stays the strategic portal offering. Support for both GlassFish Web Space Server and Sun Portal Server will be continued. An upgrade path to WebCenter is planned for both. The IP (Intellectual Property) for Sun’s Web Space Server will be released into the Liferay open source community.

First a short note on both BPMN and BPEL. BPMN is a modeling notation for business processes. OMG on it’s BPMN pages puts it:

The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes.

BPEL is an execution language. There is for example no standard graphical notation in the BPEL standard. The main focus is not on readability, it is on execution.
So BPMN and BPEL aim for different goals. It should come as no surprise that there is gap. There are several resources that describe the mapping, provide translation, or transforming BPMN to BPEL.

Guidelines

Here are some guidelines that help you bridge the BPMN to BPEL gap:

• Be as specific as possible in BPMN diagrams (In Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite you can use e.g. automated activity, notification , and human tasks.).
• Add additional information in BPMN activities. Sure this doesn’t enable automatic transformation, but it does reduce the need for additional design documentation. This will improve documentation consistency, and reduce the required governance.
• Use templates in your BPMN activities. Structure and check completeness of your descriptions.
• Use a Service repository. This will enable both designers and developer to communicate about “the same thing”
• Use a GUI components reposity, for the same reasons as you use a Service repository

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One of the projects I’m involved in, uses Oracle ESB (from SOA Suite 10.1.3.3 MLR 18) running on AIX 5.3. Instead of using the default in-memory JMS the ESB is configured to use Oracle Advanced Queueing (AQ). Although there were tuning efforts before, the performance wasn’t up to par. AQ seemed to be the bottleneck, especially the dequeueing part. During the day we saw the number of messages queue up. Generally these numbers would decrease after business hours. This should have been a big problem if the number of messages wasn’t going to be tripled or quadrupled in the next month(s).

Upgrade the JVM

Previous attempts in cooperation with Oracle Consulting hadn’t done the trick, yet. To get a fresh view and some out-of-the-box thinking Marc joined the team. He performed a scan of the systems settings. Researching Oracle’s knowledge system resulted (searching on AIX & ESB & DB Adapter) in the clue to upgrade the JVM (6848406 – SLOW PERFORMANCE ON AIX ESB USING FILE AND DB ADAPTER). Although we were skeptic at first, because why tried a similar path before, we decided to give it a shot. The previous attempt resulted in errors in our code without enhancing the performance of the system.
With the AIX system a Java 5 is delivered in /usr/java5, to be more precise:

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$:/jdk/bin>./java -version
java version "1.5.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build pap32dev-20080315 (SR7))
IBM J9 VM (build 2.3, J2RE 1.5.0 IBM J9 2.3 AIX ppc-32 j9vmap3223-20080315 (JIT enabled)
J9VM - 20080314_17962_bHdSMr
JIT  - 20080130_0718ifx2_r8
GC   - 200802_08)
JCL  - 20080314

To change this stop the SOA Suite and:

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cd $ORACLE_HOME
mv jdk jdk.orginal           # rename jdk directory
ln –s /usr/java5 jdk         # Creates symbolic link

and the start the SOA Suite. With this newer Java version we had a significant performance improvement.

Remaining issue

If the change is performed as described above Enterprise Manager doesn’t allow you to browse the oc4j_soa anymore. This will result in the following error message:

Unable to make a connection to OC4J instance oc4j_soa on Application Server someserver.local. A common cause for this failure is an authentication error. The administrator password for each OC4J instance in the Cluster must be the same as the administrator password for the OC4J instance on which Application Server Control is running.

This can be solved by applying the patch for base bug 5261515. The patch adds some security jars and properties that are not in the AIX Java5 version.
Since this patch introduces issues in our code, we are working around the Em problems for now, while trying to resolve the issue.

In the SOA still dead blogpost based on his impression of the SOA Symposium 2009, Joe McKendrick asks the question:

Is SOA still dead?

My personal opinion is that SOA is still alive or reanimated. The declaration of the SOA Manifesto has contributed to this. The least it has done is start discussion online and offline. These discussions will lead to a better understanding for the participants and those following them. The result will be more mature and successful (in business terms not technology) SOA implementations. This would be quite an achievement if the statistics that Anne Thomas Manes presented are accurate:

fewer than 10% of companies have seen significant business value in their SOA efforts.

Although the quotes on this page seem rather negative, I’m still an optimist on the case for SOA. It brings us solid principles and guidance in developing software of better quality.

Views on the SOA Symposium

The proclamation of the SOA Manifesto has resulted in most of the blogpost on the SOA Symposium. However there are post dedicated to a broader spectrum of the SOA Symposium. These give an impression or reflect back on things.

Reading the blog of Linda Terlouw, I remembered having the same expectations on the “Service-Oriented Solution Evaluation Criteria” session: some info on how you can measure whether or not (or to which extent) a service conforms to certain principles. Instead it was a summary of the principles as they are defined by Thomas Erl.

Comments, like this one, are appreciated.

Recently there was a small survey in the company that employs me. The questions boiled down to the Twitter question:

What are you doing?

or what have you been doing during the last year. Since this question was aimed at architects, it should give some insight in the diversity of tasks for the various types of architects. Reading the results there were two conclusions to be drawn:

Architects have an even more diverse job than I imagined

Here are some examples:

• “Translate” a technical complex strategic document to a message we can communicate;
• Write a strategic information plan;
• Give an impact analysis of the projected move to open source for our company;
• Write a functional design based on requirements;
• Define an action plan to get our 3th SOA project into production ASAP;
• Define a project start architecture;
• Implement an enterprise wide Single Sign On and provisioning solution;
• Create a mobile application based on MS technology;
• Reduce storage costs;
• Deliver a Proof of Concept/Technology;
• Give the arguments: Service Bus or not?

My advice:

next time someone tells you that she needs an architect on the project, you immediately ask what kind of questions this “role” has to answer.

The way questions are answered is even more diverse

The answers of my colleagues were very different on various dimensions. First of all the length of the answers, where some of them needed a few sentences, others elaborated using several pages. Some mentioned technology others didn’t – even when the question was tempting them.
Another difference was that some gave the customers question or assignment, and others answered describing their approach to get to the result. A few grabbed the opportunity to promote themselves stating awards they received, and presentations they held on important boards.

Once again this proves to me: Question and answer can never be separated from context, and who is answering the question.