This guide is aimed at installations for developers and not for production machines. Unfortunately the installation of OSB is out of scope. I expect it to be upgraded to PS4 (11.1.1.5) soon. I could find any missing instructions while installing PS4 on a Windows7 VirtualBox.

This document looks very similar to the installation chapter in Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1.

Update

It was confirmed by Simone Geib, Product Manager in the Oracle SOA team, that both the OSB part and the PS4 update are coming soon.

Update September

The update for SOA Suite PS4 (11.1.1.5) including Oracle Service Bus is now available.

We could have learned all of the tips and tricks in a normal session or presentation. However by working this way there is a much stronger feel of how technologies and tools are used in a real world project. It was fun to watch and learn and I think the team had a great time as well!

At the en of the session the End-to-End flow worked really well. Great work in just a few hours time!

ADF is the “Paint by the Numbers” for web front end development.

The most common application integration tools/solutions used are Post-it and a paper notepad.

However the real gem I discovered during this first day was:

User Experience Design Patterns

Madhuri Kolhatkar has delivered a great presentation on the effort Oracle has put into creating and implementing User Experience Design Patterns. Extended information is available on the Usable Apps pages of the Oracle website. Great insight on how this can help you in developing and delivering your applications can for example for OBIEE be found on Design Patterns and Guidelines for Oracle Applications. Take special note of the Pattern Selection Tool.

The AIA Service Constructor can be acquired using the menu Help | Check for updates, clicking Next, and selecting Oracle Fusion Middleware Products. SelectAIA Service Constructor and click next to start the download.





Verify the installation of the extension using the menu Help | About, and click on the tab Extensions:

Altering JDeveloper preferences

Now we have to make the aia.jar known to the SOA stuff. In order to do this we use the preferences, using the menu Tools | Preferences.... The is aia.jar in the ...\Middleware\jdeveloper\lib directory.

After these changes JDeveloper needs a restart.

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.

Tattie picking

The first keynote by Andrew Sutherland had a few great stories that leaded the way to show the rationale behind the Exalogic platform. This included a personal story on “tattie picking”. The larger part was on productisation and gave examples on increasing effiency in IT. One of the ways for the Exalogic platform is the one that is also used by Apple: If you limit the amount of hardware your OS of software stack has to be compliant with, that introduces a better controlled and optimized environment; “If you know the machine you need less code”. This is resulting in several efficiencies. Efficiencies both in the One Time Costs (CTB) and Recurring Costs (RTB).

One of the sound bites that stayed with me was:

The most sticky stack is the least sticky one

Indicating that the stack that is the most open and complying with standards is the one that is most likely to survive…

SOA/ BPM Reference Case

In the Partner SOA/ BPM Reference Case Leon Smiers of Capgemini introduced us to the BPM practise of Capgemini and two of their BPM cases. One of the quotes that I think is very true was:

SOA supports the success of BPM.

Besides that Leon stressed the structure, insight and compliance advantages that BPM efforts deliver. One of the things they learned by doing was the importance of showing BAM to business people. This really enables you to get visibility on a lot of stuff that is under the hood. Besides that it is a catalyst for generating more business value with ideas from the people you are showing BAM to.

WebCenter/ UCM Reference Case

During the WebCenter/ UCM Reference Case Vikram Setia of Infomentum shared great insight on how to deliver an excellent web site using Oracle technology. He did this in a very lively session showing us around a live site and telling what Oracle technologies were used behind the scenes. Besides the UCM and WebCenter stuff there were some cool uses database thingies like:

• Text Clustering
• Thesaurus
• Locator

SOA and BPM 11gR1 PS3 Update

Another intresting session was the SOA and BPM 11gR1 PS3 Update by David Shaffer. Mr Shaffer showed us some of the history and some of the highlight in the current stack. A more detailed dive into the latter will be on day 2 of the conference.

Wednesday’s Breakout Sessions

On the second day I will be attending the following breakout sessions:

• SOA Suite 11g PS3 & OSB
• ADF/WebCenter 11g integration with BPM Suite 11g
• BPM 11g, Whats New

This release of Oracle JDeveloper supports the 64-bit versions of Windows and Java.

More on the question What is 64-bit Java?, can be found on this Java Hotspot FAQ.

The Installation Guide mentioned before doesn’t show additional details on How-To get JDeveloper working on Windows 7 with an 64 bit Java version….
To get this working:

• Download and install a recent 64 bit JDK for Windows 7 64 bit, eg jdk-6u24-windows-x64
• go to the $Middleware_Home$\jdeveloper\jdev\bin directory and edit the jdev.conf
• Alter the SetJavaHome to the directory in which you just installed the JDK:

#
# Directive SetJavaHome is not required by default, except for the base
# install, since the launcher will determine the JAVA_HOME.  On Windows
# it looks in ..\..\jdk, on UNIX it first looks in ../../jdk. If no JDK
# is found there, it looks in the PATH.
#
#SetJavaHome C:\Oracle\Middleware\jdk160_21
SetJavaHome C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24

• And then start the jdev64W.exe in the $Middleware_Home$\jdeveloper\jdev\bin directory.

The product does not have schedular to schedule BPEL processes. Need to schedule the BPEL processes through SOA11G and not through unsupported softwares(Quartz).

And the business need:

Some processes need to be scheduled at a particular time and at a particular day and should not be started Manually, increases the maintenance cost of the software.

These together indicate a clear need to schedule reoccurring processes. Although I’m not so sure that this functionality should be provided by this platform. One could see advantages in centralizing all scheduling task. There a good commercial product available for cases like that (Redwood’s Cronacle for example).

On Oracle Technet there is a good document on Configure a SOAScheduler for a composite in SOA Suite 11.

One Job, multiple Schedules

We need a Class that implements Job. Something like:

package net.deltalounge.quartzdemo;
 
import java.util.Map;
 
import org.quartz.Job;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionContext;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionException;
import org.quartz.SchedulerException;
 
public class DemoJob implements Job {
    public DemoJob() {
        super();
    }
 
  public void execute(JobExecutionContext context)
     {
      Map dataMap = context.getJobDetail().getJobDataMap();
      RunMeTask task = new RunMeTask();
      String someString ="init";
      someString = context.getTrigger().getName();
      System.out.println("Quartz demo output: "+someString);      
    }
}

And we need a Class that creates and starts the Scheduler. This Class can also schedule the jobs. Here we actually see that although one Job Class is enough we need to declare mutiple JobDetails.

package net.deltalounge.quartzdemo;
 
import java.util.Map;
 
import org.quartz.CronTrigger;
import org.quartz.JobDetail;
import org.quartz.Scheduler;
import org.quartz.impl.StdSchedulerFactory;
 
public class QuartzAppCronTrigger {
  public static void main( String[] args ) throws Exception
      {
        //scheduler task details
        JobDetail job = new JobDetail();
        job.setName("someJob");
        job.setJobClass(DemoJob.class);
        //
        JobDetail job2 = new JobDetail();
        job2.setName("someOtherJob");
        job2.setJobClass(DemoJob.class);
 
        //configure scheduler time
        CronTrigger trigger = new CronTrigger();
        trigger.setName("someJobTrigger");
        trigger.setCronExpression("0/30 * * * * ?");
 
        //configure scheduler time 2
        CronTrigger trigger2 = new CronTrigger();
        trigger2.setName("someOtherTrigger");
        trigger2.setCronExpression("0/20 * * * * ?");
 
        //create the schedule
        Scheduler scheduler = new StdSchedulerFactory().getScheduler();
        scheduler.start();
        scheduler.scheduleJob(job, trigger);
        scheduler.scheduleJob(job2, trigger2);
      }
 
}

If you don’t define multiple jobs prepare for an error like:

Exception in thread "main" org.quartz.ObjectAlreadyExistsException: Unable to store Job with name: 'someJob' and group: 'DEFAULT', because one already exists with this identification.
	at org.quartz.simpl.RAMJobStore.storeJob(RAMJobStore.java:222)
	at org.quartz.simpl.RAMJobStore.storeJobAndTrigger(RAMJobStore.java:195)
	at org.quartz.core.QuartzScheduler.scheduleJob(QuartzScheduler.java:732)
	at org.quartz.impl.StdScheduler.scheduleJob(StdScheduler.java:265)
	at net.deltalounge.quartzdemo.QuartzAppCronTrigger.main(QuartzAppCronTrigger.java:36)

Developers can simply download a few files, assemble them with a script , and then import and run the resulting pre-built VM in VirtualBox. This makes starting with these technologies even easier. Each appliance contains some Hands-On-Labs to start learning.

Java Developement

This VirtualBox Appliance contains:

• Java SE (JDK) 1.6.0 u20 (note: Mac OS X 10.5 users must use Apple update)
• Java FX 1.3.1 runtime
• NetBeans IDE 6.9.1
• GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0.1 (installed with NetBeans)

The Aquarium says about this Java EE6 VM:

This is everything you need to get started with Java EE 6 development and you’ll even find three labs (with code and instructions) to start using JSF 2, JAX-RS 1.1, EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, JPA 2.0 and CDI 1.0!

For detailed instructions and downloads go here…

Oracle Database Development

This VirtualBox Appliance contains:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express 4.0
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

For detailed instructions.

It is expected that more flavors will be available in 2011.

Integration of ADF Faces with JavaServer Faces 2.0 is an exciting process that has just begun with the release of Oracle JDeveloper 11g R2 and will continue to be significantly enhanced with the subsequent releases. The aim of ADF Faces is to continue to provide the unparalleled level of functionality and productivity to developers while moving to JSF 2.0. From an ADF Faces framework perspective, most of the changes in adopting JSF 2.0 are internal and should be transparent to developers.

• JDeveloper FAQ Index – Frequently Asked (and not so frequently answered) Questions related to the JDeveloper development environment. With very usefull links to ADF resources and on installing and configuring your development environment.
• OraToolWatch – An independent opinion on Oracle Tools by Oracle ACE Director Sten Vesterli
• The Google Group that goes with the The Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook by Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema.
• A JPA tip on @PrivateOwned from the Whitehorses blog.
• Replay Gartner Webinars.
• Technical Debt explained by Andrej Koelewijn.