deltalounge

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.

On January 27th Larry Ellison and other Oracle executives outlined the Oracle Sun strategy in a live event. The webcast and sheets are available online. There is also a FAQ overview available.

Besides that there is the Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series. If you are into Java or Middleware developement, I think the message boils down to these few sheets:

Development Tools

Development Tools Strategy

Application Server

Glassfish and WebLogic will coexist and share logic/components.

AS strategy

SOA products

Oh, and WebCenter will be the strategic portal offering.

SOA product strategy

• Integration perspective
• Oracle gets MySQL for free

From today there is a SOA Suite 10.1.3 familiy member available for WebLogic Server 10.3. Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.5.1 has been released. As described earlier we were looking for a recent SOA Suite version that is certified for a recent WebLogic server version. And here it is: Oracle BPEL Manager, Oracle ESB, Oracle Rules, and OWSM (basically all versioned 10.1.3.5.1) are certified with WLS 10.3.1.

• Download SOA Suite 10.1.3.5
• Dive into the certification matrix 10.1.3
• Expect the documentation pages to be updated shortly.
• 10.1.3 Support status and alerts on Metalink

Update – Installation instructions

Installation instructions for SOA Suite 10.1.3.5.1 on WebLogic Server can be found in these blogs:

• Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond
• Solution Architect Kavin Mehta

SOA Suite 11g

In a blogpost Clemens Utschig writes about this book:

Heidi and her team have done a tremendous job to structure the labs and hands-on exercises in a didactic, explanatory way – with solutions all the way through. This way the book serves not just as a tutorial, but also as a reference bible when it comes to implementation of specific features and concepts.

Being familiar with the labs and hands-on for the SOA Suite from the earlier versions up to 11g R1, and having read the first four chapters, I agree with Clemens. It is a good tutorial, and learning path that includes some great tips on how to overcome the pitfalls you could run into.

SOA Suite 11gR1 Book resources

To get an impression of the book you can download a sample chapter here (pdf). There aren’t any errata (yet).

Artifacts for the tutorial part are available for download. An overview of the required software can be found on the Release Downloads for Oracle SOA Suite pages of OTN. These include the link for download.

SOA Suite patch set 5 – also known as SOA Suite 10.1.3.5 – is available, as is mentioned in this blog post. The patch can be downloaded here. We have been waiting for this patch as described earlier. The release document can be found here.

Metalink doc.id 745094.1 promises that 10.1.3.5 is the SOA Suite 10g release that wil be supported on WebLogic 10.3. Where older release were supported on 9.2 (although for 10.1.3.4 requiring the patch 490612 and patch 7337034).

So far the Metalink note has not been updated and is still stating a “planned” support. It could be that it is still a little premature to draw conclusions, since the released downloads and documentation pages haven’t yet been update with the information on this release.
Beside that no information on support on WebLogic 10.3 was found in the release documentation. The OTN downloaded page still features SOASuite10133OnWeblogic.

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.

Gartner has taken a look into the recently released Fusion Middleware 11g R1. They see Oracle refining and reasserting its middleware strategy with this release. The nuance has also been brought in this blog before:

The stated objective for OFM 11g is to be “complete, integrated, hot-pluggable, best-of-breed,” all of which are achieved in OFM 11g to a degree, although each will require additional investment from Oracle over time.

To customers it is important to notice that OFM 11g is the foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA), Oracle’s next generation of packaged business applications. This leverages the need to create an excellent product for Oracle, because it has to eat it’s own dog food here. One can expect that Oracle will continue investing in this set of products.
The only uncertainty is to what extent the acquisition of Sun Microsystems will impact the large range of products in OFM. This introduces some challenges, resulting in changes in some of the OFM products (no severe cases expected here).

iPod for the enterprise

Oracle refers to a strategy like the recently introduced “database machine” as the iPod for the enterprise. First product in this range is a highly optimized database appliance, with pre-installed, pre-configured RDBMS in a hardware arrangement, including processing and storage capabilities.
This is a new direction for Oracle. With the Sun acquisition Oracle is no longer dependent on partners for the technology, knowledge, skills and hardware. It is expected that a middleware appliance will be available within a year. Here the Sun statement “software is free” could be turned to “hardware is free”. Oracle afterall stays a software company and could provide hardware for their customers convenience.

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.