JEE, Spring and Seam at JUG Cologne

Watch out for the upcoming event at JUG Cologne on November, 30th 6pm - 9pm. This time there are two sessions from two SUN guys: “JEE, Spring and Seam” and “Java SE trouble shooting tools in a nutshell”. Perhaps we meet there?

Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Here we go: some rumours talk about a Christmas gift: the new Oracle SOA Suite 11g official beta shall be available shortly before Christmas 2007. This will be a major step for our SOA projects:

• Complete conversion of all modules to support Service Component Architecture (SCA). So we have only one deployment model for all artefacts.
• Introduction of the Event Delivery Network (EDN) together with Java EE edition of BAM server (formerly .NET) and the new Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine.
• Heavily enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): Support of sync, asynch services and events as first class citizens of the bus. New Service Infrastructure with Mediator component.
• All consoles integrated in Enterprise Manager (EM).
• Security: All binding components can be secured via Policy Enforcement Points, configured via Web Service Manager (WSM).
• Support for Deployment plans within BPEL: no more customize tags needed...
• and many more...
  

OOP 2008 in Munich

My talk about BPEL 2.0, together with my colleague Sven Bernhardt, was accepted at OOP 2008. So, perhaps we meet on 21.- 25. Januar 2008 in Munich?

German Oracle User Group Conference - DOAG 2007

Last conference for november: the annual meeting of the German Oracle User Group - DOAG 2007 in Nürnberg. Here I did a short session on BPM, BPEL, SOA and Oracle BPA Suite. This conference was much smaller than OOW, it had about 2000 attendies. But I was much better for networking: met a lot of the Oracle guys again and had lot's of interestings discussions.

Oracle Open World - OOW 2007

Next conference for me in november: Oracle invited the whole ACE Director team to attend OOW 2007 in San Francisco. That was an experience: one big conference with more than 40.000 attendees... a logistical nightmare - but all went very well.
Highlights were some private meetings:

• The ACE Director briefing, where I met all the others from the team and where we got some deep information about the upcoming 11g SOA Suite release.
• The SOA CAB meeting, where we had some very deep discussions about real life SOA Suite projects which already have gone live.
  
• The SOA Community partner meeting, organized by Jürgen Kress. Thanks for the nice evening and the good new contacts.
  

W-Jax 2007: a great developer conference

From 5th to 9th november there was the W-Jax conference in Munich. Organized by Software&Support Verlag, it was a very fine week with lot's of good talks. That time I was in the advisory board, so I saw the tons of good papers from lots of people wanting to talk on the conference. I hope, we managed to make an interesting program for all of you. I personnaly did three talks:

• Business Process Management, BPEL and SOA
• EDA - Next Generation SOA
• BPEL 2.0
  

Some interesting books on SOA topics you should own

• SOA Principles of Service Design, Thomas Erl
• Enterprise SOA. Best Practices für Serviceorientierte Architekturen - Einführung, Umsetzung, Praxis, Dirk Krafzig
• SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
• Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions, Gregor Hohpe
• Enterprise Service Bus. Theory in Practice, David A. Chappell

It's moving: BPEL4People is coming closer...!

The biggest disadvantage of bpel is the missing feature of human interaction integration. BPEL itself, according to the current standard WS-BPEL 2.0, is designed for fully automated processes only. But as real world projects show, most business processes have the need to do some activities non-automated - e.g. to get some decision from a real person. Therefore we have a whitepaper, BPEL4People, since several years now. Most vendors of bpel engines implemented custom solutions to handle human task stuff - like the BPEL4People whitepaper describes.
Now the scene is moving on: We will get a spec called WS-HT (Human Task), which describes a service interface for a human task workflow service, basically. Then we get WS-B4P (BPEL4People) which describes how to integrate WS-HT in WS-BPEL 2.0.
That's great news. So we have one more useful component for our SOA world.
Read details:

• Computerzeitung
• WS-HT
• WS-B4P

Hopefully, we will see these ideas at the OASIS site soon...

IDE Shoot-out at JUG Cologne

This was a very interesting event yesterday in the rooms of the university of cologne. Michael Hüttermann organized this special JUG Cologne event, where four of the major IDEs were presented. Participants:

• NetBeans
  Roman Strobl (Sun Microsystems) - NetBeans Evangelist (Prague)
  
• Eclipse
  Wayne Beaton (Eclipse Foundation) - Eclipse Evangelist (Canada)
• Oracle
  Frank Nimphius (Oracle) - Principal Product Manager Oracle/JDeveloper
• JetBrains
  Maxim Shafirov (JetBrains) - Responsible for IntelliJ IDEA (St. Petersburg)
  Mike Aizatsky (JetBrains) - Responsible for Web Development IntelliJ IDEA (St. Petersburg)
  Ann Oreshnikova (JetBrains) - Marketing Director JetBrains (St. Petersburg)

Each presenter had only 30 minutes to motivate the best features of his IDE: that's a problem, because 30 minutes are much too short to present only 20% of the features a product has. So the challenge was to concentrate on the essence of each product, what was very interesting to see.

1) NetBeans
Roman Strobl focused on the RichClient plattform, Java EE development support and Ruby integration.

2) Eclipse
Wayne Beaton presented on Ubuntu with OpenOffice, which didn't work too well. But no problem, the coolness factor made him go. He focused on the whole Eclipse eco system. Eclipse is not only an IDE, but used for lot's of other things, too. A highlight was the Europa release which bundels about 20 subproject in on e new release. If that's a "feature"? I think it's the only way to address the "plugin hell" Eclipse is facing more and more with stuff being not compatible with each other.

3) JDeveloper
Frank Nimphius concentrated on the "one-tool-for-all-tasks" message. JDeveloper today covers the whole lifecycle needed in development. Further focus was on Java EE development (EJB3, JPA) and on the integrated Application Development Framework (ADF).

4) IntelliJ
IntelliJ was the only commercial IDE presented on this event. Why is this product different? Well, JetBrains is very proud of its innovation (they had a lot of the cool IDE features at first, all others copied them), they have a brilliant code editor and what was interesting: they have a team of only 16 software engineers doing all the feature stuff and for that, they can react very fast on new ideas.

So, was there a winner? In my opinion: no. Every developer can take the tool he likes and gets all the features he needs in every case. Good, to have the choice... Outstanding features? Well, perhaps the editor of IntelliJ and the drag-and-drop development feeling of the JDeveloper ADF stuff for JSF development. Both worth a look.

More on SCA and Spring (and OSGI)

Want some more information about SCA and its correlation to Spring, OSGI, BPEL, etc? Then look at these links:

• http://www.osoa.org/
• http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/SCA+Resources

Talking to Shai Schmeltzer about migrating from JDev to JDev

I asked Shai on whats his opinion on the problem, that the Oracle frameworks are that tiedly integrated in IDE, that with every new JDev you get new frameworks, too. Well, he is concious about that problem and the goal is to minimize the problems... The tied integration has to be because of the bunch of wizards which has to match the correct framework releases. So, biggest advantage for Jdev is its capability of visual development, Shai says, what brings a real performance boost. Asking him on the history of frameworks like UIX, he answered: "What happened with UIX I don't feel well about. The today's JSF stuff is different, because even if there would happen something to the way Oracle walks, you could switch to another IDE and go on with the project."

JBoss Seam vs. Oracle ADF

Well, now I've seen two sessions with two very different frameworks heading for the same thing: make the development experience of today's java applications easier. Gavin King did a very comparable demo to Shai Schmeltzer: some JPA stuff, some JSF stuff, binding them together. Seam looks interesting, but I have to think about some reasons why I would use that. ADF in comparison, looks much more integrated on the first view and has much better support in the IDE. The ideas and what you do, are likely the same, in both cases.

Glassfish

Project Glassfish develops an Open Source application server with a bunch of reference implemenations. Things like OpenESB and BPEL are already in. The session is quite full: estimately about 300 people in here. So there is a very high interest in that new piece of technologie. Release V2 is beta.

JPA, EJB3, JSF and ADF

Cool. Shai Schmeltzer has shown a life demo of new Jdev 11g. The demo was like the ones I showed for ADF some years ago: build some EJBs, generate DataControls for them and use them in a web page. Just that I used EJB 2.1 or BC4J and a Struts/JSP stack. Shai used the new EJB 3 stuff together with JPA and JSF. Looked very straight forward, good wizard support, code insight for annotations, easy. The datacontrol concept hasn't changed, just generates the XML metadata for a "service". What's very great is the new JSF design experience. Highlights: template support, graphical pageflow for navigation rules, region support. Regions are very smart: you can display portlets in a region or complete sub-pageflows. Just define a sub-pageflow like a normal pageflow, drop it in a region and you a have a micro pageflow in the main page. Design experience is great: very fast, very useful features, much clearer UI and concepts are more intuitive than in earlier releases. And: all the AJAX rich client components are Open Source now, too (like Trinidad before). I'm curious on how this will proove in first real life projects.

Spring and SCA

Adrian Coyler did an excellent session on the upcoming SCA stuff in spring. Looks very promising: each Spring application will be a SCA component which can be wired together with other SCA components.

Dave Chappel, Pope of ESB, joins Oracle

Good news for the Oracle ESB movement: Dave Chappel himself has just joined Oracle, as Clemens told me and posted here.

Oracle announces Spring Development Kit

Oracle is working closely with Interface21 to get a lot of benefits from the cooperation of Oracle and spring framework stuff. For example, there will be spring support in the app server allowing automatically finding and initialising spring containers. Other way round: there will be spring support for all useful the features the app server has. See press release.

Oracle donates rich AJAX internet components to apache

Thomas Kurian announced this: following the steps of Trinidad, now all the sophisticated AJAX components are donated to Apache and made Open Source. Duncan Mills did a live Demo, demonstrating how to enable declarativly drag-and-drop functionallity for a shopping cart component. Just some clicks and the shopping cart works as drop event listener. Save, reload and here you go. Let's see if that prooves in real life. Details here.

SCA where you look

First "Service Component Architecture" (SCA) Implementations are coming up. In Oracle 11g we will see the complete deployment model migrated to SCA, really cool. Everything is a component now and can be wired together: BPEL processes, services, adapters... everything gets in an SAR-archive. This allows us to build real composites, just by wiring the required components together.

jBPM and BPEL

Tom Baeyens did a very good session on what it means to work with jPDL and jBPM. Especially the seam integration is worth a deeper look. What's with BPEL? Well, jBPM is miles away from what Oracle has in the BPEL area, as Tom admitted in the evening while having some beer. We had some discussions on when to use which language, jPDL or BPEL. More on that later on...

JDeveloper 11g Technical Preview is out

Look at this side for the new feature list. Especially the UI area, Web Service development and the ADF stuff were updated intensely. Worth a deeper look... What is missing in this first preview release is the BPEL and Mediator (ESB) stuff. We will see that later on this year.

Tangosol or Oracle Coherence

As the last presentation of the Regional Director briefing, Mike Lehmann did introduce the Tangosol in-memory database to us, which is a really cool tool for doing large in-memory clusters of "object databases". If a RAC isn't fast enough, then Tangosol could be an option, to typically use 100s of in-memory nodes to boost performance. No SQL here, but real object access. Great: there are lot's of use cases for such a product. Will monitor that tool in the future.

Regional Director Briefing

It was a very interesting meeting, this Regional Director briefing and very nice to meet some of the other people from around the world, who are in the Regional Director programm, too.
We got some first hand information on the new JDeveloper 11g from Duncan Mills, some infos on the new OC4J 11g from Mike Lehmann.

And JavaOne starts...

Well, as being an Oracle Fusion Middleware Regional Director I went to JavaOne this year. It's quite impressive: first time for me to see San Francisco and first time to attend a that large Java conference. The keynote from Rich Green was very interesting: a very big hall, a lot of people, a lot of announcements. Java is officially Open Source now, e.g. Very cool: JavaFX. It's a scripting language capability which sits on the standard JDK and allows to do a lot of dynamic graphical stuff. Not only running on the desktop, but on mobile devices, too. We saw an IPhone clone done with JavaFX, really cool.

Jax is over...

After 4 days on the JAX 2007 conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, I'm back at home. The conference was great again: so many sessions, more than 1700 people, tons of interesting conversations, 3 own sessions on BPEL and EDA, ... Now some time would be great to think about all the new ideas.

What is Web 2.0?

Have you ever searched for a good definition of Web 2.0? Richard Monson-Haefel has one in his blog: "Web 2.0 is an Architecture of Participation built on the World Wide Web"

BPEL 2.0 is out as an OASIS standard

At last... the Business Process Execution Language WS-BPEL 2.0 is approved as an OASIS standard. See this announcement for details.
Oracle quots the following: "As one of the earliest supporters of BPEL, Oracle has been enabling production BPEL customers for the past several years. The release of BPEL 2.0 is a significant development for the industry and will serve to increase the already strong momentum behind the BPEL standard. In particular, our customers see BPEL 2.0 as enabling a smooth evolution path from BPEL 1.1 and are excited to see several key process orchestration requirements now included in the standard," said Don Deutsch, vice president Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle.

Going to JavaOne 2007

He ho!
This year I'm going to visit the JavaOne in San Francisco! It will be my first international conference, so I'm very interested how such events are handled in the US.

Jax 2007 is getting closer

The Jax 2007 is getting closer: 23.-27. april in Wiesbaden, Germany. This time I'm doing three sessions:

• SOA Management Day: "Zusammenhänge und Praxis von BPM, BPEL, SOA & Co.", together with Mirko Drobietz.
• Session: "BPEL 2.0: Werden die Erwartungen nun erfüllt?", together with Sven Bernhard.
• Session: "Next Generation SOA - Event-driven Architecture", together with Markus Lünsmann.

Looking forward to meet you there! Visit us at our booth for a coffee, or two...?

EOUC 2007 cancelled

Unfortunately the EOUC 2007 conference in Amsterdam has been cancelled. See here for details: http://www.eouc2007.org/

Back again

Hi,
after some time without blogging I'm back here. First news is: this week I got the confirmation to be nominated an "Oracle Fusion Middleware Regional Director". Thanks for that to Oracle! You don't know this program? Here you read the details:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/ofm_directors/index.html