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.