First experience with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Beta

Today I did the SOA Suite 11g beta installation on my laptop. First interesting point: currently, there's only one download for JDeveloper 11g, which includes everything you need for getting started with SOA Suite. Reading the installation guide is highly encouraged... like always.
Watch out your database release! My Oracle Express Edition was ok, but for the Enterprise Edition you need the latest patch set.

I didn't uninstall my SOA Suite 10g release, because it looks like that both of them can coexist. Let's see...

Unzipped the big JDev file. Started the database sql scripts. Started JDev. Configured the SOA Option. Ready.

Then I tried to build the HelloWorld App, which is described in the installation guide. It's a simple BPEL process concatenating the input variable with the standard "Hello" string and copying the result to the output variable. Interesting point here: the bpel process is embedded in a SCA composite now.

My first problem was a "not enough heap memory" error while my first deployment, when the server is started up. Solution can be found in the new "SOA Suite and OC4J 11g Technology Preview" forum: use these settings in your soa_startup.properties: -Xmx192m -Xmn64m -XX\:MaxPermSize=256m.

Now I was able to start the server. Fine. Deployment is no problem. Some new archive types are used (SAR, OAR), but everything looks straight forward.

Next problem: the new SOAConsole (http://localhost:8988/SOAConsole/) doesn't show my deployed composites. Hmm, ok. That's described in the release notes: just delete this file:
%JDEV_HOME%\system11.1.1.0.22.47.96\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\applications\soa-infra\deployed-composites.xml
And voila, all composites show up.

Great, first HelloWorld is up an runing with SCA infrastructure.