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.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Beta available

Here we go. Just shortly before Christmas, arrived on 22th of december. Download...

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...
  

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 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.

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.