Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Sunday 9/21/2008

Well today started pretty nice actually, we did not go to the sessions this morning... because there weren't any!

Instead we spent the morning cycling up the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond to the Vista Point, which is at the other side of the GG bridge in the National Park. A hell of a ride (by bike that is) but normally (if there's no fog) the view on San Francisco, the bridge and the bay would have been more than worth it. Would have been, because when we arrived up there, the clouds and fog moved in and all of  a sudden the view was gone! The trip was worthwhile nevertheless.

In the afternoon I went to three sessions:

• The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
• Introduction to Web Service Manager

The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
The first session described the past, the present and the future (of course with the disclaimer: "...nothing in this presentation can be held against us...") of Application servers. 
One of the conclusions of the session was that J EE will continue to play a big roll in Enterprise development. I think so too, but what will be key for JEE is that there needs to change something to the complexity of the platform in terms of what can and must be used. This implies that for instance if I'm only using Servlets, JSP's, some JDBC and some EJB's in my application I should not have to load (in memory) all of the things needed for for instance JMS and all of the other JEE parts that are available in an application server. This will make the memory footprint and by that the necessary resources for an application very much smaller and thus performance and necessary resources will benefit of that.
For this exact reason the Oracle Weblogic team is really pushing hard to get so called "profiling" into JEE 6, which is due somewhere in 2009. This will (when the 6.0 standard is implemented) eventually lead to a more monolithic Application server. The term the presenter used is "WYGIOWYN": What You Get Is What You Really Need!
Actually SpringSource is working on the exact same thing with there SpringSource DM Application server!

One of the other trends (which you already see actually) will be that more and more POJO's will become important (Spring, etc.), as well as the support of other more scripting oriented languages to be ported on Java / JEE. This is mainly because newer languages are suffering of the lack of a good runtime environment which the JVM (with approx. 2000 man centuries of R&D) is nowadays. This means that the JVM is actually a very good runtime to host new languages, which will mean porting of the languages, like JRuby, etc.

The last point I'd like to mention is SCA, it really seems like Oracle has adopted SCA (Service Component Architecture) which will also need it's support in for instance the Weblogic Application Server platform. I'll come back on SCA in one of the following posts.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
Other than what you would expect from the session title, this session was mainly on the roadmap of the Weblogic Application server. The guy presenting it was a good prototype of a "businetized" nerd (he was wearing a suit, but was really into technical details :-)). I'll give you some highlights on this:

- Policies
- SOAP attachments (MTOM)
- Dual WS stack (supporting both JAX-WS and JAX-RPC)
- JDeveloper dev environment -> HTTP Analyzer / WS testing
- Although Workshop might be around for a while for J2EE development.

Roadmap: FMW 11g R1, 1st half of 2009 mainly combining WLS 10.3 and OAS 10.1.3.x

Introduction to Web Service Manager
Although I know it is not really the case I can't help thinking that Oracle's WSM product does really do a lot of things the old Aqualogic Service Bus is already capable of itself. I'm having a session on that on Tuesday, so I'll keep you posted on this...

More to follow...

"Sun targets BEA WebLogic users"

I read this article a couple of weeks ago about Sun's new strategy to try to get current / former BEA Weblogic users to move over to SUN Java CAPS, SUN's SOA Platform.

Sun tries to convince people to start using their platform with some kind of simple SOA TCO calculator. To my opinion a little to short to conclude the TCO of SOA based on the parameters (# of sockets (per core), # of employees and # of years).

Well it might convince people to start looking a little closer to investments in SOA, which is good. Probably the outcome will be that they will conclude to go for SOA players like Oracle - BEA.

We'll see...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: It started!

Well yesterday (Saturday 9/20/20008) I flew in from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for joining the Oracle Open World (OOW) conference 2008 in San Francisco. The flight was pretty good, no delay (we had a direct flight) and no real "roller coaster rides". Although 10 hours straight flying can be a pretty hard time...

After waiting for a colleague flying in from Detroit, we went to the Hilton Hotel, where we're staying and checked in. Nice hotel, no problemos there ;-) So that one's also checked!

Then the registration part of the conference: We went to the Moscone center, actually the hart of the conference and checked-in there. Retrieving our Full-conference passes and the goodies. We also found out to be able to see the really good stuff (sessions) we'll need to register for the Oracle Develop part of the conference, which cost an additional $100! They try to make money out of everything... Found out that due to the fact that I've been to BEA world in Barcelona last year officially I belong the veterans, being an Alumni member, meaning that I received even more goodies than "normal" registrants ;-)

Having this one settled as well we took a stroll around the city center, walking along the streets of China town, Italian quarter, seeing the Pyramid building and finally ending up at a place called Burgermeister. Very nice how the made an art out of making real Hamburgers and actually very good fries! Good thing my wives not with me because there was a lot of garlic in the stuff...

Feelings so far: so I've been to big conferences before, but this one is actually the most big and impressive one! I'm not sure about the exacts figures, but something like 1200+ presentations, keynotes and labs and about 45.000 people visiting the place from literally all of the world. In the plane I sat next to a guy from Latvia and behind me a couple from Italy, I heard some Scandinavians (Denmark, Norway) and go on... This is really big.

So what's next: this morning (I'm writing this at 3:44, jet-lag -> so what to do else :-)) we planned to go biking across the Golden Gate bridge and ride into the National Park right across the bridge to have some nice views of the bay. Later on today some sessions on SOA (Fusion) and Java (mainly the old BEA stuff) are planned. I'm really excited to see what the strategy Oracle layed out in July actually really implies. I'll keep you posted with my findings :-)

Oracle acquires BEA cont...

Here's a little on the new plans.
Oracle has voted BEA's JRockit to be their strategic JVM meaning so much that the Oracle – BEA products that are built upon a JVM will by default support the JRockit JVM and will all benefit from the enhanced features of JRockit. Furthermore the products will also support other JVMs like Sun, HP UX JVM, etc.
Secondly BEA’s Weblogic (Application) Server has also been voted as Oracle’s strategic JEE container. This means that all of the Oracle – BEA products running within a JEE container (environment) will by default use the Weblogic Server JEE platform and benefit from the enhanced features like High availability and scalability. But again other JEE platforms like SUN, JBOSS, etc. are still supported and, like Oracle stated it during the webcast the Oracle – BEA products will be hot-pluggable with these JEE platforms.
Later I’ll add some comments on BPM and WLI…
cheers,
Arjan

Oracle acquires BEA

Now the sight on the merger (or actually I should say acquisition, I know….) between Oracle and BEA is getting clearer also speculations start about what will happen to BEA. Well the truth is that we’ll all have to sit this one out. I am in tight contact with people at BEA in The Netherlands, but they also don’t know what will happen exactly. Since we do like to know what will be our future I think it will harm nobody if I shed some light on what I think will happen.

Here I go…

To my opinion what made BEA worthwhile to Oracle is especially the Weblogic Server base of their products. Oracle doesn’t have such a state-of-the-art JEE platform, with the great scalability and high availability options the Weblogic Server base has. Also the way BEA is progressing in the Virtualization of their product stack is something Oracle is still dreaming of. One of the Aqualogic products that will also be adopted by Oracle will definitely be BEA’s Aqualogic Service Bus (ALSB). Although Oracle has got its own, the ALSB product by far better than the Oracle Service Bus.

Parts of the BEA product stack highly overlap with products that can already be found in the Oracle product stack. Take for instance BEA’s BPM Suite, people won’t like this, but Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager does the same thing (and maybe even better) so the former Fuego product will probably have a hard time within the new Oracle | BEA organization.

So the bottom-line to this all is that Oracle will definitely take a look which jewels to pick from BEA’s crown and which jewels they already have and put them on their new Integration and SOA crown. Maybe even rebranding them all to Fusion, maybe some of them will still be called BEA.

Update 6-6-2008...

Well in the mean time one thing seems to be sure: As I predicted the ALSB product will be chosen as Oracle's new Enterprise Service Bus product! What they probably will be doing however, is getting the ALSB product to run on several other JEE platforms (not only the Weblogic stack). It also seems that the WLI and the SOA counterpart Aqualogic Integration (combination of ALSB and WLI) will not be continuedin favour of Oracle's BPEL Process Manager.

You might not have noticed...

Well, you might not have noticed because of all the fuzz about Oracle acquiring BEA, but last week the announced Genesis stuff was released! With this press-release BEA Systems proudly presents the new BEA Aqualogic User Interaction products.

BEA states they launched the "first full-fledged social computing platform" adding a lot of new features to already existing or new products, and I must say the list of features is impressive.

The products provide a complete Enterprise Social Computing platform including profile pages, real-time Analytics of usage, user interface improvements for the Portal product and a lot more...

Watch it yourself at BEA's special site for Enterprise Social Computing.

Genesis: IT starts all over

Under the codename Genesis, BEA is working on a couple of products, solutions and technologies to enable the so called Dynamic Business Applications of the mid and longer term future.

The two main drivers or goals for Genesis are industrialization of the SOA Infrastructure and enabling collaboration in an organization via Enterprise Social Networking.

As far as the industrialization of the SOA infrastructure is concerned, we'll see work moving from the integration layer upward to the more higher levels of the SOA. At the moment a lot of effort goes into integrating systems with custom applications, whereas the future will be that the SOA infrastructure will be more Out-of-the-box and can be bought in a store around the corner. Standard adapters being available for everything! This means that even a BPM specialist will not be dealing with integration issues, but more with the real issue, being the business!

To get all of the magic at the SOA Infrastructure aligned correctly above the SOA layer the BPM layer can be found, which will provide a business driven way of looking at the services available within a company. This will mean getting the most value as possible out of available services and being able to respond to changes within a companies market quick and agile.

And finally Web 2.0 will (have to) come into the enterprise! This means that what we see happening now on the Internet (Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves, etc.) moves into the boundaries of companies. Because of this movement the new buzz word "Enterprise Social Computing" was introduced, which comes down to people sharing ideas via internal blogs, co-workers commenting on that, valuating thoughts and ending up with better ideas or solutions by combined knowledge and effort. This might even end up in employees writing their own mashup application of that particular SAP service with (the old example ;-)) Google Maps.

In other words as with the bible's Genesis, IT starts all over!