Khanderao on Emerging And Integration Technologies

NFC and HTML5 emerging as Winners on Mobile

2011-11-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

Near Field Communication(NFC) ( for more details read my earlier blog http://khanderaotech.blogspot.com/2011/05/nfc-getting-momentum.html) is very useful in very short distance communication ideal for mobile devices. It has got another backer that is from RIM. RIM is bating high on NFC based Apps as its one of the main four focus area (according to its Dev relations VP Saunders).

This week there is another from Adobe. It seems that it is stopping further development on MObile Flash and bating on HTML5 which they should have done it long back after listening to Steve Jobs. Anyway, recently Adobe taking good steps. Adobe has recently acquired Phone Gap which is an opensource for developing HTML5 based hybrid apps of variety of mobile devices like iPhone and Android. We are using it at myBantu. In this case 90% code base is independent of the mobile device. (HTML5 related my blog entry: http://texploration.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/html5-winning-high-volume-websites/ )

Oracle in Three in One Cloud : PaaS, SaaS, DaaS

2011-10-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

After adverse comments last year, Larry Ellison announced that Oracle got into Cloud in a big way. It is significantly different than CRM on Demand. It also adopts different approach than Multi-Tenant Sales Force. Oracle's public Cloud provides: PAAS (Platform As A Service), SaaS (Software As A Service) and Daas (Database As a Service). It has five components:

* Oracle’s Fusion Applications (HCM and CRM) SaaS
* Oracle Fusion Middleware : PaaS
* Oracle Database : DaaS
* Sun Systems, OS, VM : PaaS
* Social Network : SaaS

This announcement puts Oraccle in competition with Amazon, and Salesforce, which are the clear leaders in the public cloud computing space.

Good to see that CRM and HCM are in the pack. Last year I helped CRM and earlier Talent management from HCM in this initiative. This puts Oracle in direct competition with SalesForce, WorkDay and SuccessFactor (on Talent management side).

Oracle also announced Social Network for enterprises. It would allow social networking featers like sharing and following private to enterprises. Does it sound like Salesforce's Chatter? While on the topic of SalesForce, the approach Oracle for most of the component is virtualization based where every customer gets its own pack and not sharing with others as in multi-tenant softwares like SalesForce. This addresses someof the privacy concerns. Enterprises can customize the cloud based Fusion apps by SOA , BPEL, BPM and ADF standards based Fusion Middleware. Oracle's Database as a Service is in competition with similar provision on Amazon.

Oracle also provides Java stack as PaaS in competition with VMWare's CloudFoundry, Redhat's OpenShift and Salesforce's Heroku.

According to Ellison, Oracle’s new public cloud will be available for a monthly subscription and will include resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, self-service sign up, elastic capacity on-demand, virus scanning, and more.

However, pricing and availability is yet to be announced.

Visit http://cloud.oracle.com

Opensource WebRTC for Browser 2 Browser communication Coming up

2011-06-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

WebRTC, A new open source for browser to browser communication is making some progress. http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/ has been launched and would go through W3C standardizatio. It may be part of HTML5. As per my knowledge, Google may adapt it and many browswer would support it. This browser to browser communication without any server involved would replaced traditional P2P communication including chats and talks.

Here is WebRTC architecture diagram:

For developers : http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/reference
However, currently it is not yet ready. The current demo still needs a demo server. but it will be there soon.

If you want to join the effort: http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/build

NFC Getting Momentum

2011-05-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

The Near Field Communication (NFC) is gaining a momentum. Its usage will be propelled via mobile devices and would give a birth to many fantastic devices and applications.

Last week Apple introduced Retail 2.0 store that effectively used NFC.

To the heels of the Apple, Google took the techbology to the more practical and more wider usage. That is to enable credit card payments via mobile. This morning Google introduced an android App called Wallet. It uses RFID and NFC technology.

The usage of NFC in the Android mobile is going to propel a new set of innovation. Hence let us look at few facts about NFC:

1. Distance: 4 cm or less (may be increased to 20cm)
2. 13.56 Mhz
3. Speed 106Kb/s to 848KB/s
4. Typicall usage: “sharing, pairing, and transaction"
5. Passive or active (2way) communication models
6. Unlike Bluetooth, NFC doesn’t require pairing
7. NFC requires far less power than Bluetooth but its slower.
8. Drawback: not-secure (may be ok because of very short range)

Coming back to Wallet. It should be noted that all the android mobiles would not have NFC technology built in. Also the service provider (shops / retailers) should be have complimentary technology.

Is ChromeBook nothing but Larry's old idea of Network Internet Computer?

2011-05-11T23:44:00.000-07:00

Google announced ChromeBooks at GoogleIO 2011 conference today with a great fan-far. Definitely it is an idea appropriate to current Web centric world. It seems to be giving right vibes. It's slick, fast to start, connected to web, secured, may be free from viruses, consumes low battery. It is consistent with today's cloud computing. In other word, it is perfect client device for a Cloud Computing world or new web. However, is it a real innovation? Larry had started Network computer concept and had launched a separate company for the same. May be it was ahead of time. Isn't ChromeBook recycled the same idea? Anyway, though it has an innovative subscription model for education and businesses, the cost is higher, 499 for wifi and 599 for wireless. Especially on the background of various efforts going on to introduce slick Netbook at $100. Moreover, at this price, the ChromeBook would get sandwiched between tablets and PCs. Read my detailed blog at:
http://texploration.wordpress.com/
http://texploration.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/is-chromebook-recycled-idea-of-netcomputing-would-it-be-sandwitched-between-tablets-and-laptops/

Hadoop is building a good momentum...

2011-05-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

In EMC World this week, many new products based on Hadoop called launched.

EMC announced enterprise and community distribution as well as appliance of Apache Hadoop. This would be in competition with Cloudera which has a very good traction in Hadoop market. Moreover, Yahoo which has been pioneer in original contribution of Hadoop and a heavy user, is rumoured to be launching Hadoop spin-off. It has contributed Pig as a layer above Hadoop.

During the conference other products like Brisk,which makes Hadoop with Cassendra as a node, and SnapReduce from SnapLogic were also announced. Overall all of these are good indication of Hadoop traction. A more detailed note is in my other blog which is dedicated to emerging technologies and apps.

http://texploration.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/hadoop-based-products-launche/

Personalized News Recommendations

2011-03-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of days back, on March 10, Barron’s reported that “NYTimes.com Adds Recommendation Feature‘. Back in Nov 2010 MyBantu powered ‘Personalized News Recommendations‘ was launched for Samachar, largest news portal about India. This personalized news recommendation, one of the firsts, not only increased visitors(readers) traffic to the Samachar site but it also resulted in the readers spending more time reading these personalized articles. more ....

Collaborative Filtering Vs Personal Preferences Based Recommendations

2011-03-10T02:19:00.001-08:00

From my other blogs:

http://www.mybantu.com/blog/2011/03/10/collaborative-vs-personalized-recommendations/

Buzz Around Non-Relational DBs

2011-03-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

Reposting from my other blog http://texploration.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/buzz-around-nonrelational-db/

Last Saturday we (GITPRO – Global Indian Tech Professionals Association) arranged Tech Talk on NoSQL (nonRelational actually) DBs and Scaling Hadoop. It was very well attended. In the general introduction session when many introduced themselves they told their interests in Hadoop and NoSQL DB. It was nice to see a good size crowd sacrificing their Saturday evening to attend this informative session. It was more surprising to see many of them were actually users of these technology.

We at MyBantu are using MongoDb which is a document orient database. We store XML document (actually when store it is BSON in MongoDB) and queries use Scripting language for conditions. Other alternative in this class is CouchDB which is more Web-like and gives REST based access. Other famous Non-Relational (popularly called as NoSQL) we of course Hadoop and Cassandra. Both are apache projects with few very good show case implementations. However, recently when Diggs had problem and was using Cassandra, it got a bad name which is not that accurate. Anyway, Hadoop and its database called HBase are making more buzz. It was interesting news when Facebook also moved their messaging system from Cassandra to HBase. Its interesting especially because Cassandra originally came from engineers at Facebook. They used in their InBox search. There is some interesting work on Hadoop is happening in Facebook. They are the original contributors of Hive which is a data manipulation add of targeted towards implementing warehousing on top of Hadoop. While MapReduce databases created a lot of buzz around NoSQL, it is interesting that Hive and Hbase are SQL. so, when folks say NoSQL, it is actually non-Relational databases. Another warehousing related add-on to Hadoop is Pig (Apache Pig) which has originally coming out of Yahoo.

Anyway, its interestingly rapid development happening in this space and the major drive is due to the huge user generated data being handled in the social networking giants like Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn,.. but the original credit to this concept of Big Table goes to Google from where the Map Reduce database

Games (Asian) Indians Play

2011-02-28T19:21:00.000-08:00

I recently read this book,"Games Indian Play". This book is not about Indian games like Kho-Kho, Kabbadi etc. But it is about "why do Indian behave how they behave". To be precise, the sub-title of the book is "">Why we are the way we are". The author, Raghunathan, as used his studies on "Game Theory and Behavioral Economics" to make sense of Indians behavior. Its a though provoking book which uses "Prisoners Dilemma", the famous problem from game theory, to eloborate how Indians are 'rational' but thier self-centered rationalism undermines their long term as well as community interests. His examples cover day to day scenarios covers almost everyone, individuals, politicians, or community by and large. At the end of the book, the author tried to propose crux of "Bhagwat Geeta" as a solution to behavior and explained it in the context of the game theory problem.

AS 11 SOA EDN Log URL

2010-10-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Since many folks asked about an ability to view posted events, here is the url to do so
http://:/soa-infra/events/edn-db-log

China May Lead Patenting, How About Innovation?

2010-10-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

Title is self explanatory. My following blog refers the stories..

http://texploration.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/china-may-lead-patenting-how-about-innovation/

Larry, Fusion Apps, and SOA Middleware Technology

2010-10-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

At Oracle Open World 2010, Larry Ellison glowingly referred Oracle Fusion Apps (OFA) in his eagerly watched keynote as the largest engineering project of Oracle in the recent times. He covered some important aspects of the Oracle Fusion Apps. He said that it is the first ERP Application completely based on standards. While terming it as "Never done before", he specifically mentioned BPEL! He mentioned that the Fusion Apps is all about Intelligence and not just process automation. Per Larry, the Fusion Apps has wonderful web 2.0 based easy to use UI and search capabilities. Most importantly, he specifically mentioned that the Fusion Applications is based on SOA technology. In fact, this was on his slide deck. All of us who worked on SOA - BPM stack must have been proud to hear Larry saying that.

At the end of his keynpte, Larry invited Steve Miranda, In-charge of Fusion Apps, to demonstrated the Fusion Apps. you must have seen the Work List apps and might have immediately recognized the SOA suite serving the business process. After an intense work for years, hearing such great comments is a rejuvenating memorable moment of all of us who worked on the product as well as helped to happen the Fusion Apps!

Resolving timeouts while using ejb beans for SOA invocation - deployment

2010-10-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

If you are using AS11 BPEL's apis for deployment or invocations and facing time-outs, and the task really needs more time, then you may need to increase the ejb timeout.

1. Find ejb_ob_engine_wls.jar in your deployment.
2. Modify META-INF/weblogic-ejb-jar.xml,
3. Increase time-out
4. rejar and replace the original jar

Selectively turning off the service engines in Oracle SOA AS11

2010-10-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Spring based implementation of Oracle SOA AS11, if you are not using B2B or mediator or decision or any other service engine, you can turn it off by removing their reference beans in fabric's Spring config (fabric-config.xml). Just be careful though! You may accidently remove something that is needed :-) This may bring the memory consumption down by 100s of MBs.

Integration technologies for Cloud

2010-10-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

2010 is seeing Cloud computing and mobile computing at their 'tipping points'. There are many startups being launched in these areas. With many applications being SaaS based hosted on Cloud, the next requirement would be how to connect them securely and reliably. What could be the right technologies for the same. This need would definitely turn into Cloud based Integration technologies - SOA technologies.

Micropayments opening gate to the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid

2010-07-19T14:29:00.000-07:00

Late C. K. Prahalad wrote a path breaking book showing to the world that there are great opportunities in the emerging as well as poor nations. Those potential markets would need innovation to realize.

When he wrote The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he may not have thought about VoiceSMS and voice blogging.

But he does mentioned about the innovation. And such innovation is in action in the form of bubbleMotion http://www.bubblemotion.com/ which has more than 1.2 million paid users who pay 0.65 USD per month for blogging / accessing voice.

Oracle BPM Suite .. unified engine..

2010-06-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

Oracle announced BPM Suite today http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Oracle-Announces-Oracle-iw-1502422125.html?x=0&.v=1

An important note about this Suite is based on unified process foundation of Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g . It has the same engine that executes both BPEL and BPMN processes. Note that there is not conversion from BPMN to BPEL or BPMN to any other model for execution. The same service engine can execute both BPEL and BPMN instructions. The BPM suite is enrichment and extension to Oracle's SOA suite. It provides easy to use Process Composer (BPMN) that can be used to create process, deploy them and modify (for extension) the processes that are already deployed. It provides End-to-end unified the management and monitoring of the business processes.

My predictions for 2010

2010-01-06T12:26:00.001-08:00

http://texploration.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/my-prediction-about-emerging-technologies-in-2010/
http://texploration.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/my-prediction-about-emerging-technologies-in-2010/

Google Android in an Integrated Communication Device As a Home / Kitchen Unit

2009-11-12T20:57:00.001-08:00

My blog on this ...

http://texploration.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/google-android-in-action-in-home-device-by-vega-icd/

Googlers announced "Go" Programming language

2009-11-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

googlers announced a new programming language "Go" w

Go is being advertised as Fast (to compile), Safe(pointers without pointer maths), Concurrent (lightweight process communication) and Cool (dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language) and open source... disclaimer: I am yet to validate these claims...

Here is a video clip introducing the Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwoWei-GAPo

Googlers:
Robert Griesemer
Kenneth Thompson
Rob Pike
Russ Cox
Ian Lance Taylor

Increased Momentum to Hybrid Cloud

2009-10-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

Hybrid Cloud as depicted in the following diagram is a middle path for enterprises for taking advantage of the public clouds as well as addressing the security and ownership concerns of mission critical as well as sensitive data.

Recently at OOW 2009 is SFO, Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, showed agreement to the Hybrid approch. Both Dell and SaleForce determined on this Hybrid approach.

Does Enterprise Apps on a Box make sense?

2009-10-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

In OOW 2009, Larry Ellison presented a powerful case of DB on a Box Machine. He demonstrated Exadata2 for almost more than half of his presentation time. It is a good story to make customer up and running quickly and saving from chasing different vendors. However, he presented it in the context of Database. Wouldn't the same model make sense for Apps too? It's is kind of different than the current momentum to SaaS and Cloud. But installing, configuring, tuning and setting up enterprise Apps is a time consuming process involving multiple vendors and skills. If that can be reduced by this Apps on A Box model, would it be better?

Larry J. Ellison at Oracle Open World 2009

2009-10-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

(This is my near real-time blog. Most of the content was keyed in real time and later was little bit polished .)

Wednesday was the Larry's keynote day. Today at 2:45pm it was scheduled in the Mascone center where the Oracle Open world is being held. In the beginning, Charles Philip introduced the Diamond sponsor of the event, Infosys and its CEO Mr. S. Gopalkrishnan. His speech was focused on IT led innovation. It had a lot of good content but the presentation needed to be improved. Particularly such a large audience expects some charisma, some laughter and some real life incidents connecting to the crowd. Anyway, after the Infosys' CEO's speech on Innovation, Charlse Philip invited Larry. In his typical black sports jacket and black (crew style) sweat/T shirt, Larry appeared on the stage. Right in the beginning, LJE mentioned the topics he was planning to cover starting with Linux to Fusion Apps. Here are some of the snippets from his presentation.

It seems that flow of his presentation was from OS to dedicated box to monitoring to Fusion Apps.

So LJE started with Linux. Remember 2 years back at OOW he had introduced Oracle Linux and last year he had introduced VM. This year he unified the vision with his comment. In LJE's view, the Virtual VM and OS should blend together for easier to deploy, patch etc. Oracle VM would also support other OSs (like Windows)

Then Larry moved on to Exadata Version 2
Running Oracle enterprise Linux, Sun Oracle Database Machine . He specifically mentioned that this machine is different than the Spark based machine, demonstrated on Sunday, which is 16 times faster than similar from IBM. The customers are getting performance improvement with 10s of times not just in 10s of percentages. Exadata2 is very first database machine aimed for high performance OLTP and not for warehousing like others.
Exadata2 does random IO very rapidly. It is fastest and fault tolerant and consuming less power. 1million disk i/os per sec. Despite 72 racks, IBMS machine is not fault tolerant but very costly. For same money, Exadata is 4 times faster.

Somewhere here we saw "Kalifornia"s governator Mr. Arnold appearing on the stage! He covered a lot on innovation and technology. He mentioned how he could do so much in movies because of the technology. He then moved to clean tech and environment. The only joke that he could create a good laughter was about hands-free cell phone and his wife Maria getting three times caught breaking the hands-free-cellphone law. Anyway, he ended with praising role of Oracle and Sun in innovation, business and employment to California.

Afterward, Larry launched a crusade on IBM with the performance edge of the Exadata. During the course, he also elaborated the key contributors in improving the performance. He emphasized that it is faster than fancy-specialized In-Memory DBs. It is faster because of Grid computing, compression the data, faster movement of data, and with the usage of fast flash drives.
Another advantage of Exadata2 that he mentioned was it has simplified deployment because everything pre-cofigured.
Costs 110,000 - 350,000 - 600,000 ... Start small and grow.

In Summary, Exadata is positioned as:
The Fastest for Warehousing and OLTP, best cost/performance and Fault tolerant & scalable.

This is where Larry offered his $10 million challenge to anyone including IBM to run any apps on similar IBM box with more than half the speed that of Exadata! Read again $10 million!!

Then LJE moved on to monitoring but introduced beyond just monitoring. He introduced the concept of central Global Configuration DB that can be used for Proactive problem prevention. It can be used for Recommends patches, health checks etc. Such system would proactively notify customers based on their configuration about problems and solutions. Then help in problem resolution with automated download, validation and merge patching.

He also elaborated the usage of Business Service Metrics in EM for Detect underlying technical infrastructure failures and then use Correlation Engine to further diagnose the issue. Richard demonstrated the real time problem detection, patching and merging.

Larry's final presentation was the latest and greatest introduction to Fusion Applications. he high-lighted that Fusion apps are:
1. SaaS ready / Cloud Ready
2. Service Oriented Architecture. Because of SOA, it can be easily connected to other apps.
3. Fusion Apps: Replacement Applications and new apps are add on to Apps Unlimited!

This last aspect is a great story to motivate existing customers to upgrade or selectively adapt.

Anyway, during his presentation, Larry mentioned following applications: Talent Management., DOO, Incentive Compensation, Territory management, GRC, etc ... all these apps I provided consultancy to!!!!

While covering details, Larry emphasis following design Principals of Fusion Apps.
1. Standards based middle-ware
2. Embedded business intelligence
3. Modern and consistent UI with integrated collaboration
4. SOA
5. SaaS
Now pause at the third bullet:SOA! Just remember that is the key of the co-exist with apps-unlimited or with any other apps. Isn't it the most important aspect of the Fusion Apps? Oh, I was probably over-emphasizing the area where I played role in SOA-BPM!

Larry then invited Steve Miranda for demonstration of Fusion Apps(I like working with him. A very nice-pleasant personality and good leader). Chris Leon joined Steve for the demos. They demonstrated two scenarios. Both demonstrated a very new way of building apps. Fusion Apps uses BI natively. It also provides real-time collaboration. And I am proud to be one of the key contributor in SOAfying the Fusion Apps!

The overall show was almost 2hrs 15mins and it had engaged all the crowd. Larry does a great job especially without slides. I was hoping some more fire-shots but I guess this was enough. Anyway, Oracle already announced more than half a dozen new releases this week. That itself is overwhelming.

Typically keynote speeches are high on messages and less on details. The audience was looking for a direction and new launches. That way, Fusion Apps and EM based auto patching were the new launches. The Linux-VM and Exadata was the direction or continuation. These two in general and later in specifically suitable for setting a stage for Sun merger. Linux and VM direction was a message of continuity and consistency with previous open worlds.

Analysts also analyze Larry's speeches for his positioning with respect to the competitors. Though RedHat (Linux), Vmware(VM), SAP (Fusion Apps) are direct competitors in those respective markets, Larry did not spend time on those but focused on IBM. It was surprising that he spared SAP too. Isn't it interesting? Is SAP out of picture? Another observation, he did not comment much on cloud computing. However, he respectfully added SaaS in the context of Fusion Apps. In my opinion, such ommissions and commissions give a sense of direction for Oracle. Does it? Especially on the backdrop in Larry's interview a couple of weeks back where he ridiculed the hype of cloud-computing and then affirmed the presence of the cloud-computing. In the contrast, it was missing from today's keynote but SaaS and Linux-VM was added on top of Exadata. BTW I also noticed that Larry quickly adapts to the changes in the environment. So it won't be surprising that he would change his pitch if the environment changes.

Talking At OOW 2009 Today on SOA Suite Best Practices Based on Development Experience of Fusion Apps

2009-10-12T04:54:00.001-07:00

Session Information

ID#: S308799
Title: Oracle SOA Suite 11g Best Practices Based on Oracle Fusion Applications Development Experiences
Date: 12-OCT-09
Time: 17:30-18:30
Venue: Hilton Hotel
Room: Yosemite B

Very Live Interview of LJE with a great humour and punchlines:

2009-09-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

Its seems that great CEOs had a good time. Here is a glimpse of the witty interactions...

On Cloud Computing

"Everyone looks around and is like, 'Yah! Like everything is in the cloud,' " mocked Ellison. "My objection is it's absurdity--it's nonsense ... What are you talking about? It's not water vapor. It's a computer attached to a network!"

Again on Cloud Computing
"Cloud computing isn't the future--it's the present and the past of computing,"

This is the best comment on life:
"I think life is a series of acts of discovery," Ellison mused. "We're all interested in discovering our own limits."

SOA on Cloud

2009-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

In today's world of Cloud computing, I would like to make a case for SOA on Cloud. It make sense for providing an agile and scalable infrastructure. SOA on Cloud would bring the setup cost of the customers down. Recently I had a discussions with a large consulting company engaged in providing SOA consultancy and Syetem integration to large enterprises. The executives really liked the idea of SOA on Cloud. That would immediately bring their cost down. In their opinion, at each client they spend 2-3 weeks in getting environment procured, set up etc before they could start SOA setup. With SOA on the cloud, they can immediately avoid all the setup time and start doing the real work. Obviously the saved time is a saving on billable hours.

Google FastFlip .. My quick take on it..

2009-09-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

http://texploration.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/first-look-at-fastflip-flip-or-flop/

Flaws in Using BPEL to implement Orchestration Engine than Using BPEl to Orchestrate a Process Flow

2009-09-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

BPEL provides a Web Service Orchestration language. Like any basic programming language, it has some constructs for declaring variables, switching, looping, sequencing or parallel branching, etc. Due to this construct, some times I came across implementation where BPEL is used as a programming language implementing an Orchestration Engine itself than an orchestration language. In this case, the flow sequence is captured as a model in database tables and then BPEL process is an engine which uses the model in the tables to get the next activity. So it kind of "implementing an orchestration" engine in BPEL rather than Orchestrating in BPEL. Isn't it cool? or Are there any issues? Yes, in prima-facie it looks like cool, creative and innovative. However, you would need to think about what BPEL orchestration is, how would compensation work? how about fault handling? how can you view the process itself, whether you would be able to meaningfully monitor the process? In most of the scenarios, the answers to these questions would steer you away from using BPEL as a programming language

IBM, watch out, we are coming to win it !

2009-09-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

WSJ Advertisement:

Speaking at Oracle OpenWold 2009

2009-09-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

I will be speaking at OOW 2009 on Oct 12th. The topic will be:
Oracle SOA Suite 11g Best Practices Based on Oracle Fusion Applications Development Experiences

ITPIO Launched : News covered in the Economic Times of India

2009-08-19T03:10:00.001-07:00

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4907390.cms

Association for Indian origin IT professionals launched in US
18 Aug 2009, 1908 hrs IST, PTI

Print EMail Discuss Share Save Comment Text:
SILICON VALLEY: With an objective to bring Indian origin IT professionals at one platform and give them a common voice, an association of IT
professionals has been launched here.

"ITPIO gives an opportunity to all IT professionals and other professionals as well to communicate with each other," Sri Chawla, CEO of US Microtech and a philanthropist in the Silicon Valley said in his inaugural address.

The first chapter of the Association of IT Professionals of Indian Origin (ITPO) was launched in the Silicon Valley on August 15 - India's Independence Day.

"IT professionals from India are well known and perceived for their skills, professionalism and success - yet they do not have an organisation representing their professional interest," Khanderao Kand, founder of ITPIO said.

"ITPIO is a great platform for everyone from entry level to C level with an objective to promote the professional leadership to make an Indian Imprint on the progress of world," Kand added.

Speaking on the difficult times being faced by IT industry
, well known CEO and Entrepreneur Coach Dr Prasad Kaipa in his key note address said, "Turbulent times are the appropriate times for positive deviance, for stretching, risk taking and this will show up us as leaders."

Primarily focusing on fostering the leadership and personal development of IT professionals of Indian Origin, ITPIO has also initiated chapters in Denver,Washington, Seattle Hyderabad and Bangalore.

IT Professionals of Indian Origin (ITPIO) hosts Dr. Kaipa's Talk on "Career and Self Development in Current Economically Turbulent Times”

2009-08-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

India’s Independence Day

IT Professionals of Indian Origin (ITPIO) Bay Area Chapter, Inaugural Session
( http://www.it-pio.org/Web/events.html )
Saturday, August 15, 2009, 5:00 pm to 7:15pm,
Free Entry

Keynote Speech

“Career and Self Development in Current Economically Turbulent Times"

By Dr. Prasad Kaipa

At

HP Oak Room, 19111 Pruneridge Ave, Bldg 48 Cupertino, California 95014

Dr. Prasad Kaipa is a strategic advisor, management guru and a CEO coach to CEOs, board members and senior executives. Since 1990, Dr. Kaipa has advised CEOs and coached Executive Teams in the areas of Innovation, Business Transformation, Decision Making, Strategic Thinking and Personal Mastery. Some of his clients include HP, CISCO, Disney, Adobe, Apple, Xerox, Boeing, Mastek, BAE Systems Mastek and Navteq. Dr. Kaipa is a visiting faculty at the Indian School of Business and part-time faculty at the Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, CA. For more information: http://prasadkaipa.com

Program

* Indian Cultural Program (Patriotic Songs)
* Speed Networking Game (Bring business cards)
* Presentation/Inauguration of ITPIO Bay Area
* Keynote Speech by Dr. Kaipa
* Recitation of National Anthems of India and USA

ITPIO is a networking association of IT Professionals of Indian Origin. ITPIO aims to bring professionals in the fields of hardware and software together for their career and personal development while contributing back to the IT profession and community. ITPIO aspires to represent the interests of Indian IT Professionals in the policies and issues related to Information Technology.

For more information:
Email: KHANDERAO at YAHOO dot COM or ITPIO at YAHOO dot COM

SNACKS for Early Arrivals starting from 4:45 pm.

AS11 SOA Tips: Configuring Component (Process) level properties

2009-07-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

Oracle's SOA Suite AS11 is based on SCA (Service Component Architecture). Hence the configuration of process level properties is also done as per SCA standard. To be specifically as component properties in composite.xml

Here is an example:

For details refer to FMW SOA Documentation Appendix C

Why is it important?
The Component Properties can be configured in the production environment via Enterprise Manager and they can be accessible to the running component or component container (or service engine like BPEL)

SOATips AS11 Moving SOA Projects Prom Dev-test To ProductionP

2009-07-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

SOA projects often embed physical addresses of various servers hosting wsdls, xsd s etc. For example, a SOA composite may invoke another service hosted on other box hosting a test environment and may refer xsds on the box. The physical address could be in the composite.xml where bindings and imports could be pointing to wsdls on target servers (which may change)
For example, a reference in composite.xml would be like following:

Whenever the SOA project needs to be deployed on a production environment, these references to test environment needs to be replaced by the appropriate references in the production environment.

This replacement can be done during the deployment time using Configuration Plan. It understands the composite/ wsdl/xsd constructs that may have the concrete address embedded within e.g.

Config plan is a xml file that contains information related to replacing the appropriate strings. The config plan can be generated from composite by right clicking on the composite.xml from jdev.

The plan should associated to soa composite during the deployment time.

AS11 SOA : Tracing events using event logger

2009-07-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

If you are publishing events in AS11 and would like to trace it : A quick check to see whether event has been published or not would be using event logger.

http://:port/soa-infra/events/edn-db-log

Of course, you can also use Enterprise Manager (em) to trace the event. There are multiple ways to trace them in EM.

1. Through instance tracking on the subscribing composite,
2. Business Events page in EM ( Right click on soa-infra -> select Business Events)
3. Looking into log files ( once again via EM)

Event vs Services to initiate a BPEL process in AS11

2009-07-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

Since As11 supports both events and services to initiate a SOA composite ( may be having a BPEL process within it), there is always a question around when to use events and when to use service invocation to start the process.

The decision can be based on the following understanding of the events and service patterns.

Events

Events are suitable for a decoupled integration.
Events are one way messaging (no request response pattern and correlation)
The publisher does not know about the subscribers (there might not be subscribers too)
The publisher is not blocked for the execution of the subscriptions
Events support 1:n fan out (multiple subscribers for the same event)

Service invocations

Service invocation is a tight integrations with the service provider
Service invocation supports request response patterns (sync or async)
Synchronous service invocation is blocked till the execution of the service completes.
Async Request response pattern is often supported via WS-adderessing and correlation

2009-07-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

Started another blog focusing on Software Development Management

Another post on Google Wave: Applications

2009-07-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

Just posted in my Texploration blog.
http://texploration.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/applications-of-google-wave/

Quick Summary of Business Events Support in SOA As11

2009-07-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

Oracle's SOA Suite AS11 is a rendezvous of SOA and EDA models. The EDA functionality is served by Business Events Framework (called Event Delivery Network EDN) and Complex Event Process (CEP) are two main components.

EDN: EDN supports a loosely coupled event pub-sub model. From another J2EE server, a publisher can publish the events either programmatically using Java API from a J2EE container or declaratively via ADFbc Entity Objects. These events can be subscribed by zero or more mediator(s) or bpel(s). Both Mediator and BPEL can publish events too. EDN's event pub-sub model supports m:n relations. EDN has been implemented on top of JMS. It supports delivery policies like AtLeastOnce, OneAndOnlyOne, and ExactlyOnce.

EDL: Events are described using EDL (Event Description Language). Each event has a event name as QName and event payload as a xml element. Events carry properties, headers and a payload in runtime.

SCA: We have also made events as a first-class-citizen of SCA. In SCA composite, event publishing and subscribing can be specified.

Subscription: Event subscriptions are defined with event name and (optionally) Xpath based condition filter. While multiple components from one or more composites can subscribe an event, there can be only one subscription per subscribing component.

Testing: You can fire a test event using SOA console in Enterprise Manager (EM)

Monitoring: Events can be monitored by SOA console in EM or http://soaserver:port/soa-infra/events/edn-db-log.html

First Glance at Google Wave

2009-07-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

I blogged it here

Fusion Middleware AS11 would be launched in the next week (First week of July 2009)

2009-06-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

You may have heard this in Oracle's quarterly conference call yesterday. As per Charles Philip, the Co-President of Oracle, " We are rolling out a major new release next week called Fusion Middleware 11G," he explained. "We'll launch that in Washington, DC and eight other cities around the world and then we'll follow-on with a tour in 107 cities." Finally all the hard work of last three plus years in building this great well integrated, feature rich and standards-based product would be available for customers to use! Feeling product!

BPEL: Resolving ConflictingReceive Issue while using the same PL in the branches of Flow or FlowN

2009-06-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Issue: 

Developers often encountered conflictingReceive fault while using the same partnerlink in different branches of Flow or FlowN.



Details following:



"{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2003/03/business-process/}conflictingReceive"

    has been

     thrown."{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2003/03/business-process/}conflictingReceive"

    has been thrown.

     



     

     *summary*">

     Conflicting receive. A similar receive activity is being

     declared in the same process. Another receive activity or

     equivalent (currently, onMessage branch in a pick activity) has

     already been enabled with the partnerLink "Dummy", operation name

     "processResponse" and correlation set "" (or conversation ID).

     Appendix A - Standard Faults in the BPEL 1.1 specification

     specifies a fault should be thrown under these conditions.

     Redeploy the process after removing the conflicting receive

    activities. 

   

     



Solution:

Instead of defining the partnerlink as a global partner link, declare it within a scope of each parallel branch.

BPEL: Links to synchronize a process flow

2009-06-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

"link" is a construct to synchronize the BPEL process flow. However, for some unknown reasons, "link"s are lightly used in practice by most of the customers. One of the reason can be in its understanding and, other could be due to its usability. There is no specific UI icon in BPEL designer to represent the links. Its probably because, unlike other constructs, the artifacts related to links need to injected in multiple places. For example, First, a link needs to be defined, then source and target to the link needs to be defined. May be I should post an example covering it.

Speaking at SOA World 2008

2008-11-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

I will be speaking at SOA World 2008 next week. Here is the link to my session:

http://soaworld2008.com/general/session1108.htm?id=145

See you there if you are around.

I will be speaking on BPEL Lifecycle issues and solutions.

OSGi in Enterprise Application Servers: A latest PR

2008-09-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

In our, article on OSGi in SOA World Magazine, we (Dave Chappell and I) had predicated increasing uptake of OSGi in Enterprise Application Servers. Following PR from OSGi confirmed the prediction.

“With the lion’s share of the enterprise application server market deploying OSGi technology, the alliance has created the dynamic module system for Java™ technology,” said Stan Moyer, president of the OSGi Alliance. “The OSGi Service Platform delivers universal middleware for Java to providers and their customers, modularizing and componentizing the Java platform and allowing applications to be adapted remotely and in real time.”

Leading vendors using OSGi technology include IBM’s WebSphere, Oracle’s WebLogic, Paremus’ Infiniflow Service Fabric, ProSyst’s ModuleFusion, Red Hat’s JBoss, SpringSource’s SpringSource Application Platform and Sun Microsystems’ GlassFish Enterprise Server. Both Oracle and SAP AG have announced that they will use OSGi technology as the foundation for their next-generation application servers.

These leaders note the distinct value OSGi technology provides, or will provide, to their individual enterprise application server offerings.

“As a founding member and key contributor to the OSGi Alliance since its inception in 1999, IBM is pleased to see OSGi technology gain such significant traction with customers and other vendors,” said Craig Hayman, vice president, IBM WebSphere. “IBM was one of the first vendors to realize the value that OSGi technology brought to client devices and has been shipping WebSphere Application Server built on OSGi technology since 2006. As a result, IBM clients benefit from a modular platform built with proven components and the ability to automatically use only the components required by their application.”

“Oracle WebLogic Server is a great example of the customer benefits of modularization, with its reduced footprint, improved startup time, and flexible configuration options,” said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of product development at Oracle. “OSGi technology provides the standards-based foundation for delivering and reusing proven WebLogic server modules in multiple ways across the larger Oracle Fusion Middleware product, helping us bring innovations to market more quickly and enabling robust integration with the full Oracle stack.”

“OSGi technology has been fundamental to the Infiniflow Service Fabric since 2005,” said Richard Nicholson, CEO for Paremus. “Infiniflow, which is often regarded as a next-generation distributed application server, is built from OSGi bundles and provides a distributed OSGi technology-based runtime for applications dynamically constructed from a repository of re-usable components. By fusing Cloud resource abstraction, Grid load balancing and dynamic composite SOA, Infiniflow sets new standards for robustness, dynamic scalability and adaption.”

“ProSyst has been working with OSGi technology since 1999,” said Roman Roelofsen, lead architect of ProSyst’s Enterprise OSGi solutions. “In a few days we will officially launch ModuleFusion, our first enterprise OSGi open source initiative. The goal is to help programmers using the OSGi Service Platform as their underlying runtime environment. ModuleFusion contains a full stack typical for Java enterprise applications. This stack currently consists of best-of-breed open source frameworks from the Java ecosystem. Additionally, ModuleFusion contains the necessary glue code to easily use these frameworks within OSGi and therefore provides the next-generation, pure OSGi model for enterprise applications.”

“Running OSGi technology in JBoss Enterprise Middleware Solutions enables our customers to deliver safer services and applications in a more dynamic runtime environment,” said Sacha Labourey, vice president of engineering for Red Hat’s Middleware Business Unit. “We are pleased to have helped the OSGi Service Platform reach the level of industry standard for application servers and are looking forward to continue working with OSGi technology and the other members of the OSGi Alliance.”

“Today, SAP NetWeaver is the technology platform of choice for thousands of customers running mission-critical SAP and non-SAP applications with a wide range of complexity and functionality,” said Prasad Kompalli, senior vice president of SAP NetWeaver Composition, SAP AG. “Continuing the focus on modularization, flexibility and lower TCO, the next-generation SAP NetWeaver Java Application Server will be based on OSGi technology, allowing our customers and partners to benefit fully from further improvements in ease of consumption, flexibility in deployment, and optimized resource consumption.”

“OSGi has become a critical technology for enterprise Java. Demand for modular application architectures, dynamic updating and reloading, flexible version control, and intelligent, granular, dependency management is breaking down the traditional concepts of an application server,” said Adrian Colyer, CTO for SpringSource. “That is why we have chosen OSGi technology as the central standard for the SpringSource Application Platform. Enterprise customers and developers can be freed from legacy constraints and develop next-generation applications that are ready to take advantage of more dynamic compute environments such as those created through virtualization and cloud computing.”

“Sun has seen strong demand for OSGi technology within the GlassFish community,” said Tom Kincaid, executive director, application platforms at Sun Microsystems, Inc. “The GlassFish community will be able to take advantage of the modularity and dynamic extensibility implemented via an OSGi technology-based microkernel in the upcoming GlassFish v3 Prelude release. This modularity is also being used in the Open Enterprise Service Bus (Open ESB) community where the next-generation Open ESB v3 will provide developers with a flexible and easier-to-use platform for the creation of integration and composite applications.”

OSGi technology is a component integration platform with a service-oriented architecture and lifecycle capabilities that enable dynamic delivery of services. OSGi technology is shipping in millions of units worldwide, and is deployed by Fortune 100 companies in home, automotive, mobile and enterprise markets.

OSGi Alliance members develop and facilitate the deployment of OSGi specifications, which serve as the platform for universal middleware in server and embedded environments. Deployment of the open standard greatly increases the value of a wide range of computers and devices that use the Java platform.

SDBP 2008: My Second conference in October

2008-09-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

I will be joining Dave Chappell and Clemens Utschig at Software Development Best Practices Conference in Boston. We will be presenting some thoughts in a SOA track on Next Generation SOA. See you there... Khanderao

Sun ( Open ESB) joins CQL

2008-09-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

OpenESB joined CQL (continuous query language) that is being promoted and enriched by Oracle's CEP team for a while. Sun's addition would be good for our efforts towards getting CQL standardized.

Intermediate Roadmap of Oracle's ESBs : OSB and OESB

2008-09-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

As Thomas Kurian outlined, http://download.oracle.com/products/middleware/oracle-middleware-strategy-briefing-072008.pdf, BEA's ALSB would be a value addition in Oracle's SOA stack. ALSB has been enhanced and re-branded as OSB. The upcoming enhancements includes an integration with BPEL, Oracle's Adapters (AQ/DB/EBS/PSFT/SAP), etc. OSB has a thin client service assembler and supports core ESB patterns including Service Chaining. OSB would be integrated in AS11 and so existing customers can upgrade to the same.

Oracle's existing service bus, now re-branded as OESB, would continue as a part of SOA suite. Apart from basic ESB patterns for routing and service virtualization, it also has useful features like Domain Value Maps, Cross References. In addition to OC4J, it also supports WLS and WebSphere. It is well integrated part and parcel of SOA stack and is seamlessly upgraded to upcoming AS11 as a Mediator Component.

However, any upgrade between OESB to/fro OSB would neither be needed nor be supported.

The Roadmap of Oracle's Fusion Middleware post BEA Acquisition

2008-08-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

In the following presentation, Thomas Kurian outlined the road map of Oracle's Middleware Stack.

http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/bea.html (Para: "A World Class Combination")

http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/docs/oracle-middleware-strategy-briefing-072008.pdf

Here are some Comments on the delivery and upgrades from Mike Lehmann: Fusion Middleware 11 based around this WLS core infrastructure will be the upgrade path from Fusion Middleware 10gR3. The most we are allowed to generally say around time frames for FMW 11 R1 is CY2009.

Khanderao at Jax Conference 2008

2008-08-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

I will be speaking in two sessions at JAX Conference, San Jose. I will be talking about "End to End Event Driven Application Architecture" as well as "Semantic Web Services."

http://jax-conf.com/jax-conf/sessions/sessions-popup.php?id=8879

http://jax-conf.com/jax-conf/sessions/sessions-popup.php?id=8857

If you are attending, see you over there!

Quick recap on ESB, BPEL and BPM

2008-07-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

I came across repeated queries around ESB, BPEL and BPM. Oracle's SOA suite AS11 provide all of these as a comprehensive and well integrated product suite. If someone wants to logical group the components separately to reposition them in these categories then it could be like:

ESB Enterprise Service Bus
Fabric, Mediator, Binding Components, Adapters, MDS, Policy framework and a registry
ESB essential deals with message routing and mediating between different application services. The mediation could be different transport protocols, different handshake protocols, different standards, etc. At the heart of ESB, there is a message router and transformer. ESB can be service oriented or message (in a form of an event) driven. SOA suite AS11 supports both Service and Event patterns.

BPEL Business Process Orchestration
BPEL is a service engine in SOA suite.
BPEL does process orchestration of web services. Oracle's BPEL comes up with Human task service to support workflow patterns. It also uses Oracle's Business Rules to inject dynamic decision points in a process. Though BPEL can implement most of the patterns of ESB (VETRO), it would not be good for light weight bridging between services to implement service virtualization. BPEL's key strengths is in providing a standard language for process execution with key functionalities like: correlating async interactions, providing a flexible flows, compensations for the long running processes, eventHandlers for out of the band interactions, and wait for timeout/wait activitities etc.

BPM Business Process Management
BPA for Business Process Modelling
BPM runtime for BPMN/XPDL (on roadmap after the acquisition)
Human Workflow and Advance Approval Management
BAM Business Activity Monitor for real time dashboard
Rules for dynamic busines
Web Center for Collaboration

Governance
Registry
Repository
Policy Manager
Console

SCRUM related some links

2008-07-01T17:25:00.001-07:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/49379/Are-Agile-Projects-doomed-to-halfbaked-design

Basic Overview of SCRUM
http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=18

Scrum Resources
http://www.controlchaos.com/

Scrum Cartoon site
http://www.implementingscrum.com/cartoons/index.html

Emerging technologies and Trends for 2008 and beyond...

2008-04-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

Late 2007 Gartner identified the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008. These list included BPM, Virtualizations, SaaS, Mashups & composite Apps, Real world Web and Social Software. In my opinion, development and blending of these emerging trends and technologies would lead to next generation of Web Apps.

Here are some excerpts from the report:

Business Process Modeling. Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA development.

Metadata Management. Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.

Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies – with service-level, policy-based active management – resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. Virtualization plus service-level, policy-based automation constitutes an RTI.

Mashup & Composite Apps. By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80 percent) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.

Web Platform & WOA. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Meanwhile Web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through Web based “cloud computing” environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric. A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs. For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server.

Real World Web. The term “real world Web” is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred. For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the Web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real-world Web of augmented reality. Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation.

Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.

OSGi and JSRs

2008-02-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

We did not want to elaborate on issues between JSRs and OSGi in a recently published article.
OSGi specification started with JSR-8 which was intended to be based on Sun’s Java Embedded Services 1.0. However when the JSR-8 was withdrawn And the work was carried out by OSGi,a non-profit alliance. Over a period of time, OSGi’s work directly or indirectly influenced many of the JSRs (e.g. 232, 239, 246 (Mobile Specs)) and thus J2ME. However, OSGi and JSRs have not always been in good friendship. For example, Sun introduced JSR-277 to define a competing (overlaps in packaging/deployment but differs in dynamics/lifecycle) model to provide a new distribution format, a repository, discovery, loading, and integrity mechanisms at runtime. Though a couple of OSGi folks were members of this JSR-277, this JSR largely was viewed by OSGi community as an act of ignoring their 8 years of experience. In contrast to JSR-277, the recently approved JSR-291 for Dynamic Component support is a direct adoption of OSGi’s R4 specification. Similarly JSR-294 would add a VM level modularity support in Java 7. However, the recently introduced JSR-316 for J2EE 6 defers the adoption of JSR-277 and does not comment on adoption of JSR-291. Similarly, a JSR for JBI 2.0 (JSR-312) acknowledges a need to add OSGi features but stays away from embracing it (Specific comments: “Enhancements to support full compatibility with OSGi, without necessarily requiring OSGi.”). I hope that future releases of J2SE / J2EE does directly adopt OSGi R4/+.

My recently published SOA World article covering OSGi's state of art and future

2008-02-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

SOA World recently published another article co-authored by me. In this article on OSGi, we, Dave Chappell and me, cover some basics of OSGi and discuss its relationship with other emerging technologies and frameworks like SCA, Spring, etc. We also cover some work in the area of distributed OSGi and future direction of OSGi.

Migration of Oracle's ESB from 10.1.3x to 11

2008-01-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

With the announcement of Oracle SOA Suite AS11 aka Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW), many folks asked about the future of ESB 10.1.3.

ESB typically provides an infrastructure for standards based integration between systems supporting different protocols. At the heart of a ESB is a routing engine and a bus. On the edges it would have adapters supporting various protocols. Such framework supports policies like securities and provides a runtime visibility via a console. The FMW AS11 does exactly same and much modular way as.

FMW AS11 does all of these and more! And it is based on emerging Service Component Architecture(SCA). SCA provides a much missing standard for ESB to assemble components- services interacting together.

In Oracle Middleware version 10.1.3, ESB and BPEL are separate runtime. With FMW AS11, BPEL and Routing Service of ESB are service engines in a much modular architecture architecture based on SCA. Mediator is a new incarnation of ESB's routing service with a lot many new functionalities. Since the basic UI of the routing service is same as 10.1.3, those who are using ESB 10.1.3 you would be instantly be able to use it.

In addition to ESB 10.1.3 functionalities, you would be pleasantly surprised to see many new features that I could get added while re-architecting ESB on a new SCA based architecture.

Here are few of them:
1. Supporting Events natively: FMW now supports both Service and Event paradigms. Mediator is a rendezvous of both service and events.
2. Mediator supports more MEP patterns including dearly missing Async Request Response.
3. Mediator supports multi-part messaging and rpc/doc style
4. Mediator provides Schematron based custom validation framework
5. Mediator provides a rules based dynamic routing framework
6. Mediator provides a better fault handling and fault policies
and more such functionalities.

Though mediator's model has been changed, you can migrate 10.1.3 project easily in AS11 by opening them in JDeveloper.

Essentially, ESB in FMW AS11 would be Mediator + SCA based service Infrastructure + Events + Policy Framework + Adapters along with common infrastructure components like MDS(Meta Data service) etc.

Following picture (presented during OOW'2007) is the best way to represent ESB and SOA suite in AS11.

Finally Oracle acquired BEA

2008-01-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

You may have already heard it! Read it !

yes... Finally...Oracle acquired BEA.

"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Ellison. "Oracle Fusion middleware has an open "hot-pluggable" architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA's WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That's just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come."

"For Oracle, this deal is a very big step toward completing our vision of becoming a strategic enterprise software vendor of choice for our customers, with industry-leading products and a world-class technology solution at every level of the stack and across industry verticals," CEO Larry Ellison said in a conference call.

Oracle SOA AS11 Preview: Starting /stopping Embedded server

2008-01-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle AS11 suite's JDeveloper embeds a oc4j container having SOA suite runtime. This server can be started from Jdev or it can be automatically started when you try to run an application. But in some cases if you should need it to be started independent of JDev, you can do it by command line.

Go to
system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\bin

At this directory you would find startsoa and shutdownsoa scripts to start and stop a SOA server.

For some reason if you have memory issue (out of memory error etc) you can change the JVMs memory by editing MEM_ARGS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Xmn300m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Server Lifecycle Logs:
You can find startsoa.log at \system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log

However, for any diagnostics, you would need to look at diagnostic log at
system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log\soa

Oracle SOA AS11 Preview: Config and logs

2008-01-11T13:22:00.000-08:00

Oracle SOA AS11 Preview version has embedded oc4j Application Server hosting SOA suite.

Configuration:
You may need to change some of the configurations of the server e.g. jms, datasources, logging levels etc.

The config files are under
\system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\config
Typically you may need to change logging levels, datasource settings, or transaction timeout etc. These can be done using config files in this directory

Logging:
If you need to change the logging levels, you need to change j2ee-logging.xml from the config directory. You can increase the logging levels in this file from NOTIFICATION:1 to FINE to increase the logging.

Log Directory: diagnostic.log is under
userdir\system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log\soa

Oracle SOA 10.1.3.3 awarded as the Best ESB y Infoworld

2008-01-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Infoworld Awarded Oracle's SOA 10.1.3 as the best Enterprise Service Bus!!

Ready, Set and Go with Oracle SOA Suite AS11

2008-01-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

We are all excited to announce preview of AS11. It comes with an easy to install and configure Jdeveloper that embeds the SOA Runtime server. With this you can immediately setup and try using the rich functionality of this suite. The SOA suite is based on SCA Assembly model. In addition to standard BPEL component type in SCA, we are introducing other key integration components like Mediator, Business Rule(Decision Service), and Human Task Service/ Workflow. Here is a presentation giving overview of SOA Suite AS11 that I co-delivered along with Demed Lher at Oracle Open World 2007 at San Francisco. Following slide from the presentation would give you an idea of various modules serving rich integration functionalities.

The SOA suite AS11 provides a complete integration of all the integration technologies with a single Design time, Single Metadata Repository, Single Runtime and Single Monitoring. You can use user-friendly graphical composite editor which would allow to drag and drop components like BPEL, mediator etc. Such composite can be deployed using JSR-88 based packaging and deployment framework. The deployed composites can be tested and monitored using a console. The console can be used for tracking a message hopping various components within the server, run & review unit tests, configure & enforce policies and monitor & administer faults.

Such consistent way to design, deploy, run and monitor integration projects is very important for reducing a cost of ownership. Moreover, all the runtime service engines e.g. BPEL, mediator etc converse with each other using optimized messaging. Well, the SOA suite is not just evolved into a fully integrated SCA based architecture, but each of the component has been enriched with very important and useful functionalities. Additionally, the SOA suite is a rendezvous of service oriented architecture and Event oriented/driven Architecture.

In next few days, whenever time permits, I would expose few important feature through this blog.

Meanwhile, Quickly download the preview version and install following the given install instructions .

After configuring SOA, you can quickly build a sample composite and test it. You can use the step by step instructions added in this sample for the same.

Have fun!

Impressions during three presentations on Oracle SOA AS11 Overview

2007-11-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

Last few weeks had been hectic. I gave a presentation to hundreds on Apps Developers at HQ followed by another presentation to again hundreds of developers in India and finally a presentation at Oracle Open World 2007 at Mascone Center, SFO. The first two presentations were about three hours long while the last one was just an hour. There were some clear differences in three audiences. The developers in US were mostly senior level and interested in "what" while the developers in India were younger and more interested in technical details like "how to". The audience at OOW was much more senior level and was interested in a higher level overview and the direction of technology.

BPM: Close loop integration between Modeling, Execution and Monitoring of Business Process

2007-10-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

Life-cycle issues in BPM:
It is well understood that Business analysts need a business friendly tool to capture requirement, model a process and / document a process. Many modeling tools are already available and are key in any BPM strategy. The business analysts do not implement those processes. Especially it is true for "executable processes" like BPEL. IT developers or system integrators often take a business requirement and turn them into an executable business process. There is always a chance of a communication gap. Off course, a proper review would reduce chances of such reviews. However, if a business analyst needs to review BPEL process, he would neither be comfortable nor be capable of. In such scenario, it is definitely useful to have an automatic generation of BPEL process and many modeling tools generate BPEL processes.

However, the key of modeling is to be higher level and capture key business activities. A modeler can capture some key business activities, however, none of these would be or should be complete. Hence, IT developer / SI would need to add details or implement specific business as well as technical activities to make the process complete. They may add data transformations, validations, error handling, or implement specific handshaking required by internal/external partners. Some of these, details may need to surfaced to the model. Otherwise, over a period of time, the model start getting out of sync with the implemented process. Thus, round tripping is important.

While a process can be modified at the time of or after implementation by IT/SIs, the business analyst may also need to change the model to reflect a changing business need. Thus there would be changes in both the original model as well as the generated business process. This is a very valid case in a life cycle of a business process. So the key is to support merging the changes.

Oracle BPM:
In the month of September, Oracle announced a next updated version of its BPA (Business Process Analysis) Suite which supports closed loop integration between modeling and execution models. Oracle being a vendor providing a comprehensive solution in BPM-Integration space, has offered such tighter integration between various tools and by providing a standards based (BPMN) business friendly modeler, a standards(BPEL) based process designer, an execution runtime as well as monitoring environment (SOA Suite).

This new version supports thus provides "a closed-loop engineering and bi-directional sync'ing capabilities, enabling business analysts and developers to closely collaborate throughout the entire BPM life cycle using the best tools for their specific needs".

Using Oracle BPM Suite: Modeler and IT/SI experience
Using these products, a modeler can model a process, and then publish it. Using JDev based BPEL designer, an IT developer/SI can explore this published model and start with its "blue print" which is a common model between BPMN and BPEL. The BPEL process can further be refined with implementation details and would be published. If the modeler changes the process model and republishes it, the IT/SI developer would get a visual notification in his/her JDev. The developer can sync up the process, see the differences, merge the changes (comparing the new versus existing process) and implement the details for the newly added business activities related.

Seamless Integration with Monitoring:
Oracle's BPM suite also helps in monitoring. The modeler can specify (select) monitoring points, the generated BPEL would carry all the "sensor instrumentation" without a need to add them manually. These sensor data can be fed to Oracle's BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) module which can provide a real time dashboard.

The execution can potentially be analyzed and the analysis can be used in further refining the business process model, thus completing the circle of life cycle activities.

Cost of Incompatible Softwares: Airbus/EADS Story

2007-10-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

In the recent issue of "The Economist" (Oct 13th 2007) I came across a case demonstrating a cost of use of incompatible versions of softwares. As per the story, One of the delays of the latest Super Jet A380 airplane was the use of two incompatible versions of the computer CAD softwares. (Vertatim from the article ) " The Germans in Hamburg had one system, the French in Toulouse another. When the electrical harnesses came to be fitted in the forward and aft fuseleage sections, many didn't connect with each other. Despite efforts to resolve this, it was decided in Octover last year that only by updating the computer-design tools would Airbus get on top of the problem. That meant a third delay".

This is not a problem specific to the Airbus. This is a often problem not just because of the use of two different softwares, but one software may result into different formats of outputs and often there are losses of information in transforming between the models.

Oracle strengthens Enterprise Apps GRC: Governance, Risk and Compliance

2007-10-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

On October 9th, 2007, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire LogicalApps, a leading provider of automated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) controls for enterprise applications. The transaction is expected to close by November 2007. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

LogicalApps solutions enable customers to automate GRC activities, such as enforcing proper segregation of duties in enterprise applications, reducing fraud with continuous monitoring of business transactions, and providing defensible evidence of a proper control environment. LogicalApps solutions already are optimized for Oracle Applications, with hundreds of successful deployments.

With LogicalApps' automated control capabilities, Oracle plans to extend its GRC application suite after the closing to deliver a closed-loop solution that manages both enterprise-wide GRC processes and enforcement of automated controls within one system

Oracle Honored with a Tech Innovator Award in the Business Enterprise

2007-10-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Oracle Honored with a Tech Innovator Award in the Business Enterprise Category by CMP Channel’s VARBusiness
Component of Oracle® Fusion Middleware Receives Industry Accolade

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 09-OCT-2007 05:05 AM Oracle today announced that it has received a CMP Channel VARBusiness 2007 Tech Innovator award in the Business Enterprise category for the Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The fifth annual Tech Innovators Awards celebrate the most innovative products, people and personalities in the industry and highlight emerging products and technologies currently sold through the IT Channel.

Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, standards-based set of middleware products used to easily build, deploy and manage Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The suite's hot-pluggable capabilities enable customers to take advantage of the many benefits SOAs provide, while leveraging their current middleware technologies and avoiding a costly rip and replace project. In addition, Oracle SOA Suite enables high levels of service quality with a unique Grid architecture for advanced scalability and performance using low-cost commodity hardware. Using the Suite, organizations can seamlessly connect, extend and evolve their existing IT systems to rapidly deliver new business services. Oracle SOA Suite is comprised of the best-in-class SOA components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and supports Oracle and non-Oracle application servers and messaging buses, including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss Application Servers.

SOA on Grid and relocatable BPEL processes

2007-10-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Dave Chappell, Author of ESB book and SOA Chief Strategist with whom I am privileged to work, and Dave Berry, ESB PM and colleague, jointly published an article covering SOA on Grid a potential next generation to provide a robust, scalable, reliable, high performing and highly available infrastructure for SOA.

It most of the obvious target use cases like:
Large payload
Active-Active clustering
Load Balancing
In memory persistence caching of DB (asynchronous write)
Performance improvement of BPEL PDS - Dehydration (process data/state storage)

But most importantly, the article introduced one important concept, we had brainstormed earlier, that is re-locatable BPEL process to minimize a data serialization. Why bring a large data across a network when a process can itself continue from a node on/closer to the node having data. e.g. Apps adapters.

Certainly doing such agile services would provide a stateful however relocatable services resulting into high performance and high availability.

My article on BPEL 2.0 in Action

2007-10-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

Here is an article co-authored by me on BPEL2.0 in action got recently published in SOA World / SYS-CON. A long time, about a decade, back I used to write at Java Developers Journal. I had covered CORBA and Java application server. Yes...CORBA was supposed to change the whole MiddleWare market. Anyway, after seeing many hype cycles, I would refrain from saying about any technology as world-changing. Anyway, in between there was a long long gap. Got busy in implementing a lot of stuff. ...driving products...etc...

Anyway, this article covers some value added features in BPEL2.0...but it goes a step further to demonstrate some key features like dynamic parallel branches, correlation, out of band /changes events and reflecting to them via compensations.

InfoQ: SCA Interview

2007-10-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

A recently published interview of SCA TC members by InfoQ covered many debated issues. Most of the issues are already debated outside and many like myself already commented on the same. However, it would be informative to read perspective from SCA drivers (just FYI I am too member of SCA-Assembly, SCA-BPEL and SCA-Binding TC). Some of the important issues discussed in the interview are: SCA and JBI, SCA and WCF, OASIS vs W3C, SCA and J2EE etc.

Here are some excerpts(verbatim from above InfoQ interview):
SCA & JBI:
Technically there is no overlap. SCA can be used on a JBI runtime, but it is also possible to use SCA without JBI and JBI without SCA. JBI is engine-to-engine. ...SCA looks at defining abstract notions of service invocations at design-time.

SCA & WCF:
Windows Communication Framework (WCF) has some of the features of the SCA service component model, but there is no real equivalent of the SCA assembly model for the composition of applications.

SCA & JEE:
SCA works with JEE rather than competing....(however)..in the context of SOA, or composite applications, there is a need for more facilities and capabilities than JavaEE provides, elements that are beyond the scope of JavaEE....Using SCA, The runtime might still use JMS and one of the JAX SOAP stacks, but their APIs would not be visible to the developer.

SCA-J not being in JCP:
1. SCA as a whole is not a Java specification
2. making liaison between the Java group and the other groups more difficult.
3. It also keeps all the SCA specifications available under one, easy to understand license.
4. the SCA-J team really is looking at how to map language independent notions onto Java

Choice between OASIS and W3C:
OASIS are about business and implementation standards more than W3C.

Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During latest quarterly results)

2007-09-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During the recent Quarterly results of Oracle on Thursday 20th Sept 2007)

In Middleware, while Oracle is not number one like we are in Database, we are by far the fastest growing Middleware company. As Safra pointed out, our growth in software was the fastest it's been in a decade and that was really led by our Middleware group, whose growth was just spectacular. It looks like the Middleware business is coming down to the same big three players, but in exactly the opposite order.

With Microsoft’s middleware, a lot of it is embedded in Windows. Microsoft is the number one player. IBM is the number two player and Oracle is the number three player in middleware. But we have passed all the other niche players. We have really separated ourselves from the niche players. We're almost twice as large as BEA right now. BEA is shrinking in terms of new license sales.

So, it's come down to the same big three, but we're growing dramatically faster than our competitors and our target really is to beat IBM because it's very difficult to measure the size of Microsoft's middleware business because so much of it is embedded in Windows.

Also, as I said before, Microsoft is proprietary technology while IBM and Oracle both have a strategy to deliver middleware based on industry standards. According to our current growth rate, if we maintain our trajectory and IBM maintains their trajectory, we could pass IBM as early as the end of this year or certainly next year, to become the number two player in middleware. So that's very, very exciting.

JSR-316 for J2EE and its direction about SCA, JBI and OSGI

2007-07-12T09:58:00.001-07:00

Last week I was on vacation so missed the news on J2EE 6.0 As I noted earlier, JSR-313 was filled in March for J2EE6. Due to licensing disputes, it was withdrawn. The same JSR has been re-submitted as JSR-316 with very little changes but definitely changing the licensing section (removing some statements like “no changes in licensing” etc etc). May be it would help to get approval vote from other main vendors. From SOA and integration technologies, a direction about WS, SCA, JBI, and OSGI needs to be noted.

JSR-316 and SCA

SCA (http://www.osoa.org) has taken a great momentum in SOA world to provide a uniform assembly model for composing services based application. It is now submitted to OASIS for standardization. J2EE 6 also noted the momentum. However, currently there is this JSR is not yet committed to it. Here are SCA related comments from this JSR:

“The Service Component Architecture is defining facilities that could be used by composite applications in a SOA environment. This expert group will consider whether any of the SCA-defined facilities are appropriate for inclusion in this release of the Java EE platform.”

JSR-316 and OSGI

Peter Kriens from OSGI already expressed his displeasure about non inclusion of OSGI specs (via JSR 291) . The only comment related to modules are in the context of JSR-277.

“To better support the extensibility goals of the platform it would be useful to have a more general concept of modules. Such work is underway in JSR-277 - Java Module System, which is targeted for Java SE 7. We anticipate that Java EE 7 will build on that technology and thus we will defer specification of any potentially conflicting technology to a future release.”

JSR-316 and JBI

While JBI 1.0’s JSR-208 is on a deferred list, there is no word on JBI 2.0 ‘s JSR-312. If JSR-312 completes as per schedule, it would be ahead of JSR-316. Just like J2EE’s JSR-316, JBI2.0’s JSR-312 also trying to accommodate SCA and some concepts from OSGI. May be the efforts could not same or joined. BTW as I noted earlier, major software vendors in Java Application Server vendors are not yet supporting JBI2.0

Oracle in Leaders Quadrant of Gartners Magic Quadrants of Infrastructure Market

2007-06-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant for Four New Application Infrastructure Magic Quadrants
Thursday June 28, 1:00 pm ET

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., June 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Meeting the middleware needs of more than 35,000 customers, Oracle today announced that Oracle® Fusion Middleware was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of four new Gartner Magic Quadrants tracking the Application Infrastructure Market. The Magic Quadrants cover: Application Infrastructure; Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects; Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects; and Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects.

In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, Gartner states, "Gartner has defined a new market for application infrastructure that reflects the convergence and overlap of many of the products available to support application development, deployment and execution." Moreover, "Application Infrastructure includes the majority of runtime middleware, as well as application development and management tools that support the new generation of application styles based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture and business process management (BPM) technology."(1)

"Oracle Fusion Middleware is a highly-integrated and comprehensive family of products and as a result, it is increasingly serving as the foundation for organizations' service-oriented integrations," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Senior Vice President, Server Technologies. "We believe that Oracle's position in the Leaders Quadrant for Gartner's four Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure demonstrates Oracle Fusion Middleware's ability to provide best-in-class capabilities for a wide range of integration projects while delivering tangible benefits."

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Application Infrastructure

Gartner states, "Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, 2Q07, analyzes the total application infrastructure market and the relevance of suppliers whose products might be used in a variety of project types." Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, Oracle delivers a comprehensive standards-based portfolio of middleware software that spans enterprise application servers, business integration, business process management, identity management and SOA offerings as well as developer tools.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects

Gartner states that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application (SOBA) Projects "evaluates vendors against the relevant subset of all technology attributes of application infrastructure: modeling and design of SOA-style applications and engineering and management of new user-facing software as well as back-end application components (service implementations and interfaces) and flows."(2) Located in the Leaders Quadrant of this Magic Quadrant, Oracle delivers with Oracle Fusion Middleware a best-in-class Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, SOA Suite, metadata repository and business process management capabilities that make it easier for organizations to create SOAs.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Composite-Application Projects

According to Gartner, "Although composite applications are not new, they have gained increased prominence owing to service-oriented architecture (SOA), so a requirement for comprehensive, end-to-end application infrastructure for supporting their implementation is emerging from the user community."(3) Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Composite-Application Projects, Oracle provides organizations comprehensive business process management, SOA, integration and development tools that support heterogeneous environments.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Back-End Application Integration Projects

In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects Gartner states, "More germane to the back-end application integration market is that Enterprise service buses (ESBs) provide low-cost, easy-to-use alternatives to integration suites in projects that require interfaces with simple and medium complexity."(4) Located in the Leaders Quadrant for this report, the hot-pluggable architecture of Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA Suite and ESB, coupled with its expansive portfolio of adapters, enable organizations to more easily integrate their heterogeneous back-end applications.

The Application Infrastructure and related Magic Quadrant reports can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/index.html#fus.

About Oracle Fusion Middleware

The company's comprehensive, standards-based family of middleware products, Oracle Fusion Middleware enables customers to adopt and manage service-oriented architectures in heterogeneous computing environments. More than 35,000 customers now use Oracle Fusion Middleware and include leading organizations in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Health Care and Public Sector industries. Oracle Fusion Middleware is also supported by 9,000 partners, including marketing leading independent software vendors, value added resellers and system integrators.

About The Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrants are copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, 2Q07," Simon Hayward, Massimo Pezzini, Jess Thompson, Yefim V. Natis, June 1, 2007

2 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects, 2Q07," Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Jess Thompson, Kimihiko Iijima, Michael Barnes, Daryl C. Plummer, Simon Hayward, May 31, 2007

3 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects, 2Q07," Massimo Pezzini, Michael Barnes, Kimihiko Iijima, David Gootzit, Yefim V. Natis, Daryl C. Plummer, Jess Thompson, Dale Vecchio, Janelle B. Hill, Simon Hayward, June 7, 2007

4 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects, 2Q07," Jess Thompson, Michael Barnes, Kimihiko Iijima, Benoit J. Lheureux, Paolo Malinverno, Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Roy W. Schulte, Simon Hayward, June 7, 2007

Spring apps on OSGI

2007-06-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

In my post on April 6th, 2007 I mentioned about the availability of Spring OSGI’s first milestone. However, in that post I did not cover much of the details. Anyway, the specification of Spring-OSGI is now posted on Spring Framework’s site.

The specification mentions its goal to provide an “easier path to build Spring applications that can be deployed in an OSGi execution environment, and that can take advantage of the services offered by the OSGi framework”.

The Spring-OSGI effort targets to combine the best features of both OSGI and Spring. OSGI has its strength in providing a lightweight micro-kernel where modules (read “bundles” in OSGI) can be dynamically added or removed. OSGI also provides a better isolation. The isolation is useful to co-exist multiple version of the same service. It isolated the potential problems on class conflicts. Spring provides an easy to use framework based on DI and AOP powered with various services (Spring ecosystem). Thus the combination targets, (I am listing benefits listed in the specs into two separate buckets), to give benefits from both the worlds:

Benefits inherited from OSGI
· Better separation of application logic into modules
· The ability to deploy multiple versions of a module concurrently
· The ability to dynamically discover and use services provided by other modules in the system
· The ability to dynamically deploy, update and undeploy modules in a running system
Benefits inherited from Spring:
· Use of the Spring Framework to instantiate, configure, assemble, and decorate components within and across modules.
· A simple and familiar programming model for enterprise developers to exploit the features of the OSGi platform.
In a recent interview, Interface21’s CTO Andrian Colyer, elaborated a practical and interesting scenario of using the Spring-OSGI. If a service in use needs an upgrade, behind the scene, you can bring down the service and replace with the newer upgraded service without any glitch. Spring OSGI combination manages the switching of services in the background. Spring provides a stable proxy in this scenario while OSGI provides dynamic lifecycle and versioning.” SpringOSGI solves this problem not only for ‘stateless’ services but for ‘stateful’ services too.

We may see various service platforms leveraging this powerful combination. However, Spring-OSGi might not be the only app framework based on OSGI. e.g. OSGI based Microkernel servers currently offered by different vendors are not Spring based. In addition to Spring-OSGi combination, some independend work being done to map SCA and OSGI. Moreover, OSGI itself is going through further enhancement to support distributed case. Some ESB vendors may have a look at OSGI either for dynamic services. Anyway, With such different pieces working together, more powerful platforms may emerge. The combined platforms would be effectively used to build large and complex enterprise applications. (On a side note: There is another effort, JSR 312 for JBI 2.0, in java world to combine SCA and OSGI “like features” . I commented on the efforts in my earlier post )

Spring
OSGI
JBI

BEA too entered in CEP market ..

2007-06-08T13:04:00.001-07:00

A report from Gartner had listed CEP in a list of rising technologies in their Hype Cycle. Per Gartner, CEP is important to give a competitive advantage in 2007 and it will be "requirement" in 2008. However, per Gartner, it would take a few years to mature the technology. Currently there are different players in the market ranging from niche vendors to one-shop vendors. Oracle, Apama(Progress), IBM, Tibco, Streambase, Coral8, Apsoft, KnowNow, are few to mention. Additionally, there are open source solutions like Esper and academic projects in various universities. Last week BEA too announced a first beta of CEP. It is an indication of growing interest in the field. More vendors entering into the market is generally better for maturity of the field. A standardization of language like CQL would be an important step towards achieving the maturity.
CEP

JSR 314 for JSF2.0 started

2007-06-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

This JSR got approval in review ballot. http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=314

Conversations in SCA (Service Component Architecture)

2007-05-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

Services often interact multiple times to complete a business activity. Such interactions are said to be part of a conversation. In the Database world, a series of database activities are grouped as a part of a transaction. The notion of transaction was extended to Distributed Computing too. In the world of distributed computing, many frameworks and services came up to support distributed transactions. When webservices evolved, standards like WS-Transaction and WS-Transaction Management (WS-TXM) tried to solve the transaction problem. However, a conversation is not a transaction. It does satisfy ACID test of transactions. Rather a conversation is just a way of identifying a series of interactions as a part of one larger activity. In other words, it is like correlating various service invocations related to a single business activity. Hence, conversations and transactions are handling with different constructs in SCA.

Multiple efforts have already been made to standardize conversations in Web services. A long time back, in 2002, HP submitted a specification to define a Web Service Conversation language (WSCL), which was a supposed to be supplementary to WSDL. However, it did not receive any support. Last few years parallel efforts were made at OASIS to standardize two competing specifications, WS-Context and WS-Coordination. Both of them at a very higher level defined notions of context and frameworks to manage them. ebXML supported its own way of conversational trading interactions. BEA implemented annotations based conversations for JWS. SCA’s proposal can be viewed as evolved from annotation based conversation and additional declaration of the conversation intent in policies.

The concept of conversation in SCA is very simple. A conversation may start with calling a method of conversational service (annotated as @Conversational). The conversation continues till a service reference created at start of the conversation is being used. Finally, the conversation ends with invoking a method annotated as @EndsConversation or the conversation timeouts due to being idle for a long time or continued more than a maximum age set for the conversational service. Any further attempt to participate in the “ended” conversation results into an exception, namely, ConversationEndedException.

To make this working in SCA, in addition to annotations in WSDL or Java sources, a conversational intent needs to be declared in policies for the conversational interfaces. Policy interceptors and binding components would then handle the work of populating the conversational context and interact with conversation framework. Thus the developers of services would be spared from the overload of managing conversation.

However, SCA does specify any implementation framework for managing conversation. Rightly so it does not even define a format for conversation identifier. SCA conversation intended to be complementary to various existing standards. Why re-invent the wheel? So one may use a sequence of WS-RM, or correlation id of JMS, context of WS-Context or WS-C, or MessageID of WS-Addressing as a conversation indetifier and use policy/binding implementations based on WS-Addressing, WS-RM, WS-Coordination, WS-Context for conversations.

Like BPEL, SCA assumes that conversations may also be long running. In case of BPEL, a conversation is maintained by using a concept of correlationSets, which can be mapped to a payload. Oracle’s BPEL PM additionally supports WS-addressing based correlations. BPEL does not support explicit end or aging of the conversations. SCA containers would need a framework to handle end of conversations. Meanwhile, a lightweight conversations based only on conversation ID may be sufficient for many applications.

I am attaching a simple diagram representing a conversation between two services. It is based on a business interaction to configure and purchase a PC.

SCA

CEP and ECA / ESB routing services

2007-05-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

Event Driven Architecture can be broadly classified into two distinct architectures: CEPs and ECA. Here are some basic distinctions. (some people classify into three: ECA/Simple events, Stream based and CEP thus separating streambased and CEP).

Streambased Complex Event Processing (CEP) systems process high volume of stream-based events received in a defined time window. On contrary, rule based or condition based systems respond to external situation/triggers, called as events, and typically ECAs deal with each event individually. ESBs routing service is an example of ECA.

Streams based systems typically process/joins a series of events to match a pattern or deduce an inference or predict a trend. In contrast, rule based ECAs typically follow a decision tree/table/if-then-else rules to forward the event some destinations or to trigger some actions. ECAs often deal with transformation of data and fan-outs.

Stream based system need to be optimized to give high performing required for a high volume of incoming stream of events.

In summary, stream based event processors try to detect a pattern from incoming data in a given TIME frame. Such processors most commonly do not "act" on "AN" event. They "process" a series of incoming data received in a given time frame. In other words, the stream based event processors "identifies situations" or generates events. (however, Some stream based systems work on "individual" event by setting the time window very small or via an attribute dictating the system to act on individual events as against a series of events.)

In contrast, rule based or ECAs “act” on individual events.

CEP

ECA

Complex Event Processing (CEP)

2007-05-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

In his keynote speech at Java One, Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s vice President, covered three main facets of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware: Grid Computing, SCA based SOA and EDA.

While I have already written on SCA and SOA, in this post I will quickly introduce EDA in general and Complex Event Processing is specific.

While Oracle already offering EDA based technologies for last few years in the form of RFID- EDA, event based monitoring in BAM, and event-condition-action (ECA) in a form of ESB and Business Event System(BES), CEP is distinctly newer and an important addition.

In their research paper based on their work in Stanford University, David Luckham and Brian Frasca, defined Complex event processing (CEP) as a processing technology for extracting and analyzing information from any kid of distributed message-based system. In their work on this topic, they demonstrated use of CEP for: Casual event histories, Event Patterns, Event Filtering and Event Aggregation. They demonstrated these use cases using Rapide toolsets. A much more work in this field with "different" approaches have been done at various academic including Berkley, UC-LA, as well as industrial institutes.

In my opinion some basic attributes of a stream based CEP systems are:

Streaming related attributes 1. A very high volume 2. a stream based events 3. in a period of time

and processing related attributes (ability to apply processing logics/functions)1. correlations, 2. statistical/aggregation/set processing, 3. pattern matching or 4. predictive Analysis

Today there are many applications of CEP in enterprises from a low level monitoring to intelligent processing. Some practical and familiar use cases can be listed as:

Medical pandemic detection

Fraud detection

Intrusion detection

Algorithmic trading

Traffic hotspots detection

RFID based shipmen/arrival/sales patterns

Stock trading patterns

And many more

A couple of years back, Oracle too joined the efforts and made a significant value addition in this field. A colleague and a good friend of mine, Shailendra Mishra, is leading the work. Oracle now jointly contributing with academicians and other industries to develop SQL like standard language for a stream based event processing. This work is an extension based on academic efforts to develop a language for Continuos Query Language(CQL). When I was working with him to develop a demo for JavaOne, he also mentioned that how easily he could solve the algorithmic trading problem using our tool. Though CEP is already being used for the algorithmic trading, our distinction is in an easy and expressive(declarative) way to solve the problem. Moreover, performance and scalability are two more important aspects. I would say we have done a great work! And we would need to continue to do more.

Moreover, a much can be written and needs to be written to cover the depth of the topic, however, for this entry in todays blog, I will take a pause...

Meanwhile here are some excepts from our PR on this topic:

Complex Event Processing for EDA

Organizations are increasingly adopting EDA as a platform to effectively manage the increasing number of events generated from IT systems, business processes and physical sensors such as RFID. With this in mind, Oracle is developing new Complex Event Processing (CEP) capabilities that support high-volume, programmatic analysis of events to identify patterns and correlations across multiple heterogeneous event sources. These capabilities will complement Oracle's existing EDA offerings, such as Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, that provides real-time operational dashboards for tracking business key performance indicators, multi-channel alerting, and invoking automated or manual response actions.

CEP

JSR-312 launched to provide JBI 2.0 : (Too?) ambitious to deliver in the given time fulfill all goals?

2007-05-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

A technical committee (experts group) has been formed for JSR-312 to define the next version of JBI, version 2.0. Though software vendors like Sun, Borland, Iona, Tibco, Redhat, Webmethods (now Software AG) are participating in writing this specification, most of the major Application Server as well as ESB vendors are missing from the list. BEA and IBM were not in the camp of the supporters of JBI 1.0 too. Some other vendors from the JBI 1.0 are also dropped out because of their focus on SCA (now OCSA). Without a critical support from key vendors, a survial of such technologies becomes difficult(if not irrelevant). However, let me not prematurely declare a death. I would be happy to see some good results, like bridging gaps between various technologies, coming out of this JSR and such efforts.

I noticed many desired features in the wish list of this JSR. As noted in the JSR draft, the JBI 2.0 intends to be a target runtime for SCA. I had mentioned a possibility of such architecture in my previous posts. However, OSGI may too target to provide a runtime for SCA. There are some overlaps between OSGI’s Admin wire - DS specifications and metadata with SCA. Additionally OSGI provides features like lifecycle management, class loading, etc. Hence, the die-hard supporters of OSGI see OSGI to be evolving not as a runtime for SCA but replacing a need of SCA. However, OSGI's DS specifications still need to be enhanced to support enterprise features in multi-JVM environment. Interestingly JBI's JSR too mentions OSGi as “Enhancements to support full compatibility with OSGi, without necessarily requiring OSGi”. Since the Experts group is yet to meet and flush out the details, I do not give more information.

Coming back to the JBI2.0, it seems that the specification may add much wanted integration features like XSL, integrations with orchestrations (BPEL), Rules, etc to keep whatever limited i momentum it has in the market of ESB vendors where JBI1.0 got some traction with atleast few of the implementations supporting it. However, the scope and lack of technical clarity to provide a platform for some conflicting and some overlapping standards, (JBI1.0, SCA, OSGI, WS-CDL, BPEL,) and goals concerns me about a feasibility of this JSR to provide a “simple architecture in a timely manner” (as stated in JSR). I hope that in F2F meeting the expert group can have a clarity of realistic goals and a higher level architecture. If I could not participate in this JSR, I would at least keep a close watch on its technical direction.

JBI 2.0 would be targeted both for J2SE and J2EE. Leaders of JSR-312 and JSR-313 are yet to align their plans. I already raised this concern to both of both to Ron+Peter and Bill Shannon (leaders of the two JSRs)

JSR-313 for J2EE 6.0 received a setback (temporary)

2007-04-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

An effort to standardize the next version of J2EE (6) as JSR-313 received a “temporary” setback at JCP, mainly due to licensing concerns. (Just to re-iterate my disclaimer: opinion/observations expressed in this blog are my own personal and does not necessarily reflect my employer’s views.)

A review ballot for JSR-313 was filed on April 3rd and was to be approved on April 16th. However, it was withdrawn on Friday the 13th!

From a sequence of events, I see interesting coincidences.

On April 10th, ASF sent an open letter to Sun over licensing issues related to J2SE 5.0. ASF has completed almost 95% compatible implementation and wanted to TCK license. However, the efforts failed to get mutually acceptable resolution. Hence, ASF went public with an open letter.

Though it is hard to establish the influence of the open letter on the fate of JSR-311. It might be more than a mere coincidence that ASF sent this open letter in the time window when this JSR was filled. More interesting coincidence is the comments concerning the licensing terms were expressed around the day when the letter went to a public. The letter created awareness and expressed the concerns of many others.

Anyway, since the next version on J2EE is an inevitable thing, I was told by the specifications leads that the JSR will be resubmitted after alienating the licensing concerns. J2EE6.0 would continue a Java's momentum to provide various SOA artifacts. This JSR specifically mentions that it would consider SCA artifacts. However did not mention JSR-235 or SDO. As you may know that JSR-235 was also withdrawn (by BEA and IBM) due to licensing issues. I understand that the SDO specification is also going to be resubmitted. I hope that it would also get added in this JSR.

The JSR proposes to include the following new JSRs:
* JSR-196 Java Authentication SPI for Containers
* JSR-236 Timer for Application Servers
* JSR-237 Work Manager for Application Servers
* JSR-299 Web Beans
* JSR-311 JAX-RS: Java API for RESTful Web Services

Other than these JSRs, there are some impacts on JAX-WS and JBI specifications too.

1. JSR-313 filing
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=313

2. Comments and votes on JSR-313
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=4216

3. Open letter from ASF
http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html

4. ASF FAQ
http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletterfaq.html

Announcements from WS standardizations world at OASIS

2007-04-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

This month has been eventful for SOA related standardizations at OASIS, the international standards consortium. It has standardized WS-Trust, WS-Secure Conversation, WS-Context and WS-BPEL. The announcements came one after another… on March 27^th 2007 WS-Trust and Ws-Secure Communication, April 2^nd, WS-Context, and WS-BPEL on April 12^th. All these specifications took around 3 years of hectic joint efforts by their respective technical committees whose members came from various software vendors

WS-trust and WS-Secure Conversations provide additional building blocks on top of WS-Security. WS-Trust provides primitives and extensions for the issuance, exchange and validation of security tokens and dissemination of credentials within different trust domains. It will help to establish a programmatic trust for a secure communication between the communicating. The Web Services Secure Conversation Language defines mechanisms for establishing and sharing security contexts, and deriving keys from security contexts.

WS-Context is an outcome of an initiative called WS-CAF. The efforts began some time in December 2003. WS-Context provides a session construct in a decoupled SOA world. It is yet another but an important building block in WS architecture. Implementations of other runtimes e.g. WS-BPEL can leverage. Currently many implementations depend on features like Endpoint reference etc from WS-Addressing to represent some conversation or sessions in the WS world. As WS-Context provides a more generalized session model than WSA, WS-Context may find place in some of these usages. However, there is a competing standard WS-Coordination which is also OASIS specification. WS-Coordination is targetted to solve the similar problem and it has more momentum. It is interesting to note that it seems OASIS allows competing standards to be OASIS standards as long as they follow proper standardization process.

The OASIS also announced an initiative to standardize Service Component Architecture (SCA) as Open Composite Service Architecture. Considering the fact that SCA is fairly mature specification, I hope that it may take a little bit less to be the OASIS standard.

SpringOSGi M1 available for download...

2007-04-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

This week SpringOSGI reached the first milestone. The availability to download it, added another OpenSource to OSGi(different than OGSI which is Open Grid Services Infrastructure) list of opensources.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=73357&package_id=227224

The list now goes on..Apache Felix, Equinox OSGi, KnopherFish OSGI, OXSA, Newton, and many others.

This year seems to be a good year to OSGI. Recently IBM and Cisco announced to develop Unified Communications and Collaboration(called UC2) platform based on OSGI. UC2 would not be an open source. So to increase the adoption by developers and industry, these companies would make UC2 freely available.

Anyway, coming back to OSGi which now has many mobile-telecom device vendors on its board. OSGIs start in 1999, it started with JSR-8 ( which was withdrawn). However, quite a few Mobile related JSRs like 232, 239, 246 (Mobile Specs) have come up based on works/concepts from OSGI ( and some JSRs like JSR 277 partially specified features thus became controversial) and some more are coming up JSR291 (Dynamic components) etc

Some of the concepts related to versioning, lifecycle managements, and various other services may find way beyond devices related to Web Services. Off-course, Webservices being stateless, there is already a debate whether 'lifecycle' management makes sense to Webservices or not. However, it all depends on what we makes sense as lifecycle management in the domain.

Parallelism and concurrency in WS-BPEL 2.0

2007-04-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

WS-BPEL 2.0 has a better support to parallelism and concurrency.

For example, every iteration in a newly added "forEach" iterator can be run in "parallel". A scopes in a parallel flow can be "isolated" from each other so that they would not step on each other when they manipulates 'global variables'. Similarly, input / output variables of concurrent receive/reply pair can be associated using newly introduced "messageExchange" attribute.

Parallel branches in forEach
Each of the iteration in forEach can be run in parallel if forEach is marked as "parallel" as shown in following example.

<startCounterValue>1startCounterValue>

<finalCounterValue>count($order.lineItemss)finalCounterValue>

<scope>

.......

</ scope>

</ forEach>

Isolated scopes:
When activities in isolated scopes access shared variables, they are protected by serializing (completing all such activities in one scope at a time before other).

variables>

<flow>

...

<copy>

< /copy>

</assign>

...

</ sequence>

< scope>

< scope name="Shipping" isolated="yes">

< sequence>

...

<copy>

< /copy>

</ assign>

MessageExchange:
One to one relationship between inbound message variable to appropriate Concurrent Receive/Request pair can be established by uniquely assigning a messageExchange name as given in following example.

messageExchanges>

...

<flow>

...

<receive messageExchange="supplier"

partnerLink="businessPartner"

portType="businessPT"

operation="updateInfo" />

...

<reply messageExchange="supplier"

partnerLink="businessPartner"

portType="businessPT"

operation="updateInfo"/>

...

<receive messageExchange="manufacturer"

partnerLink="businessPartner"

portType="businessPT"

operation="updateInfo" />

...

<reply messageExchange="manufacturer"

partnerLink="businessPartner"

portType="businessPT"

operation="updateInfo" />

...

</flow>

</process>

A mashups time? Welcome to Enterprise Mashup world

2007-03-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

With the emergence of Web2.0 in general and explosion using Google Maps, mashup became a buzzword in web community. A mashup is a web or serverside application that combines information from various sources so that it can me enriched and presented in a meaningful way. In last couple years developers developed almost two thousand mashups for different application space like maps, real estates, video, sports, news, shopping, photo using APIs provide by well known companies like Google, Yahoo, ebay, Amazon, etc. Emergence of Ajax also helped innovations to emerge with fancy applications. Mashups are now finding place in commercial applications too. A recent example is Salesforce announcing a mashup support in analytical dashboards in upcoming W07 release.

Depending upon where mashups take place, one can classify them as client or server side mashups. Oracle’s WebCenter is in the first category based on portal standards while QEDWiki from IBM is in later.

Many free as well as commercial and online as well as development tools are coming up so that mashups can be easily built. Some of them are listed here:

Above All

RSSBus

Procession

RachetSoft

JackBe

datamashups

Dapper

Rex from Nexaweb

QEDWiki from IBM

Many startups also rushing in to cash on this coming up with their products based on mashups. We should see more innovation and hits&miss in this field.

Anyway, if you come across good mashup tools let me know.

mashups

A free Guice from Google causing you a Guice vs Spring dilemma?

2007-03-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Whenever Google announces something it makes big news. No wonder when Google released its internal Java dependency injection (DI) framework called Guice (pronounced as Juice) to open source, it created a splash in developer community.

Dependency Injection is a pattern to separate an application class from the containers implementation. Another term commonly used for DI is InversionOfControl (IoC). However, IoC is a more generic term with varying interpretation depending upon what control is being inverted. Hence, more precise term being used here is a Dependency Injection. In case of DI, the framework’s container or assembler assumes the responsibility of delivering the required objects or their finder interfaces via constructor or methods. . Such decoupling makes it independent to container. Thus offering a flexible and movable implementation. Moreover, DI based implementations are very good for testing. One may provide mock up implementations and hence test objects which otherwise would be unreachable. A very popular framework Called Spring is a sterling example of such DI / IoC frameworks (http://www.springframework.org). Prior to the rise of DI based frameworks, Service Locator Pattern was commonly used () for locating required components. JNDI lookup is a classic example of this usage pattern.

So Guice is a DI framework. Guice injects constructors, fields and methods. It has some advanced features such as custom scopes, circular dependencies, and static member injection. Is this a path breaking and new disruptive technology? Off-course Not. Currently there already many frameworks like Pico, Nano, Avalon, Gravity, Spice, Jice, Yan and many others and most importantly a very popular Spring! You can find an exhaustive list of IoC based frameworks at http://java-source.net/open-source/containers

Guice developers published a comparison of Guice with Spring at http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/wiki/SpringComparison One of the key difference is how is the dependency defined/bound. Guice is uses Java annotations while Spring has on XML based beans registry.

A side effect of this dependency on Java annotations is you cannot use Guice with JDK versions earlier to JDK1.5 (J2SE 5) because Java Annotation (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/annotations.html) was introduced in JDk1.5 (J2SE 5).

Annotations are defined in a source code. Thus they introduce a design time dependency. You need to change the code whenever there is a change in configuration. Guice overcome this issue with properties for externalization. You can still add an implementation class in runtime from properties. The key is Guice does not enforce the externalization. So you have a choice.

A comparison paper from Guice Developers about Spring and Guice comments following about configurability and performance. "Spring supports two polar configuration styles: explicit configuration and auto-wiring. Explicit configuration is verbose but maintainable. Auto-wiring is concise but slow and not well suited to non-trivial applications. If you have 100s of developers and 100s of thousands of lines of code, auto-wiring isn't an option. Guice uses annotations to support a best-of-both-worlds approach which is concise but explicit (and maintainable)." We need to read these comment with a grain of salt. Performance impact depends when, where and how many objects being created and passed on. Are “objects being injected” created only during a startup or initializations or in every session? If the objects being created were not high in volume (or created only during startups or initializations) then the performance advantage of Guice would fade away.

Guice provides a faster, simpler and leaner framework for DI. However, Spring has much richer in functionalities in addition to DI. For example Spring XML can do transaction management, aspects, RMI exporting. With much richer functionality, Spring jars are comparatively larger in size than Guice. Guice promoters argue against Spring as it is being “bloated”. But what is a roadmap of Guice? It is always going to be a stripped down DI only framework? Or it will start building Spring like functionalities on top of DI? If Guice too adds more ingredients (read features), it may become equally “bloated”. Guice developers assert that performance is their primary driver. I hope that they maintain this commitment.

So, if you are looking for a DI only functionality. You can give a try to Guice. Google developers say that they are already using it in “mission critical” applications. With Google’s commitment you can have some assurance about a stability and continuity of this framework than many other smaller open source. However, in near future, Spring is still a popular choice for complex application developments. A more educated decision can be based on a feature-to-feature comparison for a type of application that you are building and what additional functionalities that you may need. I thing you know that “taste” is relative. So this Guice may or may not be tasty for all people and every time.

References:

Free Guice from Google

http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/

User Guide

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd2fhx4z_5df5hw8

java Docs

http://google-guice.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/index.html

IoC containers

http://java-source.net/open-source/containers

Spring and Guice comparison:

http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/wiki/SpringComparison

Using Spring in Guice: http://google-guice.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/com/google/inject/spring/SpringIntegration.html

Service Locator Pattern

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eepatterns/Patterns/ServiceLocator.html

Dependency Injection using Spring

http://www.springframework.org/docs/reference/beans.html

Guice
Spring
DependencyInjection
IoC

Exposing Peoplesoft's Component Interface(CI) as Webservice

2007-03-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

PeopleSoft’s Component Interface (CI) is a common way to abstract Peoplesoft’s Component by encapsulating data and implementation. Typically a CI exposes component properties and provides system defined and user defined methods. Peopletools IDE provides a nice framework to develop CIs. CIs can be used in App Message, any Peoplecode and App Engines. CIs are heavy weight objects carrying artifacts like validations. Though a more lightweight object model called Application Message (popularly called as AppMessage) is now-a-days more popular among Peoplecode developers, many of the legacy applications are still exposed as CIs. Moreover, it is easier to expose a Component as a CI.

Thus, exposing CIs as WebServices provides a quick way to expose existing PeopleCode based applications to SOA world. Though versions earlier to Peopletools 8.48 supported a basic mechanism to do the same, Peopletools 8.48 provides much easier and richer framework. In Pre-8.48 world, CI to WebService was via SOAPTOCI and exposed one method as a webservice.

Service Designer in Peopletools 8.48 is a web-based designer to discover, create, publish/consume, and monitor services. One can use the designer to expose CI as a webservice with select a CI by navigating to Integration Broker->Web Services ->CI-Based Service. Providing a webservice to an existing CI is as simple as selecting operations to be exposed and generating a service.

However, a WSDL for such service would have system generated names. These system-generated names may not be very intuitive. To overcome this issue, the designer provides a provision to give alias name for the service and operation names. These aliases are used in the generated WSDL as Service Name and Operation names. Similarly, one can use a message editor or routing parameters to provide some meaningful name like “CURRENCY_RECORD” instead of system generated names, which are typically like M7869912.V1. If you want to expose a different message shape then one can define a transformation in routing metadata for the operations.

If you consider CI as a proprietary Service Interface, then, Providing CI as a webservice is a classic example of Web Service to proprietary Service. It provides a nice abstraction.

Peopletool8.48

New license growth of Oracle Fusion Middleware... from Quaterly report...

2007-03-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

Larry Ellison reported in a quaterly report (March 20th 2007)

“Our middleware new license sales grew 82% in the third quarter and 62% over the last
twelve months,” said CEO, Larry Ellison. “This compares to BEA’s growth rate of 8% in their most recently reported quarter and 12% over their last year. Not only are we growing faster than BEA, we’re now larger than they are in the middleware business.”

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/investor_relations/earnings/3q07-pressrelease-march.pdf

BPEL processes in PeopleSoft Applications using Peopletools 8.48 (and later)

2007-03-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

In last few days, many customers, professional service engineers and integration specialists asked about using BPEL with PeopleSoft Applications. So I am giving some high level overview of Peopletools 8.48 functionalities for integrating with BPEL.

In 2005, when I was the Enterprise Architect of Peopletools (a development and runtime platform of Peoplesoft Applications), one of the important projects we did was to add many features to enable SOA in a better way. Peopletools 8.48 provided a better Service designer to consume or provide webservices. Many new features like WS-Addressing support, WS-SE, etc aligned Peopletools 8.48 to seamlessly work with BPEL. A much better than earlier version of Peopletools 8.46 and 8.47! (both these version are also certified with BPEL 10.1.2).

Many additional features like a support to WS-A headers & correlation id, security credentials, WSIL lookup, and others, allow PeopleSoft Applications and BPEL to discover each other’s services and invoke them other synchronously or asynchronously in a secured way.

We also added some features specifically for BPEL e.g. Partnerlinks in generated WSDLs, a utility Application classes, BPELUtil, IBUtil etc. With partnerlink support, the PeopleSoft Services are easier for BPEL to consume.

Using newly introduced BPELUtil, Peoplecode developers can directly launch a BPEL process. IBUtil class provides APIs to track the process. It also provides some more utility methods to get BPEL console URL, domain, etc. In fact, Peoplesoft CRM developed a process monitor for CRM processes using these APIs in release 9.0. Additionally, BPEL console can be launched within Peoplesoft portal without re-login.

Consuming a BPEL process was made very easy in Peopletools. One can consume the service by discovering from BPEL’s WSIL, UDDI, or directly importing using wsdl URL, or from a WSDL file. A copy of the WSDL is stored in WSDL repository table. Using the service designer, the developer can select port type, operations and messages. The developer can also add some handlers and routings.

Easy Coding: The consumed BPEL process can be launched (invoked) using a very few Peoplecode statements.

Creating a Message

&payload = CreateXmlDoc(&customer);

&msg = CreateMessage(Operation.PROCESS, %IntBroker_Request);

&msg.SetXmlDoc(&amp;amp;amp;amp;payload);

Invoking a BPEL process

&response = &bpelProcess.LaunchSyncBPELProcess(&OPERATION, &msg, "", "");

Processing a response

If All(&response) Then

&responseString = &response.GenXMLString();

WinMessage(&responseString);

Else

WinMessage("Error: No reply ");

Providing Services:

Peoplesoft Component Interfaces (CI)s and Peoplecode App Classes can be easily exposed as web services. The Service Designer helps to assemble the service by defining service operations and map them one or more CIs or App Classes or Peoplecode functions (handlers). Using the Schema designer one can design Peoplsoft’s rowset or non-rowset based message or import pure XML message as a schema. The service designer abstracts the internal names of handlers and messages allowing developers to give appropriate names. After assembling a service, the developer can publish the service as a WSDL to a WSIL or UDDI repository. The WSDL is also saved in an internal WSDL repository and available for query or export.

Routing and transformations:

Many times the external service may expect or send a message, which could be different than the internal message. The Service designer allows developing and using transformations of these messages using a graphical mapper.

Peopletools supports following Request Response Patterns:

One way notification (Fire and Forget)
Synchronous Request Response
Asynchronous Request Response

The Async Request response is supported using WS-Addressing headers. The external WS-Addressing headers, like correlation message id, propagated to Peoplecode based application (via IBInfo).

Security: In the world of integrations, Security is very important. Different framework handles security differently. PT8.48 implements a waterfall security model. A Username token and pass code token can be set at Service operation or Node or may have a default. It can be sent encrypted, digitally signed or text. An application programmer can override these using Security override API to provide a different token. This security credentials are sent via WS-SE.

Using the Integration framework, Enterprise Applications like CRM, HCM developed many Business Processes with BPEL.

SDO
JSR-235

(Peoplesoft is a Trademark of Oracle Corp. To differentiate with other ERP applications offered by Oracle, I am specifically using Peoplesoft name.)

Service Data Object (SDO): with rich DAO/DTO featureset, a standardization efforts, and support from J2EE AS vendors, ready to take off?

2007-03-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Service Data Object (SDO) specification provides a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources like XML, database, web services etc. Even though there are already plenty access mechanisms and specifications like JDBC, JAXB, JDO, ADO, Entity EJBs, etc, SDO still stands out due to some useful features.

SDO specifications provides:

Uniform access APIs to heterogeneous data sources
Multi-language
Maintains a disconnected data graph.
A dynamic APIs
Generate static APIs from the data source’s schema or UML.
Xpath based navigation through data graph
Change summary
Validations and constraints
Metadata access which is useful for tool builders.

SDO comparision with other data programming technologies
(table source Ref . 2 Next Generation Data Programming http://www.osoa.org/download/attachments/287/Next-Gen-Data-Programming-Whitepaper.pdf?version=1)

	Model	API	Data Source	Metadata	Query language
JDBC Rowset	Connected	Dynamic	Relational	Relational	SQL
JDBC cached Rowset	Disconnected	Dynamic	Relational	Relational	SQL
Entity EJB	Connected	Static	Relational	Java introspection	EJBQL
JDO	Connected	Static	Relational + Object	Java Introspection	JDOQL
JCA	Disconnected	Dynamic	Record Based	Undefined	Undefined
DOM & SAX	NA	Static	XML	XML Infoset	Xpath, XQuery
JAXB	NA	Static	XML	Java Introspection	NA
JAX-RPC	NA	Static	XML	Java Introspection	NA
SDO	Disconnected	Both	Any	SDO	Any

These rich features offer several benefits to different players:

For software architects and programmers it is useful to have a uniform representation of various data sources. As many other APIs a separation of data source specific APIs and business logic is highly desirable. With SDO, the interaction with data source is abstracted from application developers. Those who handle the persistent layer or provide a mediation framework would deal data sources.

A uniform access, metadata and dynamic APIs are very useful features for tools developers.

A disconnected data graph, a data change summary and optimistic concurrency would help application builders to build SOA oriented applications where disconnected client can manipulate data and then save to the data source.

Standardization of SDO:

In Nov 2003, JSR 235 was filed to standardize SDO in JCP. Unfortunately, due to some legal issues this JSR never made any progress.

However, in addition to BEA and IBM, many other firms like Oracle, SAP, etc joined the efforts to develop SCA and SDO specifications. As a result of this collaboration, Open Service Oriented Architecture (OSOA), a much mature version 2.0 was introduced in 2005. While this collaboration made a very good progress, the specification would not be standardized immediately. It would need to be submitted to some standardization body like OASIS, which would follow its own process to standardize. However, with the agreement of all the collaborating companies, the specification would serve as an intermediate but ‘de facto’ standard.

With Sun Microsystems joining the SDO and SCA efforts in July 2006, I hoped a revival of JSR-235. However, the SDO 2.0 was never submitted to JSR 235. Moreover, with multi-language support, the SDO 2.0 specification differed from SDO1.0.

Implementations of SDOs: In WAS6.0, IBM converted its WDO to SDO 1.0, while BEA added a SDO 1.0 based implementation in its Liquid Data. Some other vendors like Rouge Wave (HydraSDO) and Xcalia (XIC), SAP (NetWeaver J2EE 5 AS) introduced products supporting SDO1.0 while Oracle and others announced works based on OSOA’s latest specifications of SCA and SDO. Oracle added SDO support in its recently announced opensource Toplink.

Though SDO 1.0 introduced basic architecture and interfaces like DataObject, datagraph, it was incomplete due to a lack of specifications for Data mediation Services, a key architecture module, and other features. Thus it lost some portability across the implementations.

An Open source community is currently working on a project named Tuscany that would provide an implementation of SCA and SDO. Though there are high hopes about this effort, it still has a lot to be added.

Industry adoption of SDO:

For many reason’s SDO took a long time to gear a momentum. Most importantly it is a specifications, which did not get immediately standardized when it was introduced. Moreover, in the initial period, not all J2EE application vendors supported it. So the implementations based on the SDO were not portable across the J2EE application servers. Since the JSR-235 was stalled, the SDO lacked a wider visibility in Java community.

SDO: A plane ready to take off?

SDO version 2.0.1 is much more mature. It has added more languages like C++, PHP etc. There are plans to support C and Cobol too. However, there are some pieces in SDO architecture that are still scoped out of specifications. Most important scoped out feature is Data Access Service. If different vendors implement the DAS in making SDO importable on other application server, there would be roadblocks in its momentum. The success of SDO depends on its support on all J2EE Application servers.

SDO offer richer functionalities like change summary, dynamic APIs and metadata however these rich features should be implemented so that a performance of SDOs in access, updates and serializations is not affected.

As we already know, there are a lot of competing technologies and alternatives to access Data. Microsoft has ADO in its stack. WCF specific implementations may continue with the same. Many applications in Java spectrum may still prefer POJO,JDO, JDBC, JAXB for optimal direct access. However, features like disconnected model, change summary, multi-datasources would provide a sweet spot to SDO in the SOA world. SAgain, in that case, SDO need to have proper integration story working with current popular frameworks like Axis, WSIF, JAX-WS.

SDO may see a better support in SCA based solutions. Specifically some SCA implementation and ESBs may increase the adoption of SDOs. BTW, SCA itself does not strongly advocate SDO. One can have an implementation of SCA without SDO. However, within a SCA composite, one may find optimal use of SDOs as a DTOs transferring data on 'wires'.

Since applications leaders like Oracle and SAP are on board of SCA and SDO, if their applications also get aligned with these technologies, there would be a boost in arm.

Today, SCA and SDO have received a wide support from all major vendors of J2EE Application Server. If they deliver on their promises by adding SCA & SDO in their stacks, usage of SDO itself proves a "practical" advantage over other DTO/DAOs and SCA-SDO specifications get standardized, we would see a wide availability of products, tools and resources that would enable a large pool of developers and architects to develop solutions and products based on SDO. Finally, it seems that most of the stars are getting aligned! Hope for the best.

References:

[1] SDO2.0 specifications

http://osoa.org/display/Main/Service+Data+Objects+Specifications

[2] SDO whitepaper

http://www.osoa.org/download/attachments/287/Next-Gen-Data-Programming-Whitepaper.pdf?version=1

[3] SDO1.0 specifications:

http://xml.coverpages.org/IBM-BEA-SDOv10.doc

SDO
JSR-235

Mapping between XML & JSON: Need a standard way

2007-03-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

We need a standard way of mapping between XML and JSON. Let me explain why,

Currently, we have two popular types of mapping between XML and JSON.
1. Badgerfish http://badgerfish.ning.com
2. Mapping
The main difference between these two conventions is about namespace mapping.

For an example,

<xsl:root xsl="http://mynamespace.com">
<detail>my details </detail>
</xsl:root>

In case of “Badgerfish” the above xml would be mapped as:
{"xsl:root":{"@xmlns":{"xsl":"http://mynamespace.com"},"detail":{"$":"my details"}}}
In case of “Mapped”
In case of Mapped, namespace is allowed to map to a name e.g. http://mynamespace get mapped to mynamespace.root
{"mynamespace.root":{"detail":"my details"}}

While Badgerfish implements the full XML infoset in JSON, if there are many namespaces like following (example from Badgerfish site)

<alice xmlns="http://some-namespace" xmlns:charlie="http://some-other-namespace">
<bob>david</bob>
<charlie:edgar></charlie:edgar> <
/alice>
it becomes
{ "alice" : { "bob" : { "$" : "david" , "@xmlns" : {"charlie" : "http:\/\/some-other-namespace" , "$" : "http:\/\/some-namespace"} } , "charlie:edgar" : { "$" : "frank" , "@xmlns" : {"charlie":"http:\/\/some-other-namespace", "$" : "http:\/\/some-namespace"} }, "@xmlns" : { "charlie" : "http:\/\/some-other-namespace", "$" : "http:\/\/some-namespace"} } }
Which, in my opinion, seems to more cluttered than xml string.

In summary, due to two different ways of mapping, we need two parsers and builders for XMLß->JSON. This is very inconvenient. As a result we need a superset parser. Or we need a better and standardized mapping.

JSON

ESB vendors’s response to SCA

2007-03-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

Most of the key ESB vendors are already participating in finalizing SCA 1.0 specifications. The list contains on Oracle, IBM, BEA, Tibco, Sun, Iona, Progress (Sonic), Jboss (Redhat), CapeClear, and more. (You may find a latest list at http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/Service+Component+Architecture+Partners)

Most of them see a value in SCA as a promise to have standard for a simplified and powerful Component model to assemble SOA based applications/integrations. They understand a need of a common framework to connecte and assemble SOA components together so as to deploy on various middleware including their ESBs.

(http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/Partner+Motivations)

The commitments from different participants may vary significantly. Some may participate to provide inputs and be part of standardizations with two fold focus: one to influence the direction and another to align their products. Some of them may start implementations based on SCA specifications. The early participants like IBM, BEA and Oracle would offer solutions based on SCA earlier than others. Apache open source’s Servicemix allows deploying SCA composite in its container. Other vendors may work on aligning their products to support SCA. However, some vendors may play wait and watch to see a market adaption and provide a choice when customers demand.

Irrespective to their commitment, they may support SCA differently.

There are three broader possibilities.

Build a platform based of SCA foundation: A compatible to SCA in a way SCA as a first class citizen. Such platform can be a monolithic or a modular with different engines for different component types like BPEL, Java, etc. Such implementation would directly use SCA assembly metadata.
Deploy SCA on their container: support deployment of SCA composite in their container. In this model, as a part of deployment, a container would consume SCA composite but may transform to its own runtime metadata.
Integrate: Integrate with SCA based container but the SCA based container is outside the core platform.

Many of ESB vendors took one of these approaches (or a last one “do nothing”) for JBI. For example, ServiceMix is based on JBI while Oracle ESB 10.1.3 provides a JBI container to integrate with ESB.

Here, I am giving a reference to JBI as an example of ESB world’s response to a standard specification. JBI and SCA have some overlapping and some complementary functionality. JBI and SCA is another subject to discuss in detail. Since we are on the subject, I would make a passing note that JBI provides a framework and runtime specifications mainly for integration architects and middleware runtime platform (SPIs) so that runtime containers can be interconnected. SCA specification does not dictate a runtime implementation. One may enhance a JBI based runtime for SCA. There is a little overlap but a very good value addition.

In Summary, SCA is a very good specifications for ESBs to provide SOA platform. We may see some innovation from ESB vendors while implementing it.

SCA

ESB

BPEL in SCA assembly model

2007-02-26T23:11:00.000-08:00

(For basics about SCA visit:

http://khanderaotech.blogspot.com/2007/02/basics-of-service-component.html)

SCA and BPEL are complementary technologies. Though both have a mechanism to capture relationship between services, both do it differently. Moreover, BPEL is an execution language while SCA captures only the dependencies.

BPEL process can be an implementation type of service(s) within SCA. One may define service using BPEL and deploy the composite.

BPEL capture relationship between a process and an interactive web service as a partnerlink with different roles tied to port types. SCA maps the partnerlink with a single role (port type) to a reference. Thus, mapping between SCA and BPEL is straightforward.

Let us assemble a composite containing a BPEL process. I am using a stripped down version of a PurchaseOrderProcess given in proposed WS-BPEL 2.0 specifications. This process invokes two other services one to compute price and another to ship the product. These relationships are captured in three partnerlinks.

In case of WS-BPEL, a partnerLink defines two roles, one for the WS-BPEL process and one for the partner. In SCA, Depending upon a message flow direction, one of them becomes a reference and another becomes a service.

In our example, the BPEL process’s interface is exposed as a service entry point of the composite while other partner links are mapped as references.

Invoice (computePrice) service and Shipping service can be local or external to the composite. I am making both of them as external webservices. Thus, our composite looks like:

You may notice, wires between component and references. The BPEL process does not know what kind of implementation those references and what kind of binding it has. This loose coupling and flexibility is a power of SCA architecture.

Finally, here is the SCA composite representation for this assembly.

Disclaimer: The specs are still being evolved and may change. The representation is simplified for explanation hence it is not complete.

References:

1. WS-BPEL 2.0 : http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/wsbpel-specification-draft.pdf

2. SCA whitepaper: http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/SCA+BPEL+White+Paper

3. SCA - BPEL specs: http://www.osoa.org/download/attachments/35/SCA_ClientAndImplementationModelforBPEL_v0.95.pdf?version=2

SCA

BPEL

JSR-311 Java API for REST approved ballot after a Mixed reactions from developers:

2007-02-25T17:34:00.000-08:00

JSR proposal http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=311

JCP formed a JSR expert group to publish an API for RESTful services. JSR-311 is in ballot review period in this month (till Feb 26). Software companies like Apache, BEA, Google,JBoss and Sun Microsystems are on the board. Individuals like Jerom Louvel (RESTlet framework) and Douge Lea are also on board of it. However, according to others, Roy Fielding whose dissertations documented the REST pattern, seems to be unhappy about Sun using REST as a name.

According to this request, this JSR intends to provide a high level easy to use API for developers to write RESTful web services that would run on top of the Java EE or the Java SE platforms. The JSR would provide API with declarative style of programming using annotations for developers. It would also enable low level access in cases where needed by the application.

Sun's lead on this specification, Marc Hadley, outlined following conceptual model:

@UriTemplate("widgets/{widgetid}")
@ConsumeMime("application/widgets+xml")
@ProduceMime("application/widgets+xml")
public class Widget {

@HttpMethod(GET)
public Representation getWidget(@UriParam("widgetid") String id) {
String replyStr = getWidgetAsXml(id);
return new StringRepresentation(replyStr,
"application/widgets+xml");
}

@HttpMethod(PUT)
public void updateWidget(@UriParam("widgetid") String id,
Representation update) {
updateWidgetFromXml(id, update);
}

@LastModified
public Date getChangeDate(@UriParam("widgetid") String id) {
return getLastChanged(id);
}
}

Interestingly, the JSR furthers states " The specification will define
how RESTful services are deployed as JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web
Services) endpoints or Servlets."  The API will be packaged as javax.ws.rest.
I assume there could be WSDL representation of this using HTTP binding type defined in WSDL1.1 where
get,put, post etc can be captured as "verb" e.g. http:binding verb="GET

While REST based services may fit into a broader definition of webservices, a SOAP centric RPC styled
definition of Webservices is not suitable for RESTful services. Following page
compares SOAP and REST.
http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HowSoapComparesToRest

Anyway, a comment suggesting a direction of using JAX-WS and a reference to "DL based on annotations" has stirred the developers
community. Particularly on a background where WS vs REST battle is still not yet completely
settled.

W3Consortium has published a presentation on reconciling Webservices and REST.
http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/1115-hh-k-ecows/#(1)



(Unofficial)Develoeprs Polls at
http://java.net/pub/pq/146 as of Feb 25th
Approve 126  34%
Disapprove 67  17%
no opinion 99  25%
wait and see 95 24%
other 7

Latest News: The JSR 
The Executive Committee for SE/EE has  approved this ballot.

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=4168

The next (tentative schedule)schedule:

February 2007	Expert group formed
June 2007	First expert draft
August 2007	Early Draft review
November 2007	Public Review
January 2008	Proposed final draft
March 2008	Final release.

Refereces:
1. JSR-311: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=311
2. JAX-WS: http://java.sun.com/webservices/jaxws/
3. Restlest API: http://www.restlet.org/tutorial
4. Marc Hadley http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mhadley/
5. W3c on WS and REST: http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/1115-hh-k-ecows/#(1)
6. SOAP and REST: http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HowSoapComparesToRest

REST

JSR-311

Replacing XML with JSON in Ajax: Is it ready?

2007-02-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data interchange format (based on subset of JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition), which is becoming popular alternative to XML in Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) based software. It is comparatively lightweight than XML.

It has simple message format: JSON message is constructed using very simple data types and data structures similar to those available in most of the programming languages. JSON has objects and arrays. Objects are collections of Named value pairs while arrays are ordered lists of values. A value can be a string, a number, a boolean (true or false), null or an object. This message format makes easier for Ajax to access the data.

Ajax – JSON made for each other? A natural fit? Since Ajax itself is JavaScript based, JSON becomes a natural fit. You do not have to parse or evaluate JSON object within your Ajax code, you can immediately access the elements inside it. JSON object can be directly passed to JavaScript eval function. For example, var obj = eval( '(' + returned_json_text + ')' ) . This is fast and easy. Moreover, supported by most of the browsers and Ajax based tools.

Momentum: Though, neither JSON nor Ajax is conceptually new, in last couple of years both in general but Ajax in particular got a momentum. Ajax has provided a way to implement web based rich client. Ajax become mainstream with Google’s backing which provided Ajax based search (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/) and toolkits (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). Other companies like Yahoo too entered quickly into the foray (http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/ajax/). In December 2005 Yahoo published JSON based web services (http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html) while Ebay provided XML2JSON transformer (https://json-xslt.codebase.ebay.com/).

Is it ready? While we witness a momentum, the real question is what do we need to make it end to end working? Do we have adequate tooling? What is the benefit? Is it worth? Is it robust? Secured?

While it does make sense for a browser based, in other words JavaScript based, clients to prefer JSON, the end-to-end applications need support from middleware and backend. In a typical scenario data goes back and forth through many layers between a database to a client. It gets mapped to the data structures on language implementing business logic; it may be converted to XML in a middleware. Before sending to the client it may need to be transformed to JSON. If the solution is dedicated to Ajax based client, then you do not need to convert from native to XML and then XML to JSON. You can directly serialize in JSON form. Jsontools (http://developer.berlios.de/projects/jsontools/), json-lib (http://json-lib.sourceforge.net), etc are some of the open source tools for Java-JSON conversion. JSON website (json.org ) lists many such libraries for different languages. You can use them. This path narrows your software to JSON/Ajax based solutions compared to XML based Web services provides a wide variety of applicability.

Over last decade, a much more mature and robust infrastructure has been build around XML. In contrast with it, most of these JSON based tools/libraries are open-source and, as of today, may not be well supported. You may use them at your own risk. That’s one drawback JSON has. It lacks tooling support and standardization for different language mapping. In Java world, do we need a JSR? However, I hope that some of these open sources may become Apache projects and start evolving towards standards or become de facto standard. It all depends on how much industry support JSON gets in Ajax world.

Security, and robustness are next issues that need to be addressed. Since JSON code may carry security risk particularly due to JSON text may carry Java scripts dynamic script tag. Heavy-duty JSON applications reveal browser specific issues like memory leaks.

In summary, there is a good promise with Ajax –JSON (additionally REST); you may start some internal pilot projects. However, it would need some more time and resources to mature JSON in this combination.

Introducing JSON: http://www.json.org/

Using JSON with Yahoo Webservices: http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html

XSLTJSON: http://www.bramstein.nl/xsltjson/

XML2JSON: http://code.google.com/p/xml2json-xslt/

XML2JSON: https://json-xslt.codebase.ebay.com/

JSON tools http://developer.berlios.de/projects/jsontools/

Json-lib http://json-lib.sourceforge.net

JSON

Basic assembly model of Service Component Architecture (SCA)

2007-02-23T16:24:00.000-08:00

Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications started as a joint effort by mainly IBM and BEA in 2004 soon got more acceptances in 2005 when other software companies like Oracle, IONA, SAP AG, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend also joined the effort. As of February 2007, seventeen key vendors (http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/Service+Component+Architecture+Partners) are working together to define a specification that can be a version 1.0. It has almost all major J2EE middleware vendors on its board. Offcourse, you won’t miss an absence of Microsoft.

Specifications:

Version 0.9 (Nov 2005)

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/webservices/standards/sca/pdf/SCA_AssemblyModel_V09.pdf

Version 0.96 (Nov 2006)

http://www.osoa.org/download/attachments/35/SCA_AssemblyModel_V096.pdf?version=1

Upcoming specification 1.0

A service, in case of web service defined in WSDL, is a heart of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service can be implemented using different languages like Java, C++, PHP, etc and many follow different interaction protocols. Often services interact together to offer a business solution (thus becoming an application). However, there was no standard way to specific this dependencies and to assemble them together to form a composite application. Sun Microsystems had provided JBI to address some of the needs needs. However, JBI is Java centric. So cross platform component architecture was much needed. That’s where SCA stepped in.

SCA provides a way to specify the interaction of services and assemble them together to form a composite application. The specification does not dictate any runtime implementation but, just like WSDL is in XML, it express an assembly of a composite application composed of services implemented using different technologies like EJB, web services, C++, PHP and invoking internal or external services via different protocols. Thus making a deployable assembly of services. With this modular and uniform assembly of disparate services, platforms built on SCA would definitely provide service-based applications that are easy to deploy, configure, monitor and move. Thus, would reduce a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Basics design blocks of SCA assembly:

Composite: As expressed in fig 1, a basic container block of SCA assembly is a Composite. A composite is composed of Services, entry points, references and wires linking them together. Composite is expressed in XML and it does not replace the definitional artifacts of software’s implementing the services. Composite has an entry point expressed as a Java or WSDL interface. These interfaces can be bound to different protocols like SOAP over HTTP, JMS, JCA, etc via bindings.

Component: One basic artifact of SCA is the component which implements services in using different implementations like BPEL, EJB, Annotated Java, and PHP etc. The implementation types are specified in the components definition. Services, implemented by components, can be consumed by other components and external software. The components may have settable properties.

References: Services provided by Components may depend on other services. The service depending on is specified as a reference.

Wires: Wires links components to references or other components.

Fig 1. SCA System assembly (source: SCA specifications)

Fig2. SCA Composite Assembly (source: SCA specifications)

Note that, though SCA assembly provides wirings between components and can be graphically depicted as a flow, SCA itself is neither an orchestration engine like BPEL nor a workflow.

Note that SCA assembly model provides a loose coupling and flexibility to change. You may notice that a referencing service need not know the implementation type of the referenced service. It only knows the interface. Similarly, one can always change the wires or bindings thus offering a flexibility. With this module composition of services and their implementation, we may see an overall increase of productivity.

All of these can be assembled together to make a composite as:

In addition to SCA assembly model, SCA defines specifications for client and implementations, bindings and policies.

Client and Implementation specs: SCA provides Client API and service implementation specifications (Java, PHP, BPEL, etc).

Bindings: Access interactions with outside a composite are defined by bindings. SCA specifications are working on various bindings like WSDL, JMS, RMI-IIOP, REST, etc.

Policies: SCA also working on defining a framework to define policies like transaction, reliable mesaging, secutity etc.

In some later posts, I would drill down further into more details...
SCA 2.0

What changed in WS-BPEL 2.0 from BPEL4WS 1.0/1.1

2007-02-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) 2.0 is an execution language for Webservices based process orchestration. Currently (as of February 2007) it is in the final round of a public review to get accepted as a standard by Oasis (http://www.oasis-open.org/). With most of the leading vendors in middleware market being on its TC board, the specification published, on Jan 31^st 2007( http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/22036/wsbpel-specification-draft%20candidate%20CD%20Jan%2025%2007.pdf), is most likely to be accepted without any major changes.

WS-BPEL is the next revision of BPEL4WS (originally released on in July, 2002 and released as revision 1.1 in May 2003). Since there is an ample material covering some basic concepts of BPEL, in this article, I would mainly focus on some new features and concepts.

WS-BPEL clarifies the behavior of Abstract Processes. Abstract processes may hide (encapsulate) elements and activities of processes by replacing them by opaque entities or completing omitting those and, thus, becoming non-executionable. Abstract processes are useful to provide a common base with abstractions for further refinement, or identify matching counter process. Oh! This topic requires much more details, which can be covered in future. A New namespace xmlns=http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/process/abstract added for the better differentiation.

Process flow control activities:

WS-BPEL has following activities to orchestrate a process.

Activities interacting with internal/external entry to provide entry or exit points: receive, reply, invoke, pick

Data Related Activities: assign, validate

Data Related Activities: <assign>,

Process Flow related Activities: sequence, if, while, repeatUntil, forEach, flow, wait, empty, exit

Process Scope: scope, compensate, compensateScope

Fault Related Activities: throw, rethrow

Extension Constructs: extensionActivity

Out of these activities:

New activities: validate, repeatUntil, compensateScope, rethrow and extensionActivity.

Replaced Activities: switch changed to if - else, terminate changed to exit

Enhanced: onAlarm(add periodic),

Changes in: fault variable now declared catch, behavior of links changed.

Dropped: getLinkStatus() and getVariableData(). The functionality served by these functions can be achieved using new notations to access variables.

Data Handling:

Improved way to access message and variables:

WS-BPEL is XML centric. However, its earlier incarnation was not very friendly to Xpath and did not have XSL transforms. WS-BPEL further simplified Xpath mapping with a way to refer variables as “$variableName” in activities like assign, joins, etc. The same notation is used for property aliases too.

Transform: Most importantly, WS-BPEL has a function doXslTransform() to support XSL based transform. While giving a preferential treatment to Xpath, WS-BPEL still made a provision to support other mechanism with an attribute named expressionLanguage.For xpath,

expressionLanguage="urn:oasis:names:tc:wsbpel:2.0:sublang:xpath1.0"

Validate

WS-BPEL added an activity to validate a message. Additionally, assign activity has an attribute for validation.

Better mapping and exchange of message data:

BPEL process interacts with Webservices expressed in WSDL. WS-BPEL provides and constructs for easier copying BPEL variables to / from wsdl parts.

Additionally, WS-BPEL introduced a new construct called messageExchange to pair up concurrent and activities

Provision for extensions:

WS-BPEL introduced two constructs specifically for extensions. They are: extensionActivity and extensionAssignActivity. A new activity can be defined using these constructs.

Faults:

WS-BPEL has improved fault handling with Fault handlers having catch, catchAll, throw and rethrow constructs.

Process Termination:

The and exitOnStandardFault are added.

Process level addition:

At a process level, a support to has been added.

Also, a support to added to import WSDL and XSD within a process.

These are few high level changes. In addition to these changes, a much better clarification as well as some semantic changes is done in the existing constructs.

Topics like concurrent messages, compensation, fault propagation, abstract process etc needs more discussion. May be in a later blog…

References
1. WS-BPEL2.0 http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/22036/wsbpel-specification-draft%20candidate%20CD%20Jan%2025%2007.pdf
2. BPEL4WS 1.1:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/2046/BPEL%20V1-1%20May%205%202003%20Final.pdf
3. http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/bpel/index.html

Service Virtualization

2007-02-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

Service Virtualization or Service to service(s) map

In Service Oriented Architecture, a service definition, in case of web services expressed in a form of WSDL, is a contract between a service provider and consumer. This contract needs to be long lasting. Moreover, services needs to be well designed so that they can be consumed very well with various tooling and programming frameworks. It sounds easy especially when such services are defined in a standard language like WSDL.

However, when a provider is exposing a legacy application, like Peoplesoft Component Interface based application, as a service, it becomes often challenging because the services often carry signatures of legacy services including naming, data types etc. Consuming them becomes a nightmare because if you run then through some service developments tools like wsdl2java, you would get an explosion of java objects with meaningless names and a spaghetti object model. If the provider intends to expose such services at the same time re-implement the services, the provider would prefer to be a forward looking and should define the service contract as “how it should be” and not as “how it is today”.

Many air travel ticketing sites expose their web services and in backend use Web services from providers like Sabre as the actual provider. However, they may have some additional processing or just would like to hide the details of the actual provider service. In such scenario when a service provider is actually delegating to a third party, the provider would hide the identity and details of the third party service so that if needed it can be replaced by an in-house implementation or another third party implementation.

In many such occasions, service providers want to separate a service from its physical implementation. This usage pattern is often referred as “Service Virtualization” and would be served by a “service to service map”. Many Web Service gateways/brokers, Enterprise Service Bus like Oracle’s ESB typically provide a framework for virtualization.

In most of the implementations, the physical service may not be on the same host. The virtual service may have more meaningful or different names for service, operations and messages data types. Most importantly it may not have the same shape and it may even have a different protocol like SOAP over HTTP or JMS.

In bare-bone architecture of virtualization, there could be a one to one mapping of operations between a source and proxy service. In this mapping, the name of the operations as well as shapes of payload may get changed. In a more complicated scenario, a proxy service may represent a full or partial view of more than one service.

Thus, common Patterns of Service virtualizations are:

1. One to one: One service can be mapped to another service.

1. Fan out: One service operation can be delegated to multiple services to execute.

2. Partial: A service is partially exposed as a virtual service.

3. Aggregate services: Multiple services can be partially or fully grouped together and exposed as one virtual service.

A typical service virtualization framework would have metadata module to capture the service routing information, transformations and invocation framework to mediate between various transports.

In summary, Service virtualization is useful in following use cases

1. XML firewall isolating virtual and physical services

2. Proxy Service provider for an external service

3. Composite service from different services

4. Encapsulating legacy services

Service virtualization using Oracle ESB 10.1.3:

Here is an example of a 1:1 service virtualization using Oracle ESB 10.1.3. In this example I am providing MovieService as a proxy for an external movie service available on internet (http://www.ignyte.com/webservices/ignyte.whatsshowing.webservice/moviefunctions.asmx?WSDL)

The proxy movie service changes the namespace, and some operation name. The Routing service in ESB transforms and routes the incoming messages to the external movie service.

Higher level view of service virtualization:

Snapshot of Routing Service mapping to an external Service:

Java SE 6.0 announced

2006-12-11T15:03:00.001-08:00

nounced today...

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/

Some key features relevant to integration are:

· New Client and Core Java Architecture for XML-Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 APIs

· New support for Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0

· Improved JMX Monitoring API

· New API for XML digital signature services for secure web services

· SSO/GSS security support

· Improved Remote debugging

· Scripting support

Oracle officially launched Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product at Oracle Open World

2006-10-31T12:26:00.000-08:00

Oracle officially launched Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product at Oracle Open World

Oracle's ESB in 10.1.3.02 is a flexible, robust, high performing and scalable integration platform. I will cover the architecture and salient features later. Meanwhile
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/esb/pdf/ds_esb_v10_1_3.pdf

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/esb/pdf/esb-foundation-for-soa-presentation.pdf

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/esb/index.html

Features:

Multi-protocol message bus with optimized, in-memory routing and reliable delivery

Hot-pluggable: Interoperates with JMS, MQ Series, Tibco, and Oracle messaging technologies

Support for over 250 application adapters and standard B2B protocols including EDI, EDI/AS2, RosettaNet, UCCnet

Enterprise-strength performance, scalability, and manageability with Oracle Grid technology

most common Use Cases:
Service virtualization
Data sync
Asymmetric deployment
Transformations and routings