David Chappell Blog

Today is the day we officially launch Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Fusion Middleware 11gR1 is the result of a herculean effort that is 3+ years in the making.

The major areas of investment have been –
- The completion of the integration between Oracle and BEA products into unified suites. This matches to the month the schedule that we had committed to publicly when announcing the BEA Strategy last June. This continues our excellent track record of buying best-of-breed software and integrating it together into a common environment.
- Improving the efficiency of modern data centers by extending the capabilities of Application Grids. We now take advantage of new hardware and software advancements such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, 10GB Ethernet systems, and virtualization to allow large sets of compute capacity and memory to be pooled together into virtualized grids or “clouds” that are lower cost, easier to manage with more flexible capacity to respond to business needs.
- Providing new Identity Management and Security technology to consolidate how users, their identities, and entitlements are managed, audited, and controlled to lower costs and improve security on Application Grids.
- A unified and declarative toolset with which Business Users and developers can work together to develop Business Applications & capture the behavior of the applications in metadata.
- A unified Business Process Platform with which to orchestrate humans, applications, and information into processes that can be monitored and optimized in real time, and providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the Enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools

Even though we are integrated into a set of suites, we are also still committed to being hot-pluggable with other technologies. We continue to support multivendor environments, and have extended our open standards support with better support for WS-*; SCA, New Identity Management standards; WSRP 2.0 Support; BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL4People to name a few. In addition we expand our definition of hot-pluggable to now exploit new IT infrastructure trends that are mainstreaming by integrating FMW with these new technologies. For example we have created a new facility to build and deploy virtual appliances allowing organization to exploit Virtualization more effectively.

For more information, go here
Cheers,
Dave

Hey all!
Mark your calendar and plan to attend the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch event in Washington, D.C.,on July 1. Join Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian to see Oracle's Fusion Middleware in action. Click here to register.

If you're outside of the US, and you can't make it to Washington, D.C., then join live events that are happening around the world. Similar events are scheduled for London (July 2), Munich (July 2), Paris (July 2), Sydney (July 9), Beijing (July 14), Seoul (July 15), Tokyo (July 17), Sao Paulo (July 21), Mexico City (July 23) More Info here.

Oracle is announcing the call for submissions for the 2009 Oracle Excellence Awards for application grid solutions. This award is designed to recognize organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to create an application grid foundation.

Does your company use Oracle Fusion Middleware application grid products such as Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, and/or Oracle JRockit?
Nominate your organization today for a chance to be recognized for your cutting-edge grid-based solution!

An application grid enables new abilities in application infrastructure such as pooling resources, dynamically scaling capacity across clusters, caching data in memory, and automating management. If you are using Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, or Oracle JRockit in innovative, grid-like ways, we want to hear from you!

Its easy to register. The final date for nominations is Friday, August 14, 2009

Best of luck and we look forward to hearing from you.
Dave

Come check out my talk at JavaOne this week on Wed at 11:05. Its entitled - "XTP: Patterns for Scaling SOA, WOA, and REST Predictably with a Java(TM) Technology-Based Data Grid (TS-5154)"

Here is an excerpt from the session abstract -

This session highlights specific patterns that take advantage of distributed Java™ platform agent-based caching in an in-memory data and execution grid to enable shared state management with near-in-memory access speeds for state data by services in SOA, WOA, and RESTful architectures. Using these patterns, SOA-based applications can achieve predictable scalability and high availability while insulating organizations from the need to enforce special architectural practices across the organization for "stateless" service development, enabling Java technology-based or .NET services to be written like everyday! objects that encapsulate state data with the business logic that operates on it.

The presentation discusses pros and cons of stateless versus stateful services and the service state repository. It explores architectural patterns for service state management such as fault-tolerent collection,load-balanced fault-tolerant services, business logic affinity, level 2 caching, state-based notification, and claim check. In addition, it examines pros and cons of multilevel service state caching in virtualized environments.

Come learn how next-generation SOA-based application architectures can be built to take advantage of scalable, predictable, virtualized environments that are capable of adapting to the ever-changing needs of the business.

Hope to see you there! Its in Esplanade 304-306, Moscone
Dave

An article that I co-authored, which highlites the use of large XML documents in a SOA using Application Grid,has just been published online in SOA Journal.

The article includes a downloadable example that shows how to use JAXB and a streaming STAX parser to break up large XML documents and store them in an application grid as java objects, use a distributed query to manipulate the objects in the grid, then rematerialize the data as XML upon completion of multiple grid based operations. The pattern is based on common customer scenarios we are seeing.

The article also talks about how a SOA based application would interface with an application grid by implementing a Claim Check pattern.

I wouild love to hear your comments about this subject.
Cheers,
Dave

I recently did an interview along with co-author's Thomas Erl and Clemens Utschig-Utschig regarding the SOA Design Patterns book that we recently published.

The interview is located here as a podcast. If you can get past the first couple of of minutes of us patting each other on the back :) we talk about the patterns in the book that we contributed and what it was like doing it.
Cheers,
Dave

SOA growth and change: TechTarget survey shows SaaS, BPM emerging

According to a writeup on a recent survey from SearchSOA/Techtarget, SOA is growing strong at the enterprise level, as evidenced by this excerpt -

Despite some bad press of SOA at the start of the year, SOA is in fact motoring forward. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).

The TechTarget SOA Survey 2009 was conducted in February of this year. Respondents comprised a mix of developers, architects, C-level execs, managers, consultants and others, the article stated.

Continue reading "Techtarget Survey: SOA Still on the Rise" »

Every time I go to visit a customer to talk about SOA I inevitably get asked for my opinion on how they are faring with regard to other companies adopting SOA. Getting peer validation is common human nature and seems even more common in IT.

In 2009 a lot has changed - the economy is in doldrums, SOA's viability has been challenged, and IT budgets are fast shrinking. If you are wondering how you are doing against your peers then here's a short, free online assessment and get a personalized report on your vision, your current state, and peer comparison for year 2009.

The report is dynamic in that it rates your answers for each category polled shows how that compares to your peers. In addition, it provides actions and recommendations that vary based on what your maturity level is at that particular category. It also creates a composite score for all subjects queried, with a corresponding the peer score that is the average score of all your peers.

Cool stuff. Check it out.

Dave

A new book on SOA Design Patterns by Thomas Erl, which I helped contribute to, has just been published by Prentice Hall. This has been an industry wide effort which included contributors and reviewers from many leaders in technology. The main page for the book contains a good overview, TOC, and links to all of the patterns online

According to the press release -

SOA Design Patterns is an innovative catalog of 85 design patterns for service-oriented architecture and service-orientation that documents the most proven and successful design techniques for succeeding with modern-day SOA. In conjunction with the release of the book, the new SOAPatterns.org (www.soapatterns.org) community site has been launched, providing an open forum for the on-going development and expansion of the pattern catalog.

Thomas Erl, the world’s top-selling SOA author and series editor of The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl, spearheaded the community effort behind the creation of SOA Design Patterns. In development for over three years, the catalog has been subjected to comprehensive reviews by hundreds of industry professionals, employed by many of the world’s leading technology companies. For a complete list of reviewer and contributor acknowledgments, please visit: http://www.soapatterns.org/acknowledgements.asp

The patterns that I contributed are
Service Grid,
which relies on -
In Memory Fault Tolerant Collection,
and may include -
In Memory Fault Tolerant Stateful Services
and Load Balanced Stateful Services .

Other contributors from Oracle include Anish Karmarkar and Clemens Utschig-Utschig.
Clemens contributions include Canonical Schema Bus, Compensating Service Transaction, and UI Mediator.
Anish's contributions include Service Callback, Service Instance Routing, and State Messaging

Regular podcast interviews for each of the patterns will also be conducted by Joe McKendrick over the next year and made available at InformIT.

preliminary additional press coverage includes Jack Vaughan on SearchSOA/TechTarget, and Joe Mckendrick on ZDNet.
Dave

Just to let folks be aware that SOA, the architecture-formerly-known-as-SOA, and the architecture-until-recently-known-as-SOA is alive-and-well, I gathered up some success stories that show tangible ROI from recent SOA projects across the industry, which include some Oracle customers.

I came across this set of case studies from the OMG SOA Consortium web site - which highlights SOA success stories across Insurance, Transportation, Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare.

Here are a few more from Oracle customers I culled from various sources –

Apollo Group, one of the leading providers of higher education for working adults, used SOA to automate determining the eligibility of their 120,000 student population for additional funds. The eligibility verification process was driven by many complex rules and required integration with heterogeneous systems such as PeopleSoft Campus Solution, Oracle e-Business Suite Financials and homegrown student record application. The rules that govern a student's eligibility for additional funds were volatile and needed to be quickly and easily modifiable by business users. Once a student is determined to be eligible for additional loan funds by the Oracle Rules Engine, multiple areas of PeopleSoft have to be populated to complete the Additional Funds process. The business logic in the PeopleSoft system had been highly customized so PeopleSoft Component Interfaces were utilized to gain reuse of all Apollo custom business logic. By reusing Component Interfaces, Apollo Group prevented the need to duplicate any business logic in the BPEL processes

The project took 4 months from start to finish with only 3 months to architect and develop the solution. The process was comprised of 12 BPEL sub processes containing over 450 BPEL activities. It interfaced with three different ERP systems to retrieve student information and inserted data into 12 PeopleSoft Components using Component Interfaces. Said Mark Forier, IT Director of Applications at Apollo Group.

Success of this project demonstrated the capabilities of IT and the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to upper management and the business. We achieved a 600% ROI on this project with a four month time frame on a $300,000 investment. Essentially, a significant and immediate return.

Tucson Electric Power Company Unifies Business Processes with Oracle(r) Service-Oriented Architecture Suite

Tucson Electric Power Company expects to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. They expect to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent.
Tucson Electric Power Company provides energy services in a regulated market and is focused on controlling costs while expanding IT services to increase business efficiency. The utility's IT infrastructure includes hundreds of specialized application interfaces and lacked a unified process for implementing new applications to deliver new services. To reduce IT complexity and administration requirements - and accelerate new application implementations - Tucson Electric Power Company selected Oracle SOA Suite to create a single enterprise-wide integration environment.
They are integrating their STORMS Work Management application with the Oracle E-Business Suite, which allows them to streamline work requests sent from STORMS to Oracle Projects and to track project costs more efficiently. The STORMS application enables the organization to rapidly assign field crews to restore electricity service and make repairs caused by storm damage.
Oracle SOA Suite (which enables underlying support for their service orientation) helps eliminate customized application integration requirements, establishing a framework of reusable components that allow Tucson Electric Power Company to simplify integration between additional work management applications and other back office systems - eliminating the requirement for custom, "hard wired" interfaces.

Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority Selects Oracle to Support Automated Ticket Validation Services Initiative

Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA), which manages an Amtrak intercity passenger train service in eight Northern California counties is using SOA as the foundation for its Automated Ticket Validation Services initiative.
Committed to continually improving customer service and security, CCJPA plans to launch California's first real-time ticket sales and validation system on its trains. The system, which is scheduled to go live in 2009, will allow CCJPA conductors to use hand held scanners to validate and sell tickets to customers on the train. This will also improve security by being able to track when passengers board and exit the train. The scanners will utilize Web and business process execution language (BPEL) based services to link CCJPA and Amtrak's IT systems.

Last but not least, is one of my favorites, Green ROI - It is widely believed that green revolution is the answer to the current downturn. How can SOA help you go green? Verizon Wireless did it using SOA, reducing their hardware footprint by 95% and measuring their ROI by reduction of tonnage of hardware in the datacenter. I blogged about this earlier in the year.

Dave