2008 Round-up and Looking Forward to 2009

31 Dec 2008 by Simon Haslam (in General)

Well, it's time for a little reflection on what has happened over the last year in the Oracle middleware world and what to look forward to in 2009.

The BEA acquisition has been nothing short of monumental and I think in a few years we will see that this was a pivotal acquisition for Oracle. In July Thomas Kurian announced that WebLogic Server would replace OC4J as the java container in Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g. The first of the Oracle-delivered BEA products was WebLogic 10.3 which was released in August and is the JEE5-certified java server (which had been in Technical Preview since the previous November). I gave a presentation at the October UKOUG App Server & Middleware SIG, to compare and contrast administration aspects of WebLogic with OAS and, whilst OAS administrators will have quite a lot to learn, the concepts are the same (thanks to the underlying Java standards) with just some implementation differences. I expect we will see more of these sorts of sessions over the coming year, especially once OFM 11g is released.

Whilst WebLogic replacing OC4J was big news, there are a host of other BEA products which have made a welcome addition to Oracle's technology stack. Not least of these is JRockit, a high performance JVM, which has some very nice performance management and monitoring features and looks extremely useful for enterprise deployments. On the SOA side, the migration of BEA's AquaLogic ServiceBus coupled with some of the Enterprise Service Bus' features into Oracle Service Bus promises to be interesting once SOA Suite 11g is launched (hopefully soon).

Finally, JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g, after several technical previews, went live just after Oracle OpenWorld. What was remarkable was that for all of the technical previews JDeveloper had been running the embedded OC4J server but by production the JDev team had managed to shoehorn a WebLogic server in there! ADF 11g brings a raft of new features - most notably an AJAX rich client interface, Task Flows which give a far cleaner means of grouping together application functionality and page templates for an easily reproduced look and feel.

Looking ahead to 2009...

In the platform area the two big areas of hype at the moment are virtualisation and, its wider extension, cloud computing. Neither has yet to made an impact on Oracle production environments, though I do see virtualisation (VMware in particular) in use at some sites for test environments.

I think virtualisation will gain increasing acceptance next year as it provides significant benefits in simplification and increased utilisation of hardware in the data centre. This is especially true in the middleware layer where it is typical to have 6 or 8 servers for a basic HA setup and not uncommon to see 10, 20 or 30 servers for a busy web application. VMware's free licensing for some ESX editions was clearly a significant step in 2008 (and a sign of increasing competition in the market) but whether Microsoft's Hyper-V, Xen-based VM platforms (like OVM), or the even newer Linux KVM software, makes much of a dent in VMware's market share in 2009 remains to be seen - personally I doubt it. Oracle's licensing and support restrictions are a hindrance to VMware deployment for production Oracle environments but hopefully, with sufficient customer pressure and a general market demand, that will change soon.

Cloud computing, where the virtualised infrastructure is provided out on the web is, in my opinion, still a way off for mid-sized companies. Whilst products like Amazon's EC2 offer a technologically interesting solution, I feel that a well run data centre, either in-house or in a rack/cage at a co-location site, still offers mid-sided organisations better value for money, especially if they are able to use commodity hardware. Of course this is still a very new area - as the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft provide innovative services at lower and lower cost this balance may tip, but I can't see that happening in the coming year.

SOA will continue to make inroads into mainstream IT, although really whether it will be taken as the "entire organisation" approach, or as the strategic means to integrate more modular applications is still unclear. In my experience, people at the "saying" end of things (software vendors, consultancies etc) promote the former, whilst the "do-ers" (whose necks are on the line!) are using the latter, lower impact approach! There are definitely benefits to building applications in a SOA-aware way though and this should be considered as part of every new application build or significant enhancement to existing systems. I also think we will start to see more people using Oracle's products, like the BPEL Process Manager which is becoming quite mature now, to bridge gaps between systems or when replacing older products, like Oracle Workflow.

My last prediction for Oracle-based organisations is that 2009 will be the year when Application Development Framework (ADF) reaches critical mass and most people will stop building any new functionality in Forms. Oracle's next generation of applications are being built on what's now being called the 'fusion technology stack,' namely ADF Faces, JSF and ADF Business Components (presumably also running on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database). Whilst Apex will have its place as a tool for  building smaller-scale and tactical applications, I believe this Fusion ADF development environment will become the de-facto choice for enterprise-grade Oracle-based applications.

At ODTUG in New Orleans in the summer I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Muir (an Oracle ACE Director) at last. Chris has been instrumental in establishing the ADF Methodology group, a group of over 100 people working with ADF who are coming up with best practices, coding standards, management techniques, and so on, for building successful ADF systems. These are gradually being documented on the Oracle Wiki. For me this is an encouraging sign that the ADF community is maturing and indicative of the productivity that people are now seeing with ADF.

So, to wrap up, despite the economic doom and gloom - don't panic! I think IT staff in Oracle-based organisations have an exciting year ahead with a host of technologies available to us to build modern and robust IT applications to meet the ever more demanding  needs for operational efficiency and new business processes. I wish my readers, friends and customers very happy and successful 2009!