Notes from Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Fusion Middleware Keynote Presentation

15 Nov 2007 by Simon Haslam (in General)

The Fusion Middleware Keynote presentation was given by Thomas Kurian yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld and is available on Oracle's site here (presumably via trusty PL/SQL!): http://www.oracle.com/pls/ebn/live_viewer.main?p_direct=yes&p_shows_id=6001341

This lasts for over an hour, so I thought I'd summarise what was interesting to me, i.e. technologies applicable to mid-sized companies using Oracle as their strategic platform.

Overview

This keynote doesn't present anything entirely unexpected for FMW 11g - it is rather the culmination of both development work and the merging the whole raft of new technologies acquired by Oracle since the release of 10g Application Server. Some of these products have been available either separately or as part of the Oracle 10.1.4 release earlier this year, or as technology, again available for several months. I welcome the increased integration though and look forward to some easier-to-follow release numbering! Oracle now includes Business Intelligence products in this "middleware" space too which, whilst making for fancy demonstrations, doesn't necessarily fit closely with many IT departments who, in my experience, still treat application delivery and business intelligence as two distinct areas. Finally it is good to see Oracle keeping up rapid development of the JDeveloper toolset and core OC4J Application Server, along with its supporting management and diagnostics tools, which set it apart from competitors' and open-source products.

"Enterprise 2.0"

Let's get the buzzwords out of the way first: "Enterprise 2.0" was the first one, no doubt dreamt up by the marketing folks following from "Web 2.0", "Identity 2.0" and lots of other 2.0's that I must have instantly forgotten. It's supposed to encompass all the Web 2.0 social networking ideas like blogs, wikis, discussion forums etc, but within a presumably commercial environment. Enough already.

SOA (another term meaning different things to different people) of course is heavily promoted, although we are at least getting to a point where Web Services are beginning to really deliver on their original hype over the last 5 years. BPEL is another area which is maturing quickly and I think 2008 should be the year where people will have to justify why they're not using WS and BPEL when developing 3rd party integration projects and workflow management within call centres.

ADF

It was good to hear a mention of ADF up front. The most interesting new feature is the JSF renderer that will allow you to render View Objects using the full AJAX/DHTML technologies. This, for most data-centric applications, will be a big step forward: there are plenty of applications where you really need a rich client front-end for a few screens (e.g. a diary where you want to click appointment slots) but don't want to have to go to a full ADF Swing application (or reverting to Forms for that matter). Likewise you don't really want to compromise (which is what many people do at the moment) with grotty pop-up windows or complete page refreshes. Therefore I think ADF-JSF with AJAX will be useful for quite a few customers.

If you're interested in this topic I suggest you hop over to Duncan Mills' or Steve Meunch's blogs. The JDeveloper 11g Technology Preview 2 is on OTN too so you can try it out for yourself.

OC4J

As I alluded to earlier, OC4J is moving forward quickly to keep in step with the continual development of the Java standards. The JEE (aka J2EE) 5.0 certified OC4J 11g Developer Preview has been out for most of this year - the java officianados will know this already - and the key areas of support are EJB 3 (this has been available in 10.1.3.3.0 since July too), Java Persistence API and the web service-focussed JAX-* APIs including support for asynchronous calls to web services. More on this another day.

Integration / BPEL

Oracle Data Integration and ESB gets a mention (I haven't used this in anger yet so can't really comment), as does BPEL. Three process types: system-oriented (as you'd expect, triggered from various web services etc), human-oriented and document-centric. For the human-oriented processes there's now a means to quickly build interfaces, so that the humans have a way to enter their results into the system (e.g. approving a purchase order etc). Most of the specialised workflow products, like Metastorm, have their own UI building environments so I think by integrating BPEL with ADF and JDeveloper could prove very beneficial to organisations that are already building java apps.

BI Server

I think I "tuned out" a little around this point in the keynote! There was a mention of new capabilities in BI dashboards. On the ETL side there's the ability to generate star and snowflake schema for data marts automatically (actually, data marts are not an approach I like, though I can see the need for it in larger and "politically diverse" organisations). If you're interested you're probably best to go and have a look at Mark Rittman's blog for this sort of thing.

Notable exceptions

Finally here are a few products not mentioned in Mr Curian's keynote:

• Forms: well I guess the writing's been on the wall for quite a while there, but it's still a useful technology and if you have a significant investment in Forms I don't seem any desparate need to change. It might have been nice to have had a nod from Oracle that they still see Forms as a supported environment though.
• Reports: I was disappointed that Reports wasn't even mentioned in passing. It strikes me, whilst BIP looks like it might be Oracle's preferred strategic reporting platform, Reports still has a reasonable future ahead and will be productive for the next 5 years. It's also a stable platform. Finally BIP pricing puts it out of the reach of many organisations that traditionally would have been Forms/Reports, or these days J2EE/ADF/Reports, which I still find puzzling.
• Portal: I think WebCenter might be another nail in Portal's coffin but we shall see.
• Oracle Internet Directory: OID has had a curious history when it comes to integration: originally there were connectors to allow you to read from 3rd party directories directly, currently there is one and two-way synchronisation to make OID a single integration point (e.g. between your Oracle users and Microsoft Active Directory users) and now we have the Virtual Directory layer on top. OID, by virtue of being run on top of the database, is arguably the most scalable directory available and yet somehow still seems unable to stand on its own. Perhaps this new layer will allow Oracle to have their cake and eat it...

Anyway, hope this has been of interest. If you'd like to chat about it perhaps come and find me at the UK Oracle User Group conference at the ICC Birmingham in a few weeks - I'll be manning the Application Server "Focus Pub" on Monday evening or on the App Server Round Table on Wednesday morning 9am.