Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch plus Q&A
03 Jul 2009 by Simon Haslam (in Events)
Yesterday I attended Oracle's UK launch of Fusion Middleware 11g. The day consisted of substantial sessions by Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian in the morning, followed by specialist sessions in the afternoon delivered by the likes of Mike Lehmann and Vince Casarez. I was also fortunate enough to be invited along to a Q&A session with Thomas Kurian (more of which later). OFM 11g is a tour de force - I don't think I've seen such a broad Oracle technology release before. I have tried to distill the key points from yesterday in this write-up, based on my own interests (the technical aspects of WebLogic Server, SOA, Identity Management and ADF) but this is only really scratching the surface. |  |
Charles Phillips, Oracle's President, outlined the overall context and said the drivers for OFM 11g came from the need to deliver the latest requirements for applications (rich interfaces, 'enterprise 2.0' functionality, coordinated identity management and governance) and to exploit technology trends (multi-core processors, 64 bit/low cost memory, virtualisation & storage). Apparently this release has consisted of over 1,987 projects, taken 7,350 person-years and 13 million hours of testing and, in doing so, Oracle has spent $3bn on R&D... a pretty big project then!
There was also the mention of an "Innovations Showcase" - ths will be a series of incremental product releases over the next 100 days in the run up to Oracle OpenWorld, including products like Oracle Database 11gR2.
Next was the more technical stuff, as presented by Thomas Kurian (Senior VP of Oracle Product Development) who leads both the Fusion
Middleware and Fusion Applications teams. This session outlined new features in the following areas:
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As long time users of JDeveloper will have noticed, Oracle have been making big strides with its development tooling over the last two or three years. JDeveloper is central to much of the technology stack now - 'traditional' java applications, BPEL/OSB and WebCenter. Of course there were significant improvements in JDeveloper/ADF 11g (as launched at OOW last year), but the big emphasis for new new JDev release (11.1.1.1.0 - available for download from OTN) is the application lifecycle management (ALM). This is geared around making development teams work more effectively, for example, by providing an instant messaging interface and an integration framework that allows you to work with various 3rd party products such as Jira and Maven. The only topic that wasn't mentioned was continuous integration, but I suspect that could follow. The ADF Enterprise Methodology Group over the last year has had lots of discussions about best practices for team development and I expect ALM will fit in with what most of the leading ADF developers will be looking for.
Duncan Mills gave a demo of ADF showing the very slick interfaces you can produce with it, including charts and graphs, drag and drop, and tree structures using the new hierarchy component. He also introduced Jernej Kase from an ISV who was switching from ASP .net to ADF 11g. One thing that is increasingly apparent is that Oracle is using ADF for many of its new interfaces, like the SOA console. |  |
SOA Suite is now based around the new SCA standard and provides a combination of event-orientation and service-orientation. The aim has been to unify the following activities:
- System oriented processing (i.e. traditional system to system web services)
- Human workflow (the integration of human tasks into process flows)
- Document workflow (document scanning and capture)
Complex events processing (CEP) has been integrated from the BEA acquisition and there are enhancements to Oracle's business rules engine (much needed in my opinion). The new diagnostics facility, where you can trace through an instance of a flow from end to end, as well as restart it after failures, should be useful though I can imagine will take a few more revisions to make it practical for general administrator usage.
Human workflow is a very interesting area. This is the logical successor to the Oracle Workflow product in the database, but for the modern, service-based environment. Let's take the example of an insurance policy claim. Many of the steps in such a business process will be carried out by systems, but some, such as verifying the claim, may require human intervention. In this case this becomes a human activity web service. BPEL can decide when the human activity is required, for instance based on some criteria of the claim, and then you can use JDeveloper to easily build an ADF interface to present the relevant information to the user to make their decision (e.g. as part of an ADF Task Flow). This is a very common requirement; the majority of call-centre systems I have worked on have had some sort of workflow component, and to have it already integrated into the application development environment will save a lot of effort.
3. Enterprise Portal
Unfortunately I can't really comment on the improvements to WebCenter as I'm not very familiar with it. It all looks very smooth though.4. Application Grid
Application Grid is Oracle's marketing term for the core infrastructure products in Fusion Middleware: the JRockit JVM, Coherence and, of course, WebLogic Server. There are three enhancements that caught my eye:
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5. Identity Management
This release brings "enhancements to the directory infrastructure", by which I assume Oracle means OID and OVD. It also provides unified access management across both desktop and web, as well as consolidating entitlements management across SOA and applications.
There is a new Identity Analytics Warehouse which is a kind of data warehouse showing all identity management activity across your organisation. I'm finding it difficult to get too excited about this stuff - whilst I'm sure corporate governance is driving this kind of technology, it strikes me that it will only be applicable to the largest organisations and government departments.
What I am looking forward to using though is the new Oracle Directory Services Manager. This is a web based console for managing your directory - I think will be a consolidation of existing functionality previously available in OIDDAS and oidadmin, along with support for tasks which previously had to be configured manually (such as directory synchronisation). Many of us will certainly be glad to see the back of oidadmin!
Summary
Fusion Middleware 11g is a significant product launch and marks the culmination of the several years' development work, as well as the integration of technologies brought in through acquisition. It gives Oracle a very strong platform for delivering a new generation of modern enterprise applications, as well as giving customers a solid foundation for building their own.
OFM 11g is now available for download from OTN.
