Mobile for business users

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Oracle Fusion Apps breaks with Oracle's past in the sense that the user interaction is built from a user perspective. Rather than exposing a datamodel or a business process to the user, they have designed the user interface based on information they have gathered about their user. Their website tells this compelling story, go check it out (after finishing this blog ;).

The world goes mobile

These days you can't just design for the desktop anymore. People use other devices like tablets and mobile phones and these devices are showing up in the workplace more and more. On top of that, people are working from different locations: from the office, from home, en route, or wherever they happen to be. This creates a new challenge when creating services or application. Take for example a HR self service application or an expense report application. Employees expect this functionality to be available everywhere, and on all devices.
At the other hand, organizations are struggling with the application of 'apps'. When I started programming, every piece of software had to have an API. Then the world realized that you want to integrate systems in heterogeneous landscapes and every piece of software needed to have a 'service interface'. Now that we have apps, every piece of software I realize needs to have a REST API so that people can create an app for that. The problem with this approach is that creating a service interface on every piece of software does not create a good service oriented architecture and creating a mobile interface for every piece of software does not create a good mobile user experience for your customers, employees and partners. So how should you approach this?

Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Patterns and Guidelines 

The ADF User Experience patterns and guidelines site is a very good starting point for organizations that want to start using mobile for their applications. The site has four sections:

1. Design guidelines. This section explains that mobile design differs from designing for desktops. It  then states 10 mobile design guidelines. The most important ones are at the top: know your user and define the essential mobile task
2. Know your user is a separate section that talks about getting to know your user. You have to revisit your idea of your user and determine who will use your application on a mobile device and in what context this will happen. Creating personas is a very good technique that you can apply. The site has some references to this technique at the bottom. 
3. Create a mobile task flow. This section explains how your mobile tasks fit in the overall business process. Unfortunately this section is rather short and uses flow charting to show the flow in the user interface, and not the overall business process. It is very important that the business process and the (mobile) user interaction that is designed from the perspective of the user are aligned: otherwise you get into trouble with rules and regulations that exist in your organization for the business process that people are accessing using their mobile device.
4. Mobile design patterns. Users may not be used to using mobile applications for work, they use it at home and in their personal lives all the time. So using patterns that people are familiair with is important. You as a developer doesn't have to re-invent the wheel when creating the mobile tasks and your users are happy because the application works the way they expect. This will save money because there will less calls to the helpdesk, less errors and your application will actually be used ;)

OBUG Connect

Ultan Ó Broin and me will present some mobile design patterns that are defined in the process of designing mobile applications for Fusion apps at OBUG connect 2013, this afternoon. We will explain the importance of patterns and show some of the patterns that can be built with either ADF Mobile, or the native platform of a device.

Next: apply!

The next step is that projects start using these techniques to built user interaction for professional users, like we have been doing for consumer software for a long time. It is time that professionals get the user experience they deserve and need to be productive and happy while doing their job!

SOA Made Simple

The book SOA Made Simple is published! SOA Made Simple is written by Vennster's Lonneke Dikmans and Ronald van Luttikhuizen. You can download a sample chapter and order the book from the Packt Publishing website. 

SOA Made Simple is a concise and indispensable handbook for finally understanding exactly what Service Oriented Architecture is. Split into three clear sections, in this book you’ll learn from both theory as well as step-by-step implementation examples to aid in your understanding of this often poorly- articulated industry term.

A short abstract for SOA Made Simple:

SOA is an industry term which is often preached like a religion rather than taught like a technology, and over time, grasping the concept has become unnecessarily difficult. Many companies proclaim that they don’t know where to begin with SOA, while others have begun their SOA effort but haven’t reaped the benefits they were convinced it would bring. “SOA Made Simple” explains what SOA is in simple terminology and by using real-life examples. Service-orientation is already a very natural way of thinking for business stakeholders that want to realize and sell services to potential clients, and this book helps you to realize that concept both in theory and practice. After reading “SOA Made Simple” you will have a clear understanding ofwhat SOA is so you can implement and govern SOA in your own organization. If you are an architect who wants to be completely clear in your understanding of what SOA is, then this book is essential. In fact, anyone (designer, developer, administrator or team lead) who is implementing or about to implement an architecture in an IT environment should not miss out on “SOA Made Simple”. 

From the Trenches 3 | Patching OSB and SOA Suite to PS5

In two previous blogs (part I and part II) I talked about a recent upgrade from Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g PS2 to 11g PS5. This blog finishes with a post-installation step that was required to complete the upgrade and a quick note.

All in all, after a good preparation the team was able to patch a production environment to PS5 in almost an afternoon. The environment runs several Fusion Middleware products (OSB, SOA Suite, OID, WebLogic Servers for JEE apps) and spans multiple WebLogic Domains and multiple WebLogic Managed Servers in single-node clusters.

Migrating running composite instances that use While activities

One of the new features in SOA Suite 11g PS3 is that the Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Console shows the loop count in the BPEL Audit Trail when using While activities. This is shown in the following figure.

This feature works for new instances that are created after applying the patchset and for running instances that haven't reached the While activity yet when the patchset is applied. However, when you have running instances that are executing a While activity (also when the instance is in the dehydration store), you see the following entry in the SOA Suite log after applying the patchset:

ORABPEL-02118

Variant not found.
The variable "__loopCondition" is not declared in the current scope. All variables must be declared in the scope before being accessed. This was an internal error. The flow was not generated correctly by the BPEL compiler.

The audit trail will show the following message:

The transaction was rolled back. The work performed for bpel instance "xxx" was rolled back to the previous dehydration point, but the audit trail has been saved. You can recover the instance from the recovery console by resubmitting the callback message or activity for execution.

It seems SOA Suite uses an internal variable to count the number of times a loop is executed. Probably, this variable is not initialized when using a SOA Suite 11g version predating PS3 and thus results in the error.

There are two solutions to this:

• Validate there are no running instances that execute a While loop while patching your environment;
• If not, use the patch as indicated in patch reference 1451018.1 at the Oracle Support Site.

After applying the patch and restarting SOA Suite you will notice the following log entry indicating the loop count exception is handled by SOA Suite:

<Warning> <oracle.soa.bpel.engine> <BEA-000000> <Handling Exception on setting __loopCondition. This is expected for in-flight instances created before SOA upgrade from PS3 or older versions. 

Default Human Worklist Application and OWSM

The out-of-the-box Human Worklist Application is configured to use the oracle/no_authentication_service_policy policy of Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM). This policy became available in later patchsets, but isn't shipped with SOA Suite and OWSM PS2. Without updating your OWSM policy store you'll see the following error when logging into the Human Worklist Application after applying PS5:

An error occurred for port: {http://xmlns.oracle.com/bpel/services/IdentityService} IdentityServicePort: oracle.fabric.common.PolicyEnforcementException: PolicySet Invalid: WSM-06162 PolicyReference The policy referenced by URI "oracle/no_authentication_service_policy" could not be retrieved

This can be fixed by updating the OWSM policies using the upgradeWSMPolicyRepository() command. This is documented in Upgrading the Oracle WSM Policies in the Repository. Make sure the Managed (or Admin) Server on which the OWSM PM application is deployed is running. Otherwise you'll see an error indicating that an MBean that is used for the policy upgrade cannot be reached.

See the Oracle Fusion Middleware Security and Administrator’s Guide for Web Services 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6) for more information on OWSM and its policies.