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!

Presentations at OpenWorld 2012

This blog contains a wrap up of our presentations at OpenWorld 2012.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Live Application Development (UGF10464)

In this three hour show moderated by Duncan Mills and Chris Muir, the audience could experience the dynamics between three different teams that are building an application based on Oracle Fusion Middleware:

1. User Interface in ADF;
2. Services in SOA Suite and Oracle Database; 
3. Business processes in BPM Suite.

Behind the scenes at the presentation

It's the fourth time Vennster participated in the Live FMW Development sessions after appearances at ODTUG Kaleidoscope, UKOUG, and OBUG. For OpenWorld 2012 the team that prepared the application consisted of Lucas Jellema, Luc Bors, Aino Andriessen, Guido Schmutz, Lonneke Dikmans, and Ronald van Luttikhuizen. This time we tried a different approach in which we pre-built the application and focused on explaining and demoing it in the first part of the session. After that we made several changes and deployed the improved software components.

OpenWorld 2012 - Oracle Fusion Middleware Live Application Development from Ronald van Luttikhuizen

Some best-practices the team discussed:

• Use Business Rules to allow for runtime modification of fast changing business logic instead of design time modifications and redeployment of services. Encapsulate useful Business Rules as separate services instead of adding them to existing SCA composites.
• Include a heartbeat operation for every Web Service (e.g. by using the Mediator's Echo activity) so you can verify that all technical layers of the Web Service work without triggering a functional side effect. 
• Invoke PL/SQL from DB Adapters instead of directly executing CRUD operations for additional decoupling.
• Decouple components and introduce additional reliability and robustness by using events.

Effective fault handling in SOA Suite 11g (CON4832)

In this co-presentation with Guido Schmutz we explored how the out-of-the-box frameworks, patterns, and tools that are available in Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite can help you to implement fault prevention and handling capabilities.

360 view during the Fault Handling presentation

The session was pretty well attended, and with an extended Q&A sessions at the end. I never had so many questions after a presentation; don't know if that's a compliment or not ;-) Some of the questions raised:

• Wrapping asynchronous message exchanges as synchronous exchanges and vice versa. 
• Where to execute long-running and statefull processes: SOA Suite rather than OSB.
• Fault handling in fire-and-forget message exchanges: if there's no callback, implement fault handling in the service that is being called.
• Can the Fault Management Framework of SOA Suite be used to catch internal BPEL faults: use catch activities for that purpose.
• Transaction boundaries, dehydration points, and global transaction timeouts.
• Compensation versus rollbacks.
• Chaining exception policies using the Fault Management Framework.

The slides are available from Slideshare and answer some of these questions. A series of articles is underway that dives deeper into these subjects!

Effective Fault Handling in Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus (OpenWorld 2012) from Ronald van Luttikhuizen

Live Fusion Middleware Development Session @ OBUG Connect 2012

The MECC in Maastricht will host the 5th edition of the OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group) Connect conference on tuesday the 24th of April. This conference will be the third time that a group of Fusion Middleware specialists from different companies such as AMIS Services, Vennster, Veriton, and Oracle Consulting Services team up to present a live application development session after successful performances at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2011 and UKOUG 2011. The goal for these events is to build and demo a working application in just half a day using JDeveloper, ADF, Oracle Service Bus, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle BPM Studio. At the upcoming OBUG Connect 2012 conference the team will consist of Steven Davelaar, Lucas Jellema, Edwin Biemond, Luc Bors, Lonneke Dikmans, and Ronald van Luttikhuizen.

Attendees can walk in and out of the session, ask questions, interact and comment on the way developers build the application, and see how Fusion Middleware can be used to build an application based on SOA and BPM principles in a productive and iterative way. Thanks to Murphy and his law, at each development session unexpected things happen that need to be dealt with by the development team and session moderators in a short time frame. So come and see!

FMW development session at UKOUG 2011

Read more about the OBUG Benelux Connect 2012 program here.

Wednesday Wizardry - Small encore

Just a small encore on my blog post about the Wednesday Wizardry session at UKOUG 2011. Thanks to Simon Haslam we have a 180 degree view on the setting and team. Based on the frowning and dislayed code on the screen the team was in the final stage of the session.

180 degree view of the Wednesday Wizardry session at UKOUG 2011

Wednesday Wizardry

No, this is not the title of a new Harry Potter novel. If it were, there would be lines of people in front of the ICC Birmingham days ago where the UKOUG conference took place. Instead there was a modest but very interested group of spectators assembled who were interested in how to rapidly build an enterprise application based on SOA and BPM principles using Oracle Fusion Middleware in only a couple of hours.

Let's step back a little bit. This year at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in Long Beach a team of Dutch ACEs and ACE Directors took part in a rapid software development session called Thursday Thunder. The format is to have a small team of experienced developers that each build components of an enterprise application in parallel. The application consists of a business process, services, and a frontend. Such an approach is possible since the application is developed in a SOA-fashion: based on loosely-coupled components with well-defined interfaces that can be easily integrated. The developers' laptops are hooked up to projectors so the crowd can watch whatever developer, programming, and tools they are interested in. You'll also experience the interactions between developers and the pros and cons of the decisions they make. Moderators will question these choices, take questions from the audience, explain the design choices, interview the developers, and act as (annoying) stakeholder to the developers to spice things up a little bit. After a conference filled with theory and small demos, a final live development session showing all these concepts and resulting in a concrete result (a working application) in real-life is fun to watch!

Due to the success of the session at Kaleidoscope the format was copied at DOAG by our German and Swiss fellow ACEs and ACE Directors and repeated for this years UKOUG conference in Birmingham: Wednesday Wizardry! Goal was to develop an application supporting a conference and its speakers by implementing a speakers business process (submit an abstract, review and accept or reject it, invite a speaker, upload the presentation, collect evaluations, and so on).

Now we had a small setback with the original team. We lost some developers and moderators due to an ice hockey accident and last minute meetings. Of the original team only Lonneke Dikmans (Vennster), Lucas Jellema (Amis), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) remained. Luckily, Simon Haslam and John King were willing to step up as moderators!

So what were the three of us supposed to build in a three hour window? The figure below shows an overview of the various components involved. Lonneke would implement the speakers business process (blue) using Oracle SOA Suite 11g, Lucas would realize the user interface (yellow) using ADF 11g, and Ronald would develop the services (red) using Oracle SOA Suite 11g as well.

Overview of Wednesday Wizardry case

The team prepared only the database (green) and the interface of the services (so its WSDLs and XSDs) in advance. The rest was build from scratch.

In the beginning we had Murphy pay us a visit: There were some network problems and the VM on which the server was running was not reachable. Thanks to Alex Gorbachev, tips & tricks from the audience, and help from the tech guys we managed to solve the connectivity issues. In somewhat more than the two hours that were left the team was able to develop almost all of the functionality shown in the image and do a live demo for the "manager" (Simon was kind enough to play for manager, it was scary how well he did that...) at the end of the session. All steps from submitting an abstract to the acceptance and indicating the session was done were successfully executed!

Wednesday Wizardry Team in action; from left to right: Lonneke, Ronald and Lucas

Some general key take-aways:

• SOA helps in breaking up systems into well-defined services that can be easily integrated. Thereby reducing complexity of components, speeding up development, and enabling parallel implementation.
• A bigger development team is not always the best choice. A small experienced team can realize software fast(er) with less communication overhead.
• Live enterprise application development in a few hours is doable and fun for both audience as well as developers. Things can go wrong and will go wrong, but these are the same issues real software development teams run into.

Some specific and technical take-aways:

• Use MDS to store your service interfaces (WSDLs and XSDs); even for small projects! We didn't use MDS as team (too little preparation time) and as a side-effect had some troubles with defining service references for Web Services that pointed to local artefacts that were unreachable from the developers' machine.
• Use scripting for deployment for predictable and less error-prone deployment of software components.
• The out-of-the-box worklist application is an excellent tool in testing a busines sprocess. You don't need a working user interface that interacts with the Human Workflow components to test the business process.
• Never overwrite a database trigger that enqueues an event on AQ with a trigger that selects sysdate from dual 5 minutes before the final demo :-)

So, what will be the next live application development session after Thursday Thunder and Wednesday Wizardry? Friday Fantasy, Monday Maniac, Tropic Tuesday? Our team is ready for it :-)