Vennster @ UKOUG 2011

The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) Conference 2011 in Birmingham is a wrap! Well, at least it was when I started writing this blog :-) Now it has been over a week since I returned on a bumpy flight from Birmingham from my first UKOUG conference which I really enjoyed! Good atmosphere, friendly people, quality presentations, lots of familiar people, and surprisingly good food (at some places at least).

Here's a short summary of the sessions that were hosted by Vennster. Due to last minute cancellations we were asked to fill in for some of the speakers that couldn't attend and presented some more sessions than expected.

BPA Suite to BPEL case study
Lonneke presented on how to model business processes in Oracle BPA Suite and how to transform business process definitions from BPMN to BPEL along with the advantages and disadvantages of this approach. You can find the slides and more background information in this previous blog post.

Effective Fault Handling in Oracle SOA Suite 11g
I presented on fault prevention and handling in SOA and BPM environments and the mechanisms Oracle SOA Suite 11g offers for fault handling. A fault can be defined as something that happened outside the expected operational activity or “happy flow”. Faults can be categorized into:

• Technical faults (network errors, full tablespace, etc.)
• Programming faults (nullpointer exception, cursor not closed, etc.)
• Business faults (credit check failure, invoice amount higher than the ordered amount, etc.)
• Faulty user input (return date of a flight before the departure date, wrong credit card number, etc.).

To prevent faults you can apply various techniques: configure a robust infrastructure to avoid technical errors (clustering, redundancy, high availability), use pair-programming and peer-reviews to avoid programming errors, identify business requirements and implement these to avoid and correctly deal with business faults, and apply user experience techniques to lower the chance of faulty user input and its impact. This session mostly focused on fault prevention and handling for technical and business faults.

Effective Fault Handling in Oracle SOA Suite 11g

View more presentations from Ronald van Luttikhuizen

Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services
Lonneke and I presented (unexpectedly since the would-be presenter was unable to attend) the use of events and how events, services, and processes can work together to provide flexibility, decoupling, and realize business requirements. Events are important from a business as well as technology perspective. Oracle SOA Suite supports eventing through several implemenations such as Advanced Queuing (AQ), Java Message Service (JMS), and the Event Delivery Network (EDN).

I included the slides from my earlier eventing presentation at Kaleidoscope 2011 which was quite similar to the UKOUG session.

Overview of Eventing in Oracle SOA Suite 11g

View more presentations from Ronald van Luttikhuizen

Some background information can be found in this 2008 blog post explaining the importance of events.

Approach to SOA: Making This a Successful Endeavor for the Whole Organization
Lonneke was asked last-minute to present on why and when to use SOA and what will makes it successful using the (according to some) infamous "breakfast" example. At the end of this session, you will know what SOA means, when it is best used, and how you can get there. 

Wednesday Wizardry
Lonneke, Lucas, and Ronald showed how to rapidly build an enterprise application based on SOA and BPM principles using Oracle Fusion Middleware in only a couple of hours. Read all about it in this blog post.

Other sessions
Due to the unexpected sessions we needed to host I wasn't able to attend that many other presentations. However, I did visit and enjoyed the "WebLogic Server and Oracle RAC" session by Simon Haslam and Frances Zhao on the integration between Oracle WebLogic Server and the Oracle (RAC) Database; especially Active GridLink and the enhancements it offers.

Christmas in Birmingham: Lonneke in front of a square with a giant polar bear and snooker on the big screen

As for me, until next year at UKOUG 2012!

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 :-)

DOAG2011 Day 2: Vennster presentations

Wednesday was the day I presented on BPA Suite to BPEL and User experience in the Enterprise. As I mentioned in the previous blog, this fitted nicely with the sessions I attended on Tuesday.

BPA Suite to BPEL case study
The first session I presented talked about the use of the Oracle BPA Suite as the modeling tool for the business processes in a project. The Oracle BPA suite provides an option to automatically transform BPMN (Business process execution language) to BPEL (Business process execution language). This approach has some advantages and disadvantages, as I described in "Transforming BPMN to BPEL: Why and How" a couple of years ago.
So, not surprisingly, we ran into some issues in the project; both from a design perspective and from a development perspective. These findings were discussed, including some pointers to solve these issues:

Oracle BPA Suite to BPEL: A case study

View more presentations from Lonneke Dikmans

Using Oracle BPM (the BPMN 2.0 designtime and runtime tool from Oracle) will resolve a lot of the translation and impedance mismatch issues. But other issues will remain; the most important things to keep in mind when using the models that are created by analyst for development are:

1. Make sure the analyst is fluent in BPMN 2.0.
2. Make sure the business process is not to detailed, so that the best practices from a development and user experience perspective can still be applied.

User experience in the enterprise
The second presentation concerned the second item: best practices from a user experience perspective. Often when Business processes are modeled, the analyst will model all the tasks and then a screen is generated for one task. This might seem like a cheap solution from a business perspective, but usually this leads to very clunky user interfaces and expensive changes to the process once it is deployed an in production.
It is important to clearly separate the user interface logic (flow) from the business process flow and apply common user interface practices and patterns in the application. This is exactly what happened in Fusion application: user experience was an integral part of the development process.

Ux fusion apps

View more presentations from Lonneke Dikmans.

You can apply these techniques in different types of projects:

1. Custom development projects
2. Customization of packaged application
3. Creating packaged application.

It will save you a lot of money in the life cycle of the application, and does not cost a lot to implement!

DOAG2011 Day 1: Quality

Today was the first day of the German Oracle User Groep (DOAG) conference. If you are interested in SOA and BPM, there is plenty to see: there is  a development track, a Middleware track and a BPM track.

When you develop SOA and BPM applications, quality and control is an important topic. Components are reused and processes span multiple departments. This means that you have to make sure that the processes you design perform the way you expect them to, and that the services you use, are functioning as expected.

These topics were all addressed one way or the other in the sessions I visited today. Let's start with the more technical aspects: the quality of the development process.

Continuous integration
Jurgen Broda, Martin Karmann and Daniel Kleine-Albers presented "SOA Continuous integration". In this session they explained the way they had used Hudson in their SOA (SCA-BPEL) project. For people who are familiar with test driven development and continuous integration in Java projects, the approach this team took was very similar to that. The only complication with SCA composites is you have to deploy them before you can test the code. In this project, they created a custom testing framework for integration testing of the composites. Note that the SCA composites testing framework can be used to unit test the composites.
The biggest advantages of continuous integration in a SOA projects are:

• Developers work on components that are part of services that are reused. Often this becomes very complex and it is hard to keep track of the functionality and quality. Using continuous integration breaks down the complexity in deployable units of code that run tests successfully. 
• If a change is being developed, there are regression tests available to make sure the rest of the services and processes did not break. 
• Requirements can be tracked if you tie the tests to the requirements, giving project managers a clear view of the progress. 

The thing the team found lacking is automated quality checking of the BPEL code. In the Java world we are use to analyze code using tools like FindBugs and CheckStyle. There is no such thing for BPEL, yet.  This was a very inspiring session; I used to think continuous integration was not too complicated in SOA projects. But now I know differently: in fact, I am going to propose to install Hudson and start doing continuous integration in our current project as soon as I get back!

AIA

Controlling the code you create using continuous integration is an important step towards quality and stability in your development process. But, creating SOA and BPM applications has additional requirements compared to 'regular' java or PL/SQL applications: code is supposed to be reused, and often you need to integrate existing packaged applications like Oracle eBusiness Suite or Siebel CRM. For this reason, Oracle provides a framework to integrate different packaged (Oracle) applications: Application Integration Architecture. In his session "Oracle AIA, does it deliver on it's integration promise" Ahmed Aboulnaga talked about his experience with Oracle AIA. Lowering risk and cost are the main reasons to get started with AIA. Using predefined process integration packs (PIPs) and the application integration foundation pack is not easy. But the architectural principles behind AIA are solid and this ensures that the integration code is reusable. Apart form that, a lot of time can be saved in analysis, because the data models (EBOs) are already defined. This is often a large part of the effort in a SOA project. Beware of customization though: this will become expensive very quickly. In fact, Ahmed stated that in AIA projects in general the initial investment is low (ROI is high), then in the middle (which can take up to two years) cost are high and finally it lowers again because of reuse of the integration code and good systems design. In the end it is worth it, but you have to know what you get into.

Process Simulation

Reusing architectural patterns, code and data models is a good way of ensuring quality in your projects. But every organization is different. For example, the type of staff you employ, the number of process instances you run etc. With BPM studio, process analysts have a simulation tool to make sure that the processes they design are efficient in terms of resource utilization and throughput. Michael Stapf showed in his session "Simulation von BPMN 2.0 Prozessmodellen mit BPM 11g" how to simulate a model that is created in BPMN 2.0 with Oracle BPM Studio 11g. The nice thing is, you don't have to deploy the model, nor do you need to implement all the services to run the simulation. The simulation engine checks the quality on a totally different level: it gives you the opportunity to monitor and control your process design. This is a very effective way of finding bottlenecks before you actually implement them in your organization. Changing a process that is in production is much harder than changing a design, obviously... A nice new feature in 11.1.1.5 (Feature pack) is the round trip simulation: you can add data from your running instances and feed that into the simulation models. 

Social BPM

So far I talked about ensuring code quality with Continuous integration and AIA and ensuring quality of design with AIA and process simulation. But a lot of quality gets injected in your process at runtime. People work together, make decisions, talk to each other, learn from similar cases etc etc. Social BPM is a term to indicate the application of Collaborative work to Business Process Management. Manas Deb explained in his SOA keynote "Social and collaborative BPM pushing organizational excellence" what this means for your organizations and how this helps you improve the quality of your organization. 

I really enjoyed this session. I graduated in Cognitive Science in the 90s and a large part of the curriculum at the time was CSCW or computer supported collaborative work. At that time, the tooling and connections (internet) was not as developed as it is now. It is good to see the application of these concepts in modern tooling like Oracle BPM. 

For me this was a very successful day. I enjoyed running into the "Oracle crowd", and attending sessions both in German and in English. I learned a lot. Unfortunately I did not learn enough German to do my presentations in German, so tomorrow I will talk in English about using the BPA Suite to generate BPEL and how User Experience and BPM fit together (using Fusion apps as an example). This fits nicely with the themes I have discussed so far.  I think the DOAG program is really well balanced, it is a nice location and after attending DOAG2011, everybody should be able to produce modern high quality applications ;) 

SOA Partner Community Award for Dutch ACE team

Every year at the SOA Partner Community dinner at Oracle OpenWorld, Jürgen Kress announces the winners of that year's SOA Partner Community awards. These awards are a recognition of contributions to the Oracle community in specific areas such as BPM 11g, SOA 11g, and specialization. This year there was a special community award for the Dutch ACE team for their community contributions through blogging, articles, tweeting, presentations, books, and so on. Vennster's Lonneke and Ronald are part of that team. Lonneke accepted the award on behalf of the others.

For the complete list of awards and winners see the SOA Community Blog.

Magic OpenWorld pass

You ever had the disappointing experience that you weren't allowed in a session or hands-on lab cause you didn't register and the session was already fully booked? I certainly had that a couple of times. This year is different, and not because I already finished the Schedule Builder months ago. I don't know why but somehow I'm always allowed to enter sessions this year :-) Even those sessions I didn't register for and are fully booked. Every time the green checkbox mark appears after scanning. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to treasure and hang on to my OpenWorld pass, that's for sure. Beginning to hope the magic pass also works on the business class lounge at the airport and the
ATM :-)

Just for the fun of it, a picture of Duke & Vennster.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011, The Story So Far ... !

It doesn't matter how often you've visited Oracle OpenWorld before, it remains an overwhelming experience every year! The enormous crowds (over 45,000 this year), the gigantic amount of information to absorb, all the networking, business opportunities, social events and meetups with old friends and new people, all the new ideas that start bubbling in your head by listening, dicussing, asking, answering, and presenting.

Mix all of that with a proper jetlag and you'll get a feel of the spicy cocktail that OpenWorld is :-) Returning from OpenWorld gives you a tired yet really energetic feel!

Tuesday feels a bit like the calm before the storm. Everyone digested a lot of information and attended a lot of events these last few days and is now prepping for the final encore on wednesday with Larry's keynote and the appreciation event that evening at Treasure Island.

To give you an idea of the things going on at OOW, I've compiled a short list of activities we participated in so far:

• ACE Director Briefing at Oracle HQ. Product management gives a preview of the things to be announced at OpenWorld and presents roadmaps of Oracle's products and tools.
• BPM and SOA Partner Advisory Council. Every year Jurgen Kress organizes a partner council at OOW in which product management present a detailed roadmap for BPM and SOA products such as Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPM Suite, Oracle Enterprise Repository, AIA, and so on. Partners are encouraged to provide feedback for product improvement. It's good to see that the Oracle products in this space such as OSB and SOA Suite are mature and future versions will build on the same programming models and will be made even more stable. 
• SOA & BPM Partner Social Event. This year Jurgen took us eBiking in San Francisco and Sausalito. Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, and a lovely dinner at Sausalito. Excellent event. This was followed up by the SOA & BPM Community Reception at Gordon Biersch later this week. Again a great event. And on behalf of the Dutch, thanks for the "active community" award :-)
• Loads of sessions and hands-on labs on BPM, SOA, NoSQL, Java/JEE, and so on. This year I had a chance to play with Coherence, BAM, CEP, ADF Mobile, BPM, and some other cool three letter acronyms.
• Lonneke presented on how to make SOA successful - session 28720 "Approach to SOA: Making This A Successful Endeavor For The Whole Organization". Full room!
• Annual ACE Dinner. Yet another great event to meet up with the OTN team and your Oracle peers!
• More good stuff from the OTN team who make a lot of this stuff possible! The OTN Lounge and OTN Night Party. Excellent hangsouts for Oracle developers! Go to the Howard Street Tent. Always something good going on in the OTN Lounge with techcasts, meetups with the OTN team, chatting with others from the OTN community.
• ODTUG social event in the French Bistro. Already lots of discussions on Kaleidoscope 2012.
• Oracle Publishers Seminar. Another heads up from product management on all the various products. We were invited thanks to Packt, who is publisher of the SOA Made Simple book we're writing.
• The Fusion Apps User Experience Advocates program had a short meeting to discuss the UX topics for the upcoming period.
• Demogrounds. Almost all Oracle products are demoed at Moscone. Go there to learn more about products and ask questions to Oracle staff. 
• Oracle BeNeLux event at Ruby Skye.

What's there to come?

• Meetup with Bob Rhubart (OTN Architect Community) for a podcast recording on our new book "SOA Made Simple".
• Larry's keynote of course: bright lights, loud music, cool intro, and hopefully some big news!
• Appreciation event at Treasure Island with Sting!
• Sessions, and even more sessions!

So, I can only say this. Come to OpenWorld next year if you're not here this time!