Lehmann Blogger

Oracle Application Server EJB 3.0 Preview

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:43:00 GMT

Well, after much frenzied work from the 24X7 Product Manager Debu Panda, specificiation work driving the standard from Mike Keith and our incredible TopLink EJB team we have the Oracle Application Server EJB 3.0 Preview available for download. Seventeen tutorials, several whitepapers, start up guide and a development and PM team awaiting the onslaught of questions. Check it out!

Web Services Journal Reviews Oracle Application Server Web Services

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 07:57:13 GMT

One of the entertaining things about being working at large vendor like Oracle is how you have the opportunity to use a lot of different levers to make a ruckus about your product stuff. However, more often than not, it often seems like when you try your hardest to use those levers seemingly little noise is made and when you try the least sometimes more noise happens than you ever expected.

Take for example Web Services Journal where we have been on a bit of a run getting a pretty good set of articles on BPEL, WSIF and Web services published over the last few months but mostly from Oracle folks. These are hard work and usually are somewhat brutal efforts at the last minute with all nighters pulled, engineering reviews to make sure they are accurate etc. These are great pieces and hopefully provide good insight into what our engineering teams are doing but in all honesty happen under much stress.

Then literally out of the blue we get Brian Barbash doing a solid review of our 10.1.2 Web services infrastructure - no work on our side and even better, a pretty reasonably accurate bit of coverage. Check it out:

http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=48034&;DE=1

This garners OracleAS Web Services the "Web Services Journal World Class Award". Now if only all product reviews could be like this, product management would be a piece of cake! As noted in the sidebar, 10.1.3 brings a whole new class of functionality to the table but it is good to have a level setting with 10g 10.1.2.

Interoperability

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 00:50:56 GMT

Interoperability is often a harder problem that I generally let on in this blog as due to the huge variety of implementations out there, there are subtle variations on how one constructs doc/lit, rpc/lit and rpc/encoded messages on the wire. Depending on how it is done, you either help the consumer or hurt them.

For example, right now I am in the middle of an customer escalation where the customer has chosen an rpc/encoded approach to model a document oriented exchange. When both sides are the same vendor's SOAP implementation it works like a charm because it is a homogeneous environment. However, as soon as you bring in nearly any other SOAP stack the other stack chokes and you either have to write a custom serializer, look for a one-off relaxation fix from the vendor for a solution to this problem or suggest having the exact same server on the client side. None of these are particularly attractive when you don't control the client ... a more proactive approach is to be more thoughtful up front when designing the service.

I wrote one article two months ago suggesting top down design as a way to maximize chances for interoperability but at a pretty high level. These articles from Sun tackle the issue in detail and discuss pro's and cons of appoaches to interoperability:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/xml/jaxrpcpatterns/index.html

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/xml/jaxrpcpatterns2/index.html

As a result of these, my colleague, Eric Rajkovic who often is our diagnostics experts with these kinds of issues, has submitted a paper to JavaOne in the hopes of sharing his "war stories" on interoperability.

An Introduction to Service-Oriented Architecture from a Java Developer Perspective

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:47:02 GMT

Debu Panda published this article today on OnJava - An Introduction to Service-Oriented Architecture from a Java Developer Perspective.

Nice job on tying together a fair chunk of the moving parts of SOA from a guy who is living and breathing EJB these days! Check out Debu's blog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0135826/ where he has being on a bit of a jag around EJB 3.0 of late.

Large Scale Deployment of a Web Services Infrastructure

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 05:30:00 GMT

I had an opportunity to do a WSJ article which of course was left until the last minute and then in a frenzied brain dump this is what came out:

Deploying Large-Scale Interoperable Web Services Infrastructures

By no means perfect, not exactly rocket science and sadly I didn't have time to build some pictures to go with it, but particularly in the interoperability section and the performance section it does outline some of the very common pitfalls/solutions we run into in our customer base who are using Web services. In the management section it touches on a favourite topic of mine which is bringing a policy enforcement point into ones architecture in order to bring managability to heterogenous services.

I realized when writing it, to really discuss this topic there is enough meat for a book as many of the areas are really just mentioning a point that really should be explained by full fledged examples, especially some of the workarounds and alternatives for lack of interoperability at the reliability and security levels.

More WS-Security

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 05:24:11 GMT

There is a fair amount of WS-Security content coming out now that our 10.1.3 DP3 preview is out with support. Here is a couple of pieces I have been involved in to gently get folks introduced to it:

My Oracle Magazine Article: http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/05-jan/o15web.html which introduces our WS-Security implementation
An "Oracle By Example" - see: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe1013jdev/secureunitedloan/secureunitedloan.html

Just finished a digital signature article to follow the Oracle Magazine one with a slightly more complex example. Should be published in 3 months.

OOW and OC4J 10.1.3/JDev 10.1.3

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 08:12:14 GMT

It's been a mad rush but at long last Oracle OpenWorld is done, our next rev of OC4J 10.1.3 released and the countdown is on to Christmas. Try out the new OC4J 10.1.3 Developer Preview 3 from here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/oc4j/1013/index.html

Probably the most significantly visible piece of technology in it is the new Application Server Control at http://127.0.0.1:1810 (id/password: admin/welcome). From a Web services angle it is where are first WSM and real JAX-RPC runtime is revealed in almost its entirety as per my articles in Oracle Magazine pointed to from this blog. The Web services features are not only reflected in the AS Control management interface but also in the very cool 10.1.3 preview of JDeveloper at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/101/index.html

To kind of flesh out the Web services management story a little better that I and others have slowly being opening the door on in various articles, I added a bit more material around my WSM slides in this presentation I did at OOW:

https://www.openworld2004.com/published/1413/1413_Lehmann.pdf

Hopefully you get these sense there is lots there in this 10.1.3 release and there will yet be some more coming as we get closer to production.

My role is changing a bit on the OC4J team to be a bit broader in scope than my familiar stomping grounds of Web services so my blog may start covering a bit more territory going forward. The hardworking team of Debu, Jon, Steve (breathing life again into his blog) ,Tug, and Frances (who remains bloggless so far!) are working to close this puppy down. We will be looking for a new inbound Web services PM to work with Jon filling my old role and to polish up that area of the release.

Interoperability and WS-Reliability

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:50:50 GMT

Some interesting articles of note passed around inside Oracle today of relevance to some of the stuff we have been doing in our upcoming Developer Preview of OracleAS/JDeveloper in the next couple of weeks:

An article on WS-Reliability, now an OASIS standard, and how it works and its importance to a Web services infrastructure: Getting the Message Across: OASIS Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) . Our reliability support will be part of the developer preview release.
Oracle has been heavily working the interoperability efforts across the industry over the last several years. This effort last Friday - Interoperability Demos for OASIS Standards at XML 2004 - Oracle participated in the Web Services Composite Application Framework (think transactions) interoperability demonstration and the Web Services Reliability demonstration

Watch out for it ... the link in the earlier article below this one gives a sneak preview of the WS-Security in both runtime and design time.