IT-eye

Robert Scoble is linking to Justin Kestelyn who is asking why Oracle isn’t getting any blogging respect, especially around Web 2.0. According to Robert Oracle would get more respect if they’d invite more bloggers over to Oracle blogging events. Sure, I haven’t seen any events especially targeted at bloggers, but they recently organized a special event for Partners, which i blogged about (though not as much as i would have liked).

During this event Oracle demoed some of the upcoming web 2.0 features in it’s products. Tagging, relating information, wiki, presence, mashups, Ajax will all be available out of the box with Webcenter and JDeveloper 11g. I think this will earn Oracle some web 2.0 respect, when released. You can see some pictures of the demos here.

One commenter on Scoble’s blog said the lack of respect could be caused by Unbreakable Linux, which is seen as a cheap rip off of RedHat Enterprise Linux. According to this commenter Oracle should have created their own distribution. It may be a cause of disrespect, but i think Oracle did a good thing not inventing yet another Linux distribution. There are already enough Linux distributions. In fact, many people claim the problem with open source is that everybody wants to come up with their own solution, instead of working together on one solution. So i think it’s a good thing Oracle didn’t create their own distribution.

There are still a lot of people afraid of using open source because they think it’s not as well supported as commercial closed source software. This is the problem Oracle is trying to fix by providing support for Linux. They want people to migrate to Linux by giving them confidence in the support available.

Another reason for providing Linux support may their focus on making Grid computing easily manageable. If you want to run a grid of a 1000 cpu’s, doing upgrades or installing software should be easy. You want 24*7 availability, while still being able install upgrades and fixes. Oracle is doing this for their database and middleware software, by improving the provisioning facilities in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. By providing support for the operating system, they can also improve management of the grid on the operating system level.

What do you think, should Oracle have made it’s own distribution?

There was an interesting piece about Toyota in a major dutch newspaper yesterday: Nieuwe Henry Ford is Japans (New Henry Ford is Japanese). Of course this has everything to do with the fact that Toyota has become the worlds biggest car producer. It’s about Kiichiro Toyoda who is responsible for Toyota’s production system, which is seen as big an improvement as Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. Toyota’s method for producing cars is called The Toyota Production System, which focuses, among other things, on eliminating waste, and just in time production (There’s a lot more to it). But Toyota has also made a large contribution in improving product development. The article also mentions that a large number of companies have adapted the Toyota way, or lean as it’s often called, of developing and producing products.

How does this relate to the software industry? You often read or hear that the software industry is immature and could learn a lot from other industries. So this is what we try to do. We copy from other industries. For example, the use of design patterns has had a positive impact on software development. But sometimes we copy the wrong practices. One example in my opinion is the assembly line. Assembly lines were invented by Ford to mass produce exact copies of a product. In the IT industry were are not mass producing exact copies. Every project I’ve done was different. Every customer wants a solution that is tailor made. Every customer has a different infrastructure. An with each new project, frameworks and tools have improved. So in fact we are not mass producing, we are doing product development. So i don’t understand why some companies are trying to create an assembly line for software development.

Too often IT people think product development consist of writing design documents. One group will write some design documents (product development) and then another group will create the actual software (production). A thing we could learn from other industries is that product development isn’t finished until you have at least one finished and tested product. And to achieve this you’ll probably have to create a lot of testable prototypes (or computer models and artist impressions), otherwise you can’t evaluate the correctness of your design. No feedback means you can’t improve your design based on real tests. Too often we try to assess the correctness of design documents using experience, knowledge and common sense. But this is no substitute for testing. I think customers will stay unhappy with the performance of the IT industry until we include testing in our designs. This is why iterative and lean software development make a lot of sense.

What do you think? Are we copying the right practices from other industries? Are other industries actually doing a better job than the IT industry?

More info:
* Implementing Lean Software Development
* Lean Software Development
* Product Development for the Lean Enterprise
* The Toyota Product Development System
* Agile Software Development with SCRUM
* Agile Project Management with Scrum

Some moments ago, I discovered Slideshare.net on the internet. This site is a YouTube look-a-like to share your slideshows and presentation with the internet community. You can upload Powerpoint as well as OpenOffice presentations to your personal SlideShare page and make them public. You are also able to download presentations so that you integrate parts of it into your own presentation…I wonder if this violates any private property legislation in some way On the other hand, you should not make them public, if you want to prevent usage by others.

I already found some interesting presentations about topics like web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. I think this site can also be really helpful to inspire you to make attractive and well-organized presentations.

For development and testing purposes i’m using vmware to run Oracle’s SOA suite on my laptop. I’ve installed it on Centos. When running this on my laptop, the performance isn’t really great, the oc4j processes are using a lot of cpu time (continuously 50%). My initial thought was that this was related to my situation: running it on a laptop and not giving it enough memory (the vmware instance has about 1Gb allocated, the laptop has 2Gb). But recently we’ve seen these performance problems at other locations, where the vmware instance has enough memory (2.5Gb). A search on google shows that more people have problems using Oracle’s SOA suite on vmware: Poor performance of oracle soa-suite in vmware.

Has anybody else experienced this problem? Have you found any solutions?

The parallels between Scrum and Organizational Development are obvious. Both center around communication, feedback and learning. In a recent project I am introducing elements of scrum. Since March I am using a daily scrum to keep everyone informed about the project. In the daily scrum the whole team gathers at 10:00 a.m. and every team members tells what he has done yesterday and is planning today. The second Monday of April the first sprint started and we started using planning poker and a burndownchart.

I am surprised with the effects of the daily scrum. At first I had invited all the team members and stakeholders for the daily scrum. Sometimes i was walking into the rooms to remind them of the daily scrum. Now everyone joins the meeting at 10:00 a.m. sharp. The effects on communication and cooperation are significant. Team members are actively sharing information and the involvement and commitment to the project is getting better and better. Management is now considering using scrum in other projects .

Today, OASIS announced the approval of the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard for service orchestration. Since the previous release of the WS-BPEL 1.1 standard by OASIS several years ago, there was need for an upgrade. Some key process orchestration requirements, such as Improved data manipulation and Enriched fault handling are now included in the standard. To review the OASIS press release please follow this link.

Now, BPM vendors like Oracle and IBM will be challenged to embed the new standard within there software stack, if they not already have. For example Oracle already uses BPEL 2.0 within its SOA-suite and has become compliant to the standard today.

BPEL 2.0 compliant SOA projects are up to come.

I recently needed to quickly test some regular expression. There are a number of tools and websites that will let you do that, but since scripting is included in java 6 i thought there should be a way to do it with java without actually writing and compiling a java class. I hadn’t used scripting in java until now but after some research i found that you can use jrunscript to start a javascript shell. Java is integrated into the javascript engine in jdk 1.6, so you can use this to test java. Here’s an example:

>jrunscript.exe
js> "!if:companyname[a!=b]".split(":")[0]
!if
js> "abcdef".match(/bc/)[0];
bc
js>

Initially i though webcenter was more or less the same as Oracle Portal, but implemented in Java, with some additional web 2.0 components. But the vision behind Webcenter is a bit different. Portal is basically a container where you add in external content. The Portal combines all the external content, and allows the user or an admin to the container and the presentation.

Webcenter is different, it’s not a container. It’s a framework that allows a developer to include external content into a JSF page. Content can come from different locations, for example using WSRP (Web Services for remote portlets) or JSR 170 (Content repository API).

This means that every application, every page can be a portal container. The other main feature of Portal, customization, will be handled through MDS, Oracle’s Metadata Services. The MDS enables you to customize any application after it’s been deployed. All metadata that is part of the deployment unit (war, ear, composite app) can be customized. Using MDS you’ll be able to add pieces to a JSF page, or change the look and feel.

All xml in a deployment unit is considered metadata, and loaded into MDS. MDS can use a database to store this data, but can also be filebased, to ease development. Using Xslt all the XML metadata can be customized after deployment. This includes ADF Faces pages (you’ll probably have to create jspx pages), but also bpel process definitions.

From what i understand, MDS is already a part of Oracle’s eBusiness Suite. Starting with Oracle Fusion Middleware version 11g it will be available to all applications using OFM, so you can use it to customize your own applications. The MDS customization engine is an important core part of the Fusion architecture.

So using webcenter framework and MDS you can create composite pages containing content from different locations, and users and administrators can customize these pages. In 11g Oracle will also provide container pages, or shells, which can be used by administrators to assemble pages by adding content. This can be content created by developers, or content from a content repository. The webcenter services add additional functionality which can be added to pages like discussions, wiki’s, mashups, rss, voip (click-to-call) and communities. User will be able to create relations between different pieces of content using linking and tagging.

Jdeveloper 11g will be extended to support portal page development. You can create JSF template pages (container pages), which contain protected and non-protected areas. Developers will be able to add (drag and drop) content only to unprotected areas. In Jdeveloper 11g there will also be a new way to create page flows called ADF Task Flows. Not sure what the difference is with JSF pageflows, but it was mentioned that this enables page flows in a portlet while preserving back button functionality. During the demo it looked the same as JSF pageflows (in jdeveloper). Having a separate file with task flows might also make customization using MDS easier than when you have to customize an entire faces-config.xml file.

So to conclude, using webcenter every page will be able to function like a portal page. Using MDS you can add content to every ADF Faces page and customize it.

I’m currently in the ADF deep dive session by Duncan Mills at Oracle’s Xtreme PTS. Wasn’t sure if it would be worth attending, as most presentations here have been pretty high level. But Duncan had a nice trick which i didn’t know: you can customize the drop options that are available when you drop data controls on an adf faces page. The options are configured using the file aces_creator_configuration.xml (in $JDEV_HOME/jdev/system/oracle.adfm.dt.faces.10.1.3.40.66/). You can add new options, single components or complex components, to this file. The file uses velocity templates, so you add some expressions to dynamically configure the components as they are dropped on a page.

I’m currently in Redwood City attending Oracle’s Xtreme PTS event, which is an event organized by Oracle’s Platform Technologies Solutions support team. The goal of this team is to help Oracle partners deliver better solutions to their customers, and this week a large number of partners are invited to learn about Oracle solutions and products.

I think this week is an excellent idea, as it’s pretty hard to keep up with Oracle. A lot of new products have been released in the last few years, and even more products have been bought by Oracle and are currently being integrated into the Oracle products. Oracle is buying so much that even last weeks event agenda is already outdated. The new agenda includes a session on Tangosol Coherence.

Today we had sessions on the new features in the 11G database, Oracle’s Management tools, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Other session discussed how Oracle can help partners through Oracle PTS and Oracle Support and how partners can use Oracle’s support tools like Configuration Support Manager.

Here are some pictures i made, first a kitesurfer under the Golden Gate Bridge, and another picture of the Oracle offices.