The Fusion Applications User Interface = Oracle WebCenter

WebCenter is a combination of JavaServer Faces development, the best features from various portal products, and a collection of horizontal web services. However, one needs to dig a bit deeper to really obtain a feel for the power of WebCenter.

According to Oracle, the WebCenter Suite architecture looks something like the following:

Keep in mind that this could change before the product release, which is scheduled for late 2006. Nevertheless, this should be fairly close to the delivered product.

So...why should we care about WebCenter? First, it is a progressive step in fulfilling the promise of using a single user interface to access business applications, enterprise content, business intelligence, web-centric applications, and your digital pictures of Uncle Fredo's dog. Second, because WebCenter will be the default user environment for Fusion Applications; we now have an idea of how Oracle expects users to interface with the next generation of apps...and it's very different from what any of us are doing today. In fact, if you've seen John Wookey's keynote address from OpenWorld 2006, you have some flavor of WebCenter and the change it will mean to the way we use applications.

You can learn more about the Oracle WebCenter Suite here.

Oracle Containers For J2EE (OC4J)

Oracle Containers For J2EE (OC4J)

One of the reasons I am writing today’s post on Oracle Container For J2EE is that apart from being a core component of the 10g Application Server Oracle Containers For J2EE is also an important member of the new Oracle Applications Release 12 Tech Stack.

Oracle Containers For J2EE or commonly referred to as OC4J is the underlying runtime engine for the 10g Application Server infrastructure. It is an extremely lightweight and easy to install component which requires less than 50 MB of disk space and 20 MB of your server memory to be up and running. It also has a support for a wide range of operating systems including NT, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, IBM-AIX and Compaq True 64 with support for both 32 and 64 bit operating system.

OC4J runs on the Java 1.4 virtual machine and is J2EE 1.3 complaint. You can have multiple OC4J process running each of which is referred to as a OC4J instance. The OC4J configuration is controlled via XML configuration files and OC4J properties file. An OC4J instance is referred to as a container as it provides a web container to support services like Java Server Pages(JSP),Servlets , Enterprise Java Beans(EJB) and Web Services.

The OC4J also implements the following J2EE services.

• Java Authentication And Authorization Service (JAAS)
• Java API for XML Parsing (JAXP)
• J2EE Connector (J2C)
• Java Mail
• Java Naming and Directory Interface(JNDI)
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
• Java Application Framework(JAF)
• Java Transaction API (JTA)
• Java Messaging Service (JMS)

High Availability Single Sign On and SOA

OC4J can also be configured to support High availability architectures with Oracle RDBMS using Real Application Clusters and Oracle Datagaurd Technologies.OC4J also supports the Single Sign On functionality by making use of the JAAS service. OC4J is also out of the box Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) compliant as it supports the underlying feature of persistence.

Deployment

Though I am mostly talking about OC4J as a component of the Oracle Application Server, its important to note here that it comes as a standalone java component as well in the form a single zip file. Both the standalone distribution and the Application server distribution are developer friendly and deployment friendly. The code deployment in OC4J is done
through a Enterprise Archive File (EAR). The EAR file contains the Web Archive (WAR file) which in turn encapsulates the Java Archive (JAR) files containing the code.

OC4J In Oracle Applications

OC4J replaces the Jserv component which is there in the current release 11i of Oracle Applications. Also as a result the mod_jserv component would be replaced by the mod_oc4j component in release 12 of Oracle Applications. The mod_oc4j is used to communicate between different OC4J instances.

The default installation Release 12 of Oracle Applications will create 3 OC4J instances

• Oacore: This runs the OA Framework-based applications.
• Forms: This runs the Forms-based applications.
• OAFM: This is responsible for running the web services.

The Jserv groups which are there current in Oracle Applications Release 11i are also planned be replaced by OC4J instances.

As mentioned earlier the OC4J properties are controlled using the XML files and OC4J.properties file. These files are managed by the standard Oracle Applications Autoconfig.

The Java code deployment in Oracle E-Business suite for OC4J is done at the time of install using rapid install and maintained by ad tools like adadmin and adpatch. New custom code deployment can be done by using the Application Server Control user interface.

The OC4J implementation in Oracle Applications Release 12 will include the following directory structure.

• applications: Contains applications deployed
• applications-deployment: Contains configuration settings for the applications deployed
• config: Contains common configuration setting for the OC4J instance.

Process Management in Release 12

Oracle executives have been devoting a lot of slides in recent customer briefings to Oracle BPEL Process Manager: it's the cornerstone for our corporate integration strategy. This begs the obvious question: what's going to be included in Release 12?

Workflow in Release 12

The Rapid Install for Release 12 will include Oracle Workflow out-of-the-box. At present, Oracle expect that the version included will be Workflow 2.6, but as always, this is subject to change.

The practical implication of including Workflow in Release 12 is that all of your existing customized workflows will continue to function with minimal disruption and effort if you're upgrading from Release 11i.

Optional R12 Integration with BPEL Process Manager

If you're excited about working with BPEL Process Manager, you'll have the option of doing that, too.



Given that the E-Business Suite provides standard SOA web services, all that you'll need to do is to install OracleAS 10g and and BPEL Process Manager on a separate instance and point it to business service endpoints available from the E-Business Suite Release 12.

Getting Started with BPEL Process Manager and Release 11i

The BPEL Process Manager is considered a standalone tool outside of the E-Business Suite space, so you don't need to wait until Release 12. You can use BPEL Process Manager and other Oracle Integration connectors with Release 11i today. That's a good way of getting a headstart if you plan to upgrade to the combination of Release 12 and BPEL Process Manager in the future, or if you'd like to kick the tires and take this for a test drive today.

Oracle BI & SOA - Hype or Here Now?

BI is positioned very much within the Fusion Middleware stack of products, alongside areas such as identity management, as one of the key pillars of the platform, and many of the BI Suite Enterprise Edition talks made reference to how the suite played well with SOA-enabled applications. So what does this mean then, in practical terms, for Discoverer, Warehouse and Oracle OLAP developers? Is it just another architecture, or does this represent a step-change in the way we put BI applications together?

As a basic starter, a Service Orientated Architecture is an application architecture that makes use of loosely-coupled, self-describing web-based components that can be accessed by a calling application without any knowledge needed of the way in which they are implemented. Like previous component architectures used when building VB, C++ or Java applications, you can call published components and work with the results, except in the SOA world there's no need for the calling application and the components being used to be built using the same technology; you just register the components using something called a broker, your calling application then checks in with the broker, establishes what services are available and what parameters they require, then makes use of them as desired.

What we're doing then is building an application architecture at the macro, rather than the micro, level. It's evolutionary, rather than a complete new way of doing things - components and object-orientated programming have been around for a while now, but the difference here is that by integrating at the published, standards-based interface level, you can string applications together that draw on functionality from all sorts of systems, even where you have no idea as to how they were implemented.

Apart from the loosely-coupled integration factor, another key feature is that these services can be "orchestrated" - the analogy here is with Oracle Workflow, but Oracle Workflow generally works with PL/SQL components only whereas SOA orchestration, using BPEL (Business Process Orchestration Language), is implementation-independent and a standard across the industry. As well as BPEL, another acronym is ESB, or "Enterprise Service Bus" - a communications layer that takes messages from one SOA component to another, queues them and ensures their delivery.

So, where's the relevance for business intelligence and data warehousing? Here are some recent articles on the subject:

• What Do SOA and ESB Mean in Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Software as a Service Mean for Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Web 2.0 Mean to the Enterprise - Colin White
• Integrating Business Intelligence into the Collaborative Workground Environment - Colin White
• Business Intelligence and SOA - Robin Mulkers
• Why SOA is Important to Your BI Solutions - Colin Hulford
• OTN Service-Orientated Architecture Technology Center

Reading through these, it seems that the major areas of impact for business intelligence are:

1. Exposing ETL functionality as a service, having these routines transform data coming into a warehouse in real-time and in such a way that they can be called by any sort of application
2. Surfacing analytics, reports, dashboards and so on generated by SOA-compliant BI tools within line-of-business applications, and
3. Using the scalability of these loosely-coupled applications to create bigger and better BI applications that are quicker to respond to new data sources, new business opportunities and new ways of analyzing data.
4. BI has to become pervasive, user-friendly and as easy to use as Google Search.

So, getting back to the real world, what does this mean for us? Well, my initial thoughts are along these lines:

• Our ETL tools need to be able to consume, and produce, web services, and work in real-time, so that they can provide the data formatting and transformation facilities required in an SOA environment. This is a step-change beyond the "flat files and database links" that we're currently used to with OWB, and we're going to have to get used to writing ETL routines that are fast, can be run on-demand as opposed to in a batch, and are more about interfaces and standards than automatically assuming we're working with Oracle-only data.
• The analytics generated by our BI tools need to be made pervasive - it's no longer enough to provide a standalone client-server or web-based query tool; we need this tool to make it's insights available, again through web services, to all sorts of applications, so that for example a real-time prediction, or a visualisation showing a customer opportunity, is as likely to be shown in a call centre application as in a dedicated BI dashboard.
• We have to build our data architectures in a way that makes them quick to respond to changes in the data landscape; no more three months to load a new data source via OWB into a data warehouse, we need the data in now, integrated and presented in such a way as to immediately be relevant
• We need to get away from crosstabs, dedicated BI tools that need a week's training to master, and present just the insights people need to do their jobs directly in the applications they work with.

In terms of real-world specifics, my predictions in terms of Oracle BI embracing SOA include:

1. Much more emphasis on BI's place in Fusion Middleware - more emphasis on identity management, more emphasis on interoperability, such that all major new features in Oracle BI (especially Discoverer, OWB) are centred around SOA-interoperability and enabling their use in this new architecture.
2. A very strong emphasis on the technologies now available through the Sunopsis purchase. Sunopsis Data Conductor ticks all the right boxes in terms of SOA-enablement, process orchestration, being platform agnostic and so on. OWB will still be important, but in the world of SOA, Sunopsis will be the key ETL technology.
3. BPEL will be the key workflow technology, replacing Workflow as the way you string together ETL tasks and business processes.
4. BI Suite Enterprise Edition will be the key BI technology, with analytics then being surfaced through traditional dashboards but more increasingly, directly through the Fusion line of business applications
5. The new Real-Time Decisions product will be the key to delivering real-time analyics, and automated decisions, through this architecture
6. OWB will take on more SOA-type features over time; already you can consume a web service through a PL/SQL routine, it's only a small step to publish OWB mappings or processes as web services through a PL/SQL wrapper
7. Web services will increasingly be used to expose Discoverer functionality to other applications
8. In the Oracle BI world, it'll increasingly be about working in heterogeneous environments - Oracle will still hopefully be the centre of the BI world, and will individually have the best features, but it'll play well with other applications and BI solutions developed using Oracle tools will be designed as data source and visualisation technology agnostic

So, it looks like interesting times. Going back to my original question - hype or here now? - I'd say I'm coming down on the "here now" camp. Certainly if you're a partner, or a customer, this is the conversation Oracle and it's competitors are having with their customers, so by definition it's here now.

In terms of Oracle's products, SOA is definitely here in terms of the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Fusion Middleware and Sunopsis Data Conductor; it's not such an easy fit when you come to the traditional tools - but I guess that's not a bad thing; if you're after a fairly straightforward, tactical solution, and you're primarily working with Oracle technology, then Standard Edition and OWB are the best fit.

If, however, you've seen the possibilities when it comes to Oracle's middleware platform and the new SOA paradigm, well it just so turns out that Oracle may have the products to make it all work. Interesting times indeed.

Oracle Open World Keynotes

OK. This is far to long for a blog post but there is a lot of information to communicate; so bear with me.

Whilst being unable to attend the most recent Oracle Open World Event due to a bike accident , I was able to listen to the keynotes live on the Internet as well as review the concurrent press releases and blog postings.

There was a lot of good information delivered through the speakers. Below are what I consider to be the highlights from OOW 2006.

Links to my summaries of the TOP 5 Keynote speeches
1. Phillips; OpenWorld Keynote Kickoff
2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux
3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future (includes Fusion demo)
4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter
5. Rowzat; Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

Other interesting topics
1. Identity Management
Links to Oracle Identity Management offerings
At Macerich we looked at Oracle Identity Management solutions earlier this year, including a set of presentations and demos. Clearly the solutions and functionality are a good fit with our requirements and future direction. Most of the components in this stack are comprised of software solutions acquired by Oracle over the past year. Given the number of projects currently under way it was decided to deal only with the Single-Sign-On component in 2006 and address other components at the end of Q1 2007. This would also give Oracle time to more seamlessly integrate these newly acquired products.

Over the course of the last 6 months I have posted a number of Identity Management related articles on my Macerich-Oracle blog. Here is a listing of those articles:
Synchronizing Oracle HRMS with OID
Password Management with OID
Using Third Party Identity Managers with EBusiness Suite 11i
Password Management with Third Party Solutions
Aliases Maiden Names and Nicknames
COREid, Thor, Xellerate and Others

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2. Ten Things You Can Do To Prepare for Fusion Applications

Although Fusion Applications are years away, there are many components of Fusion Middleware that are available today to help get us one step closer to Fusion Applications. The message from John Wookey, Cliff Godwin, Nadia Bendjedou, and others regarding Release 12, Fusion Middleware, and Fusion Applications remains consistent - we don’t need to wait for the release of Fusion Applications to start preparing for Fusion.

Moving to Fusion Applications will require new skills and experience to install, configure and support the new Applications Suite. However, many of the tools and technologies for Fusion Applications are available today and can be leveraged with 11i10 and/or Release 12, allowing us to get a head start on preparing our environment and staff for Fusion Apps.

Dr. Nadia Bendjedou’s session “Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications” was still standing room only for some despite the fact the room held almost 500 people. There is obviously a lot of interest in Fusion, and the good news is we don’t have to wait years to start preparing today. Nadia’s presentation focused on both best practices as well as product components, and listed 10 items e-Business Suite customers should start focusing on now:

Dr. Bendjedou's Top 10 List

1. Rethink your customization strategy
2. Consider Master Data Management (MDM)
3. Move to SOA-based integration
4. Extend your business intelligence portfolio
5. Adopt enterprise reporting and publishing
6. Secure your global enterprise
7. Deploy grid computing
8. Centralize your lifecycle management
9. Upgrade to the e-Business Suite R12
10. Prepare a Fusion project plan

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1. Phillips; OpenWorld Keynote Kickoff

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Oracle President Charles Phillips announced Oracle's business strategies for grid computing, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and applications. Mr. Phillips also discusses Oracle's acquisitions, Oracle Accelerate, and the enterprise software ownership experience (PDF).

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2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Addressing the largest crowd in Oracle OpenWorld history, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
Link to brief summary of Mr. Ellison's keynote.
Quotes from Mr. Ellison's keynote:
- "Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux"
- "the new support program is available for all Linux users for as little as $99 per system per year; until January 31, 2007"
- "Oracle customers can get a free trial, and anyone can purchase support at a 50-percent discount"
- "..all you have to do is point your Red Hat server to the Oracle network; switching takes less than a minute"
- "We think it's important not to fragment the market, and we will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux,..we will resynchronize with their code"

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3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to brief summary of Mr. Wookey's keynote
Mr. Wookey reiterated Oracle's Applications Unlimited initiative. Mr. Ellison later stated that maintaining all of these Applications Suite was not a problem. Oracle could afford it as long as customers wanted it. He believes that within 10 years the demand for these legacy suites will have waned.
He also discussed the following topics:
a. The improved user experience within Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12
b. Four concepts that drive thinking about the next generation of Oracle applications:

- secure enterprise search, which is the new metaphor for navigating applications;

- XML-based reporting, which allows reports to be customized in countless ways;

- role-based analytics, a concept taken from Siebel products, which places business insight into the context of operational systems;

- sustainable integration, or connecting all products to one another and to third-party applications. To highlight this last point, he announced the creation of Oracle's Adaptive Business Solutions Group, which is dedicated to applications integration.

c. Oracle Fusion, its time line, and the four technologies that enable it:

- Web 2.0 concepts, such as desktop and collaboration tools;

- Service-oriented architecture (SOA), which gives businesses flexibility in how they develop and deliver business processes;

- Middleware, which orchestrates those processes;

- Standards, which provide Oracle, its partners, and its customers with common, shared tools for doing all of the above.

d. One of the biggest highlights of the entire Open World event for me was the demonstration which provided the first glimpse of Fusion Applications during Mr. Wooskey's keynote address. Jeremy Ashley from the Applications User Experience group walked through a scenario where a sales rep uses Fusion Apps to prepare a quote, ultimately leading to a closed sale. Here is a link to the screen shots from the demo.

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4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter

(4 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to summary of Mr. Kurian's keynote
Mr. Kurian discussed how Oracle WebCenter will provide a way to build sophisticated Web 2.0-based user interaction environments, and deliver task-oriented, contextual, multichannel interactions for users. "[Web 2.0] technologies are fundamentally changing how people interact with information on the Internet", he said. "WebCenter is used to streamline and automate tasks that involve jumping between different applications and tools that don't share content or context." The new set of tools, which is based on a service-oriented architecture, will enable companies to build applications that bring together data from various enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, Microsoft Office desktop and mobile devices.

Kurian identified a number of other processes of Oracle Fusion Middleware's software:

- service-oriented development of applications

- business process management

- secure identity management

He also announced the next release of Oracle's open, standards-based suite of business intelligence products: Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3

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5. Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to Mr. Rozwat's Keynote summary
Chuck Rozwat announced Oracle Database 11g and its 482 new features. Rozwat also reviewed a cross section of Oracle technology that helps customers address the issues associated with getting a single view of information, customers, and suppliers, including Oracle Content Database 10g, Oracle Records Database 10g, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, and Oracle Audit Vault 10g, articulating how these products help companies' CIOs and IT directors manage content across the enterprise.

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2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux

Addressing the largest crowd in Oracle OpenWorld history, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Unbreakable Linux, a new support program for Linux that provides the same enterprise-class support for Linux that Oracle provides for its database, middleware, and applications products.

"Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed," explained Ellison. "Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems."

Better Support, Lower Cost

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support. Ellison explained that the new support program is available for all Linux users for as little as $99 per system per year; until January 31, 2007, Oracle customers can get a free trial, and anyone can purchase support at a 50-percent discount. "This is all about broadening the success of Linux," added Ellison. "And to get Oracle support for Red Hat Linux, all you have to do is point your Red Hat server to the Oracle network; switching takes less than a minute."

Midway through his keynote, Ellison invited Edward Screven, Oracle chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux engineering, to join him on stage.

"We think it's important not to fragment the market, and we will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux," said Screven. "Every time Red Hat distributes a new version, we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of the community."

Coekaerts concurred. "We have many years of Linux engineering experience and an excellent technical team solely dedicated to Linux," said Coekaerts. "In fact, several Oracle employees are Linux mainline maintainers, and Oracle has a long history of contributing to the community." Oracle's breadth and depth of technical expertise, advanced support technologies, and global reach includes 7,000 support staff in 17 global support centers, providing help to Oracle customers in 27 languages, in any time zone.

Screven echoed Ellison's assertion that true enterprise-quality support for Linux at a lower cost is something that customers demand, and a long list of customers and partners have already endorsed Oracle's new Linux support program. Yahoo! Vice President of Engineering Laurie Mann took the keynote stage to share his company's enthusiasm for Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Mann explained that Yahoo!, which runs Oracle and Linux, is the most visited home page on the Web, so reliability and support are paramount. Oracle's enterprise-class support program addresses this demand head-on.

Many more customers and partners appeared via video on the massive screens in the keynote hall, including Dell, Intel, HP, IBM, Accenture, AMD, BearingPoint, EMC, BMC Software, Network Appliance, and many others. Toward the keynote conclusion, the audience was treated to Oracle's version of "The March of the Penguins," as several live penguins (accompanied by their professional trainers) waddled on stage.

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3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future

Now I know why security apparently worked extra-hard to keep aisles clear during the Wednesday morning keynote.

A few minutes into his talk, Oracle Senior Vice President John Wookey said, "Continuing our tradition of having sexy Italian companies present with me at Oracle Openworld, I'm very excited to introduce and welcome Ducati Motorcycles." A roar came from the back of the hall, and two gleaming Ducati bikes raced up the aisles and onto the stage.

Answering the question of why Ducati chose Oracle E-Business Suite, Giovanni Contino, Ducati Consulting CEO, joked that Oracle and Ducati have the same red color in their logos. But the real reason, he said, was that Oracle Applications adapted to his business. Contino then showed how Oracle E-Business Suite had helped Ducati become a "lean ride" and how the company had ridden Oracle-powered Lean processes to an International Best Factory Award (from the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management) in just three years.

While the motorcycles were impressive, Oracle's Applications Unlimited initiative was the real high-powered machine in the room. Wookey reiterated Oracle's plans to support and enhance all of its application lines. "The commitment is very real," Wookey said. "We have dedicated development teams and dedicated leadership across product lines that are absolutely passionate about them, and passionate about working with customers to make sure we continually improve how we support you, how we continue to enhance the product with new features, and how we bring innovation and next-generation technology into those product lines."

Indeed, the needs and desires of customers drive Oracle's efforts in applications development. Wookey discussed the countless hours that Oracle applications teams have spent interviewing, surveying, and learning from customers in order to determine how they work and how—they want to work--and then plowed that information back into the applications.

Wookey also emphasized that major new releases are planned in all application product lines. "In fact, the new release of [JD Edwards] World is the first major functional release of the product since 1998," he pointed out.

Oracle's acquisition of applications companies has allowed it to take the best elements of each of its application lines and incorporate them into other applications. "We're bringing great intellectual property out of these product lines, across [to] other product lines, and into our next generation of applications," Wookey said.

Take, for example, the task-based user interface pioneered by Siebel. "It's a great idea, and something we think Siebel customers will be very excited about," Wookey said. "But we think it's something everyone can benefit from, so it's one of the design principles from a user-interface perspective that's actually getting architected into Fusion applications."

Wookey discussed the new Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12. Improvements include tailored installation scripts that customize upgrades that minimize upgrade interruption, and the application's improved user experience. "We've benefited from a lot of great [intellectual property] that's come into Oracle from PeopleSoft and Siebel," he said. "They had done a lot of great work on usability design, and we've actually taken advantage of that in all of our product lines, certainly in the [Oracle] E-Business Suite Release 12."

Turning an eye to the future, four concepts drive thinking about the next generation of Oracle applications, according to Wookey:

a. secure enterprise search, which is the new metaphor for navigating applications;

b. XML-based reporting, which allows reports to be customized in countless ways;

c. role-based analytics, a concept taken from Siebel products, which places business insight into the context of operational systems;

d. sustainable integration, or connecting all products to one another and to third-party applications. To highlight this last point, he announced the creation of Oracle's Adaptive Business Solutions Group, which is dedicated to applications integration.

Lastly, Wookey spent a few minutes discussing Oracle Fusion, its timeline, and the four technologies that enable it:

a. Web 2.0 concepts, such as desktop and collaboration tools;

b. service-oriented architecture (SOA), which gives businesses flexibility in how they develop and deliver business processes;

c. middleware, which orchestrates those processes;

d. standards, which provide Oracle, its partners, and its customers with common, shared tools for doing all of the above.

"That's what really brings the promise of SOA home," Wookey said, "the idea that there are accessible tools that we've used to build the system that you have equal access to."

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4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter

Heralding the first user interaction environment to break down the boundaries between Web-based portals, enterprise applications, and Web 2.0 technologies, Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of development for middleware platform products delivered his keynote address, called "The Middleware Revolution," at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday morning.

Kurian announced a new product of Oracle Fusion Middleware called Oracle WebCenter Suite, which will provide a way to build sophisticated Web 2.0-based user interaction environments, and deliver task-oriented, contextual, multichannel interactions for users.

"[Web 2.0] technologies are fundamentally changing how people interact with information on the Internet. We're bringing those technologies to you, the enterprise application community, and to people who want to build applications that use Web tool technologies within their corporate enterprise," said Kurian.

Customers can use WebCenter to streamline and automate tasks that involve jumping between different applications and tools that don't share content or context. WebCenter also creates a more dynamic, interactive work environment by deploying the new wave of Web 2.0 technologies, such as mashups, wikis, Voice over IP, RSS feeds, and discussion forums, across the enterprise.

The new set of tools, which is based on a service-oriented architecture, will enable companies to build applications that bring together data from various enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP). Because it is hot-pluggable and based on open industry standards, users can also access this environment from other environments, such as Microsoft Office desktop and mobile devices.

"Only Oracle WebCenter Suite enables a superior user experience based on a full set of enterprise services that are pre-integrated and based on open industry standards," said Kurian.

Kurian identified a number of other processes of Oracle Fusion Middleware's software that companies can use to streamline business operations and improve information technology flexibility. These include service-oriented development of applications, business process management, and secure identity management.

He also announced the next release of Oracle's open, standards-based suite of business intelligence products: Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3, which includes new components and improvements, allows for strategic integration with other Oracle products, and has expandable hot-pluggable support for third-party data sources and systems.

"Fusion Middleware has grown from virtually nothing in 2001 to over a billion dollars in just five years. Thirty-one thousand global companies use Fusion Middleware today," said Kurian. "The Internet continues to transform the architecture of enterprise applications. Fusion Middleware gives you the best middleware suite in the industry to exploit that transformation."

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5. Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's executive vice president of Server Technologies, outlined Oracle's vision for its key technologies and provided some details on the company's product road map in a Monday morning keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld, titled "The Information Road Map: What's Next?"

"We have a business intelligence crisis in the midst of our content data crisis," Rozwat told the crowd. "Most companies have a collection of different applications, so getting a single view of information, customers, and suppliers can be difficult."

In addition to the announcement of Oracle Database 11g and its 482 new features, Rozwat reviewed a cross section of Oracle technology that helps customers address those issues, including Oracle Content Database 10g, Oracle Records Database 10g, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, and Oracle Audit Vault 10g, articulating how these products help companies' CIOs and IT directors manage content across the enterprise.

In addition to listing Oracle's range of products, Rozwat discussed several of Oracle's recent acquisitions and how those companies' solutions bolster Oracle's technology road map. A representative from TimesTen helped to illustrate the point, explaining in a video presentation how TimesTen's real-time data caching solution works with Oracle Database.

A theme of Rozwat's keynote was the belief that evolving and expanding information requires businesses of all sizes to embrace a road map for managing important content and data in a secure, reliable, and cost-effective way. Oracle software, using advanced grid computing technology, adapts to a company's changing business needs, Rozwat emphasized.

"As data volumes increase, stress is being put on existing computing resources. The ability to scale is incredibly important, and you need an architecture that allows you to plug in more servers," said Rozwat. "Grid computing has grown over the years because of this."

Rozwat described the information explosion from both the demand side, which includes user demands and needs, and the supply side, examining how companies struggle to bring all this information to users in an integrated way.

"The amount of information that's being generated is truly incredible," he said. "However, the demands on how we use information can turn an asset into a liability. Oracle has new solutions to harness this information explosion."

Rozwat concluded by detailing Oracle's vision for its key technologies and outlining a specific strategy for the future of Oracle products, including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle's development products, and Oracle Grid Computing.

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Oracle Identity Management: Best-in-Class. Application Centric. Hot-Pluggable.

Oracle Identity Management's best-in-class suite of IdM solutions delivers hot-pluggable middleware, allowing enterprises to manage the end-to-end life cycle of user identities across all enterprise resources both within and beyond the firewall. One can now deploy applications faster, apply the most granular protection to enterprise resources, automatically eliminate latent access privileges, and much more.

Oracle Identity management is leading the next wave of Identity Management with an Application-Centric approach.
Read more about best-in-class Oracle Identity Management solutions:

SINGLE SIGN-ON AND WEB ACCESS CONTROL

USER PROVISIONING

FEDERATED IDENTITY

DIRECTORY SERVICES

STRONG AUTHENTICATION

WEB SERVICES ACCESS CONTROL

ENTERPRISE SINGLE SIGN-ON SUITE

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Introduction to the Google Web Toolkit

Learn how to use the Google Web Toolkit to do everything from basic tasks to advanced ones such as RPC communication, history management, and packaging a production-ready application.

Web 2.0 and its technical counterpart, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), are gaining momentum thanks to applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. For Web applications, the main benefit of Ajax is a greatly improved user experience. Although JavaScript and DHTML—the technical foundations of Ajax—have been available for years, most programmers ignored them because they were difficult to master. Today, frameworks written in JavaScript, such as Dojo, can help you build Ajax applications, but you still need a good understanding of JavaScript in order to use them. Google offers another way to help Java developers create Ajax applications more productively. This new framework, called Google Web Toolkit (GWT), can be used efficiently with Oracle JDeveloper. GWT is freely available under the Apache License v. 2.0 at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit.

...read ful article at http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/dubois-gwt.html

Introduction to the Google Web Toolkit

Learn how to use the Google Web Toolkit to do everything from basic tasks to advanced ones such as RPC communication, history management, and packaging a production-ready application.

Web 2.0 and its technical counterpart, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), are gaining momentum thanks to applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. For Web applications, the main benefit of Ajax is a greatly improved user experience. Although JavaScript and DHTML—the technical foundations of Ajax—have been available for years, most programmers ignored them because they were difficult to master. Today, frameworks written in JavaScript, such as Dojo, can help you build Ajax applications, but you still need a good understanding of JavaScript in order to use them. Google offers another way to help Java developers create Ajax applications more productively. This new framework, called Google Web Toolkit (GWT), can be used efficiently with Oracle JDeveloper. GWT is freely available under the Apache License v. 2.0 at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit.

Main Features and Restrictions

One of the main problems with Ajax development is that you need to master a large stack of heterogeneous technologies. Depending on the nature of your project (for example, business applications), this can be a great drawback.

In addition, different Web browsers don’t support JavaScript and DHTML in the same way. For example, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox handle these technologies slightly differently; you’ll need to deal with this if you want your application to run seamlessly on your users’ PCs.

Although most of the Ajax frameworks available today simplify development work, you still need a good grasp of the technology stack. So, if you’re planning to use Ajax to improve only your application’s user experience—if you’re not also using it as a strategic advantage for your business—it may be unwise to spend a lot of money and time on the technology.

GWT proposes a different way to create Ajax applications. It uses Java as a single programming language for both the client and server sides. Is it the return of Java applets? Not at all: GWT provides a compiler that translates the Java code on the client side into JavaScript and DTHML. This solution greatly simplifies the technology stack from the programmer’s point of view: You have to master only Java. The downside is that you have less control over the client-side code of your application because it’s eventually generated by the GWT compiler.

The Java code for the client side of your application is subject to restrictions because JavaScript doesn’t implement the entire object-oriented concepts and APIs available in Java. You can use only a subset of Java keywords and APIs (java.lang and java.util):

• All the primitive types (such as byte, char, short, and int) as well as their corresponding classes (such as Byte and Char) are directly supported—except for long, which is translated into the JavaScript equivalent of double. It is recommended that you use int instead of long.
• User-defined exceptions (checked or not) are possible but the method Throwable.getStackTrace() is not available. Some JVM exceptions are also available (such as IndexOutOfBoundException).
• The keyword synchronized has no effect because JavaScript is mono-thread. The multithread API is not available.
• Reflection is not supported. However, you can get the class name of an object by using the method GWT.getTypeName(Object).
• Finalization is not supported.
• Several objects containers from java.util can be used, such as Stack, Vector, and HashMap. The Date class is also available.

In addition, GWT provides specific APIs to manage the GUI, internationalization, and XML parsing. It also provides a comprehensive library to manage communication between the client and the server. It uses well-known Remote Procedure Call (RPC) principles implemented by a generic servlet (RemoteServiceServlet), which you can specialize for your own needs. You also can use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the data interchange format for your HTTP messages sent with the GWT HTTPRequest class.

GWT also offers an interface, called JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI), which lets you mix your own hand-made JavaScript code with the code generated by the GWT compiler. JSNI uses the keyword native used by Java Native Interface (JNI) to define your own JavaScript functions. The body of these functions is defined inside specifically formatted comments.

Finally, you can unit-test your code inside JDeveloper with GWTTestCase, a specialization of the class TestCase provided by JUnit.

Focus on GUI Programming with GWT

Ajax dramatically changes the way you develop Web applications. Most of the time, an Ajax application needs only a single Web page. Its content is modified dynamically by JavaScript and DHTML to produce a user experience similar to that provided by native applications.

Therefore, GWT provides a programming model whose principles will sound familiar to Swing or AWT programmers. The GUI is no longer specified by HTML tags as in classic Web applications. It’s programmed directly with Java code in a way similar to AWT or Swing. The well-known concepts of GUI programming are available with GWT:

• Widgets, including the usual items (such as Button, TextBox, and CheckBox) and more advanced items such as Tree and Menu Bar
• Panels, which contain widgets, with their own layout (panels and layout aren’t separated as in Swing)
• Events generated by widgets. The listeners must implement specific interfaces.

Loading the GWT JavaScript library and specifying the entry point of your application is easy: all you have to do is create a simple HTML page.

GWT uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Every widget has its own style, which you can change to meet your needs. You must create your own CSS to overload the defaults defined by GWT.

If the standard widgets don’t suit your needs, you can also define your own. (This topic, however, is beyond the scope of this article.)