First two chapters of “Industrial SOA” articles series have been published both on OTN and Service Technology Magazine

Industrial SOA is a 14-part  article series focused on service orientation, written collaboratively by a group of recognized experts and community leaders in service oriented architecture. I’m really happy and proud to be part of that group. 

SOA and service-orientation have laid the foundation for a variety of emergent service technology innovations, while the original building blocks of SOA and service-orientation continue to evolve by embracing fundamental service technologies, concepts and practices. These new technology innovations do not replace service-orientation; they use it as their basis. Service-orientation continues to evolve towards a factory approach, towards industrializing integrated platforms, such as BI, master data management (MDM), mobile front-ends, BPM, adaptive processes, Big Data and Cloud Computing – all of which add architectural layers upon SOA-based infrastructure. All of these technologies can interface via standardized data and functions, published as service contracts, in order to avoid redundancy – that’s service-orientation.

The articles are & will be published both on Oracle Technology Network (OTN) and Service Technology Magazine (STM).

Available and upcoming Articles:

Preface : Industrial SOA (OTN, STM)
Chapter 1: SOA Blueprint: A Toolbox for Architects (OTN, STM)
Chapter 2: Project Categories
Chapter 3: Service Categories
Chapter 4: SOA Maturity
Chapter 5: Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Chapter 6: Security
Chapter 7: Transactions and Compensation
Chapter 8: SOA and User Interaction (UI)
Chapter 9: Mobile
Chapter 10: Events
Chapter 11: MDM and SOA
Chapter 12: BPM and ACM
Chapter 13: SOA and Cloud 

Thomas Erl, Editor of Service Technology Magazine: “Welcome to this special issue in which we are launching an extensive article series dedicated to the exploration of contemporary SOA topics and issues. This refreshing view of what is termed as “Industrial SOA” highlights some of the more recent innovations in practice that will especially be of interest to those who want to learn some techniques that go beyond the academic essentials. This issue begins with a preface by Oracle veteran Juergen Kress, and then moves on to the first of twelve articles in the series. Subsequent issues of the Service Technology Magazine will publish new articles, which will take the series into early 2014. These articles were authored by a group of SOA experts that have received wide-spread recognition throughout Europe and have been nicknamed the “Masons of SOA”. One of the masons, Clemens Utschig, was also a co-author of the SOA Manifesto back in 2009.”

Send us your feedback  @twitter/soacommunity  #industrialSOA

 

I’m speaking at DOAG IMC Summit, 6th June 2013 in Mainz, Germany

In June I will be speaking for the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) at the Infrastructure and Middleware Community Summit in Mainz. This is all about Oracle Infrastructure and Middleware topics and has great speaker lineup for the german-speaking Oracle community.  The summit consists of the three tracks “Infrastructure”, “Middleware” and “on top of Middleware”.

My speech will be in the “on top of Middleware” track and it will be about “Where and when to use the Oracle Service Bus (OSB)”. Here is the abstract to my talk in german:

Der Oracle Service Bus (OSB) ist Bestandteil der SOA Suite 11g und steht im Zentrum moderner Prozess-. und Integrationslösungen. Die leichtgewichtige, zustandslose und hoch-performante Architketur des OSB macht ihn zu einem hervorragenden Werkzeug für die Transformation und das Weiterleiten (routing) von Nachrichten. Diese Präsentation erklärt wo und wann der Einsatz des Oracle Service Bus Sinn macht, zeigt dabei aber auch auf, wo die Limitationen des OSB sind. Wo sinnvoll wird auf die weiteren Komponenten der Oracle SOA Suite bzw. der Oracle Fusion Middleware hingewiesen. Anhand von bekannten Design Patterns wird gezeigt, wie diese mit dem Oracle Service Bus effizient umgesetzt werden können. Themen des Vortrages sind: Load-Balancing, Service-Throttling, Transaktionen, Adapter und Transformation über XQuery. 

Looking forward to meeting you there! 

Oracle Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum 2013

In Februray 2013 the Oracle Fusion Middleware Community Forum 2013 will take place in Faro, Portugal!

The OFM Partner Community Forum is a wonderful opportunity to:

• learn how to sell the value of Fusion Middleware by combining SOA & BPM & WebLogic & ADF solutions
• meet with the Oracle SOA & BPM & WebLogic & ADF product management
• exchange knowledge and have access to competitive intelligence
• learn from successful SOA & BPM & WebLogic & ADF implementations
• network within the SOA Partner Community and the WebLogic Partner Community

During this highly informative event you can learn about partner success stories, participate in an array of break-out sessions and last but not least exchange information/ideas with partners and the Oracle product management.

Two years ago, the OFM Partner Community Forum 2011 was the place, where I started the initial discussions for the Oracle Service Bus Cookbook and found my fellow co-authors. Register for the event and enhance your network!

In addition to the Community Forum, you can participate in technical hands on workshops on February 21st and 22nd. 

Hope to see you all in Faro, Portugal.

Presenting at ….

Hope you all started well into the New Year!

After a few relaxing days in Spain, I’m again in normal “working mode” and next week my visits to conferences start again. In the next 2 months I will do the following presentations:

• Java, big data & service bus & twitter - OOP (24th January, Oracle Developer Day, Munich)
• Where and when should I use the Oracle Service Bus (20th February, Oracle Fusion Middleware Community Forum, Faro Portugal)
• BPM und SOA machen mobil – ein Architekturüberblick (28th February, BPM Integration Days 2013, Munich)

Hope to meet you at one or the other event!

Apart from that, I’m currently also working on the 2nd and 3rd part of the OTN article “Fault Handling and Prevention” together with Ronald van Luttikhuizen. 

My presentations at Oracle Open World 2012

Oracle Open world 2012 is already past and I’m back in Europe. Here is just a quick wrap up of my involvements at OOW 2012. 

Oracle Fusion Middleware Live Application Development (UGF10464)

For the fourth time, the Live FMW Application Development show has been held. This time at Oracle Open World 2012,  during the ADF EMG community event on Sunday organised by Chris Muir. I joined the team for the first time, as due to my injury in last december, I was not able to be part at UKOUG 2011. For three hours, we demonstrated the audience (around 100 participants) how an application can be created across the tiers – UI (ADF), Process (BPM), Service Integration (SOA Suite) and the Database. Because we had only one beamer available, we first presented for each tier how the development works and then in the second phase, we presented how some changes/addons can be applied to the 1st iteration. I was part of the Service Integration team, together with Ronald.

The slides of the show are available on slideshare. Only a few, the real value was of course in the live demo!

A photo of me and Ronald during Lucas introduction: 

It was fun to be part of the team, hope we can repeat it soon somewhere else! Thanks to Lucas, Chris and Duncan for organising the show!

There were also some discussion about further using the material, such as some videos on youtube, writing an article series….

Effective Fault handling in SOA Suite 11g (CON4832)

In this co-presentation with Ronald van Luttikhuizen we presented how the built-in functionality of Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus can help to implement fault handling and fault prevention. We used an example scenario, which is complex enough to show some real live problems in a service-oriented solution with a mix of services, technologies and platforms. 

The session was pretty well attended, and with an extended Q&A sessions at the end. We got quite a lot of interesting questions and I even had to leave earlier, as I had my next presentation just after this one.  

The slides are available on slideshare. We are currently writing a series of articles which will dive deeper into the subjects of error handling and error prevention and show how the SOA Suite 11g platform can help. 

Five Cool use cases for the Spring component of Oracle SOA Suite (CON6210)

My last presentation at Open World 2012 was about the Spring component of the Oracle SOA Suite.

The Spring component makes it possible to embed Java code as a Service Component Architecture (SCA) first-class citizen through the Spring component implementation type. Thereby the coarse-grained components of Oracle SOA Suite (such as BPEL, Mediator) can be extended by much-finer-grained Spring beans wrapped inside the Spring component. The goal of the session was to show how and why you want to use the Spring component and to hopefully inspire attendees to use it for their own projects.

There is of course a question what “cool” means. Cool and practice-related doesn’t always match and of course I wanted to also show some use cases which are actually useful at daily work. 

It took me quite some time to put the use cases together and to make them working. Especially because I have not previously worked with some libraries/frameworks i have used. At the end I presented the following use cases:

• Advanced Configuration through JMX
• Dynamic Routing in SOA Suite (i.e. publish/subscribe)
• Integration of MongoDB NoSQL database
• Integration of Twitter to send update messages
• Integration of Twitter to receive mentioned messages

As you can see on slide 40, I had some other ideas, but just not enough time to do them as well. Maybe I will do it for a session on another conference. 

The slides are available on slideshare. I have also planed to write some further blog articles, one for each use case I have presented and to show step by step how the use case can be implemented.

 

It was a lot of work to prepare the session, but enjoyed it! 

SOA Spezial II verfügbar – Industralized SOA

Die überarbeitete und ergänzte Neuauflage des SOA Spezial Sonderheftes ist seit letzer Woche verfügbar, als komplette Ausgabe des Business Technolgy Magazins. Ich durfte als neuer Co-Author mitwirken. Hier die Ankündigung des Verlags:

Industrialized SOA – Thema des Business Technology Magazin 3.12
Auch wenn es ruhiger geworden ist um SOA, beerdigt ist das Konzept noch lange nicht. Ganz im Gegenteil, über die Jahre hat es einen neuen Maturity Level erreicht. Hype-Themen wie Cloud Computing oder Big Data haben SOA aus den Schlagzeilen verdrängt, aber „ersetzen die neuen Hype-Themen die Serviceorientierung nicht, sondern bauen darauf auf”. Die Autoren dieser zählen im deutschsprachigen Raum zu den SOA-Pionieren. Für diese Ausgabe von Business Technology haben Sie ihr kollektives Wissen zusammengetragen und eine einzigartiges Bild, des aktuellen Zustands von SOA geschaffen. Nach ihrer Überzeugung entwickelt sich SOA evolutionär weiter, in Richtung Fabrikansatz, in Richtung Industrialisierung, in Richtung ‚ganzheitliche Plattform’” zu einer neuen Industrialized SOA.
Die Ausgabe 3.12 des BT Magazins bekommen Sie als iPAD-App (http://it-republik.de/business-technology/bt-magazin-ipad-app), per Post (http://it-republik.de/business-technology/bt-magazin-ausgaben/Industrialized-SOA-000516.html) oder am Kiosk!
Weitere Informationen auf www.bt-magazin.de.

Ich wünsche viel Spass bei der Lektüre.

The making of the Oracle Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook

Almost a year ago I started to think about writing a cookbook for the Oracle Service Bus (OSB). I first discussed it with Mischa Kölliker, a colleague at Trivadis and he was happy to join the team. Next I have used the Oracle SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum in March 2011 to talk to Edwin Biemond and Eric Elzinga, two well-known OSB experts and Oracle ACE colleagues. Gladly they were as enthusiastic as me about putting together a book with lot’s of recipes of how to use the Oracle Service Bus in practice. They also introduced me to Jan van Zoggel, who joined the team as well. So the setup of the team of authors was complete: The Netherland – Switzerland 3:2 (could have been the final result of a football game).

I have then started to talk to Packt Publishing, the publisher of the book, about my idea and the team I have put together. At the beginning of May 2011 the outline for the book was setup and at the end of May 2011 we have signed the contract with the publisher.

This was the start of 6 very busy months for me, writing and internally reviewing the 80+ recipes inside the 12 chapters of the book!

At the beginning our aim was to include recipes for all roles involved in the development of an OSB solution. But in August 2011, after writing the first few chapters, we could see that it would not be possible to fit all of that into the 500+ pages we agreed with Packt, which I think is a reasonable size for such a cookbook. That’s why we decided to change the focus to an OSB Development Cookbook, “only” including recipes targeting the development on the Oracle Service Bus. That’s why topics such as Monitoring, Management, Deployment are not covered in that book.

We finished the draft version of the book at the end of November.

From middle of December, I have worked on the feedback we got from the reviewers and finish everything by the end of the year. Thanks to Matthias, Jelle, Matt and Peter for your valuable input and comments, we really appreciate your help!

Unfortunately I broke my leg at the beginning of December playing ice hockey. But that was positive for the book, as I had a lot of time to really focus on the last part of the project and to make sure to reach the deadline we got from the publisher.

In January 2012 the final changes to the book have been made and then the production started with the result now being publicly available!

The book now contains a bit more than 80 practical recipes to develop solutions on the Oracle Service Bus 11g. The are organized into the following 12 chapters (digit behind the title is the number of recipes contained in the chapter):

1. Creating a basic OSB service (13)
2. Working efficiently with OSB artifacts in Eclipse OEPE (7)
3. Messaging with JMS transport (9)
4. Using EJB and JEJB transport (5)
5. Using HTTP transport (5)
6. Using File and Mail transports (5)
7. Using JCA adapter to communicate to the database (6)
8. Using SOA Direct transport to communicate with SOA Suite (4)
9. Communication, Flow Control and Message Processing (10)
10. Reliable communication with OSB (5)
11. Handling Message-Level Security requirements (9)
12. Handling Transport-Level Security requirements (4)

Throughout the book, we have consistently used diagrams, such as the one below, to clearly show the setup of a given recipe. The following image is showing a proxy service using the AQ JCA adapter to consume from a queue (EVENT_QUEUE) inside an Oracle database.

 

I got the printed version of the book a few days ago and I really like the result!

You can find the first two reviews of the book here:

• The SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus blog – Thanks Marc for your review!
• Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner – Thanks Lucas for your time to write such a complete review!

Thanks a lot to the team at Packt Publishing for all their hard work and support. It has been a long journey, but I’m very happy with what we have achieved!

You can get it as an EBook and/or printed book directly from Packt Publishing or Amazon. Hope you like it! Enjoy your reading and cooking!

Please give us feedback of what you like, what you might not like, what you miss …