Oracle Open World - Oracle Forms Modernization - The Case of ZLM

Tuesday I was able to participate in a co-presentation with Grant Ronald regarding Forms Modernization.

The audience was great and we had a lot of feedback regarding best approaches, best practices, ...
It was a great experience, especially my thanks go out to Oracle to make this possible !!!

You can download the presentation from our website.

You can find more information regarding the presentation on grants' blog as well!

For more Information regarding Forms Modernization.
For more information regarding BPEL and Web Services you can download presentations on our website or have a look in OTN.

Flexbuilder Debug Mode Dog Slow on Mac using Firefox

Quick find today.

Little while back debugging in FB 3.0.x became a brutal exercise in futility. Finally reached a point where I couldn't debug at all. At the time I was running FF2.x. Initially upgraded to FB3 with no change, well no change, except that suddenly I wasn't entering debug mode (bug: had GreaseMonkey Add-On installed - removing it fixed that). Once I was entering Debug again, it would grind my Mac to a halt. Switched to Safari and it worked perfectly. Figured out that Piclense / CoolIris addon for Firefox was in fact the culprit. I uninstalled that add-on and suddenly Debug mode was working just fine again. Lesson learned: If debugging against Firefox, be wary what add-ons you have installed. Hopefully this little lesson will help others.

Oracle Open World - Oracle Forms Modernization - The Case of ZLM

Tuesday I was able to participate in a co-presentation with Grant Ronald regarding Forms Modernization.

The audience was great as well and we had a lot of feedback regarding best approaches, best practices, ...

It was a great experience, thanks Grant for making this possible !!!

You can download the presentation from our website.

You can find more information regarding the presentation on grants' blog as well!

For more Information regarding Forms Modernization.
For more information regarding BPEL and Web Services you can download presentations on our website or have a look in OTN.

Flexbuilder Debug Mode Dog Slow on Mac using Firefox

Quick find today.

Little while back debugging in FB 3.0.x became a brutal exercise in futility. Finally reached a point where I couldn't debug at all. At the time I was running FF2.x. Initially upgraded to FB3 with no change, well no change, except that suddenly I wasn't entering debug mode (bug: had GreaseMonkey Add-On installed - removing it fixed that). Once I was entering Debug again, it would grind my Mac to a halt. Switched to Safari and it worked perfectly. Figured out that Piclense / CoolIris addon for Firefox was in fact the culprit. I uninstalled that add-on and suddenly Debug mode was working just fine again. Lesson learned: If debugging against Firefox, be wary what add-ons you have installed. Hopefully this little lesson will help others.

Aqualogic vs. Oracle Shoot-out (Oracle Mix Winning Session)

I went to the presentation of Lonneke and Ronald regarding AquaLogic vs. Oracle, which was a really great presentation with a good overview and an objective comparison of both environments.

This mix session was 1 of the winning sessions for Oracle Open World and it's a hot topic nowadays of course.

What were the tools that were compared:

• Oracle BPA/Oracle BPEL PM vs. BEA ALBPM
• Oracle ESB vs. BEA ALSB

One of the first tips Lonneke has discussed was how to govern such a SOA Project using waterfall approach or not. She mentioned that bottom-up and top-down should be combined instead of sticking with one of both methodologies because when choosing one you would either have a load of services that weren't used, or a combined service with not enough granularity.

You need to think about an Enterprise Model, once you've defined that model, the high level architecture, you can start going into the business processes itself and the description of all the artefacts.

Trying to rush your business process analysis without a firm understanding of the enterprise model will spare you a lot of rework and of course a firm approach for as well the business as it department.

The comparison which was made by them, is put in their presentation slides, which will be made available by Oracle.

The main points I've written down (which maybe aren't all documented in the presentation).

Enterprise Architecture:

• Strength of Oracle BPA Suite: A Complete Architecture Tool for as well design as simulation as monitoring as execution (but for monitoring you need to use BAM (real-time monitoring on in-flight processes) and for execution you need BPEL (round tripping is supported)
• Weaknesses of Oracle BPA Suite: Representation of process in BPA and BPEL is different, you have a logical model of your process in BPMN and an execution model in BPEL, these don't match 1-on-1 (one could argue if this is really what you want because you're talking about 2 separate standards, one for modelling purposes and one for execution purposes)
• Strength of AL BPM: 1 representation of business process and execution is support by the runtime engine which trully gives you 1 view.
• Weaknesses of AL BPM: BPMN Spec isn't fully supported, AL uses proprietary coding and uses some sort of templating to put another flavor on your process model (uml view, bpmn view, ...) + no abstraction available between system centric and human centric activities (kpi's) + no optimization of your business process possible because you don't have a context within your business process

Composite Services:

• Strengths of Oracle ESB (rebranded to Oracle Service Bus = OSB): Usage of JCA + adapters being provided (no ability for enrichment in a declarative way)
• Weaknesses of OSB: No native support for resource management (e.g. centralized XSD)
• Strengths of ALSB: Use a logical name for an XSD and not a physical location (let's you use a central repository for all your definitions) + ability to define generic transformations which can be used within different composite services
• Weaknesses of ALSB: only runs on Weblogic + adapters are technology driven and JCA isn't provided

I would really like to thank Ronald and Lonneke for the great presentation and the different demo's they provided during the session. I'm sure this session was of great value for many customers struggling with the very hot topic right now: what to choose ;o)

Flexbuilder Debug Mode Dog Slow on Mac using Firefox

Quick find today.

Little while back debugging in FB 3.0.x became a brutal exercise in futility. Finally reached a point where I couldn't debug at all. At the time I was running FF2.x. Initially upgraded to FB3 with no change, well no change, except that suddenly I wasn't entering debug mode (bug: had GreaseMonkey Add-On installed - removing it fixed that). Once I was entering Debug again, it would grind my Mac to a halt. Switched to Safari and it worked perfectly. Figured out that Piclense / CoolIris addon for Firefox was in fact the culprit. I uninstalled that add-on and suddenly Debug mode was working just fine again. Lesson learned: If debugging against Firefox, be wary what add-ons you have installed. Hopefully this little lesson will help others.

OOW - Oracle BPM Studio

Following an hands on lab regarding BPM Studio was really interesting for me, because I'm a firm believer of Oracle BPA Suite and I'm using it in day-to-day projects in Europe today.

So my big question was ... what's BPM Studio all about, and what will it offer that I don't already have when using Oracle BPA Suite. Well I have to say, I still don't know exactly how these 2 products will work together. So let's have a quick overview of the different parts of BPM that got my attention on performing the hands-on lab.

The big difference in BPM Studio is the different contexts in which users will work depending on their skill-set and their responsibilities within the team.

You have 3 kinds of views within the 'Eclipse'-environment - BPM Studio uses Eclipse as it's IDE - you can be a 'Business Analyst', a 'Business Architect' or a 'Business Developer'.
Depending on your responsibilities and your view you will get a different context within the IDE so only those components, views and perspectives are shown that are of importance for your skill-set.

The ability to add swimlanes, add activies, add components is more straight-forward than in BPA, but you're not really using the BPMN Specs and best practices your used to working with as a BPMN Engineer.

When you've defined your process flow you can already test it, simulate it, within the environment and follow the process lifecycle using dashboards, charts, ...

So the big value is that within one environment you have all the different artifacts you need to define a process, to deploy a process, to simulate a process (using KPI's) and to monitor the process' execution.

I will need to take a look at it to be able to have a clear comparison of strengths and weaknesses of both environments to be able to see the value in both of these products.