Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

First wave of industry standardization was around functional-specific standards in areas causing headaches in the integration space. Emphasizing the role of SCA in the standardization of the service platform in the same way that Java EE played a role in the evolution of the application server. I’ll be honest, I’m still not a big SCA fan. I know Oracle is, though. The one good thing being shown is that the hosting environments can be managed in a single, unified way, regardless of whether that service is hosted in BPEL PM or WebLogic. As long as there’s good tooling that hides of the various SCA descriptors, this is a good thing.

Now they are talking about the event delivery network. It’s nice to see a discussion on fundamentals rather than trying to jump into a CEP discussion. They’re talking about having an event catalog, utilizing an EDL (event description language), and easily connecting consumers and subscribers. This is a good step forward, in my opinion. It may actually get people to think about events as first class citizens in the same way as services.

Now, they’re on to Oracle Human Workflow. It is all task-based, with property-based configuration. The routing of tasks can be entirely dynamic, rather than based on static rules. It has integration with Oracle Business Rules. It publishes events on the EDN (e.g. onTaskAssigned, onTaskModified, etc.). Nice to see them eating their own dog food with the use of EDN.

They’ve now moved on to Service Data Objects. They’ve introduced entity variables into BPEL to allow working with SDOs.

Additional subjects in this session included Metadata Services (MDS) and the Dev-Test-Prod problem (changing of environment-specific parameters as code is promoted through environments). On the latter, there are a large number of parameters that can now be modified via a “c-plan,” applied at deployment time. Anything that makes this easier is a good thing in my opinion.