event-driven architecture

Gartner cautions on Oracle middleware status

Oracle Fusion middleware is currently based on a group of product suites for SOA and BPM that are “assemblies of convenience,” argue Gartner analysts.

The suites are made up of Oracle’s existing product line and the technologies from its acquisition of BEA earlier this year, according to a brief report on the state of the current Oracle middleware offering, Oracle OpenWorld’s Middleware Message Is ‘Watch This Space,’ published earlier this month.

The Gartner analysts note that little was said about middleware in the announcements at Oracle Open World last month other than the announced plan to put Fusion in the Amazon cloud. The roadmap announced this past July for the full integration of the BEA products into Oracle’s middleware will not come until sometime in 2009, Gartner predicts.

Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g, due in the next six to 12 months.

That release ”will begin to implement the announced road map, and platform modernizations, such as support of OSGi Alliance technology and Service Component Architecture, expanded hot-pluggability, and the extensive use of Oracle Coherence XTP-distributed cache,” the report states.

XTP limits?

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) has limits that have nothing to do with its 500+ transactions per second performance.

The limits are in its applicability in applications, which may benefit from grid technology, but may not require extreme processing, says Mike Piech, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

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XTP powers SOA

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) gets down to business in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications at AbeBooks.com, a Canada-based online bookstore, profiled in a SearchSOA user story earlier this month. The marketplace for books is using Oracle Coherence, a distributed in-memory data grid designed for XTP environments. A product of Oracle’s purchase of Java performance specialist Tangosol in 2007, Coherence automatically partitions data in-memory across multiple servers.

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BPM and event-driven SOA highlight IBM Impact

The overwhelming theme coming from IBM on the opening day of its Impact 2008 event is that SOA isn’t about the technology. It sounds a bit odd to hear that message coming from a company with more SOA-related software and hardware products than anyone can count, but Big Blue deserves some message purity points for noting that SOA isn’t per se a technology initiative … even if it is more than willing to sell you a mother lode of technology in the pursuance of SOA.

Yet it also has some new technology to show off in front of the 6,000 attendees at the Las Vegas conference, which produced a standing room only crowd this morning at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. One of the highlights is a new business process management (BPM) suite. According to Tom Rosmilia, vice president for WebSphere software, the suite will be available during the second quarter of 2008. It will feature modeling, monitoring, process accelerators and asset repository capabilities.

The product itself comes from IBM’s January purchase of AptSoft Inc. and it will be called IBM WebSphere Business Events. True to its name, there’s lots of event-driven architecture under the covers. That fits into the second generation SOA vision pitched by senior pice president and group executive for IBM Software Group Steve Mills. Beyond event-driven services he stressed high performance transaction systems, low latency, integrity and scalability as the most in-demand functionality for an SOA growing in size and responsibility.

As with most of his comments during the day, Mills made sure not to offer any magic bullets. In particular, he noted that an ESB alone won’t net you a working SOA.

“The very nature of this is bringing multiple things together to make an environment work,” he said. That sort of business process unity marks IBM’s current efforts. Mills noted that goal comes on the heels of an endemic condition where IT shops “have effectively fragmented the ownership of information technology across the company.”

Rosamilia urged users to “take an iterative approach. Build it up over time and make it little bit better with each pass because you won’t get it right the first time.”

Tomorrow the company plans the commercial launch of its REST-based Project Zero initiative.