integration

Much watched: The hardware side of the Oracle-Sun deal

It is much watched as Sun is absorbed into Oracle. We refer to the hardware side of the story. Will Larry Ellison follow through on his stated intention to hold on to Sun’s hardware business? Some viewers suggest his original interest was solely in Sun’s software. Recent news that Sun is jettisoning its advanced Rock processor program, presumably at Oracle’s bidding,  does not indicate an aversion to hardware on Oracle’s part – but it does not betoken a forward looking hardware program either. There are a couple of ways one can look at this. For a good view, read writer Ed Scannell’s How will Oracle do when the chips are down?

Transaction processing in the 21st Century

Eric Newcomer has just finished co-authoring the second edition of his book on transaction processing. On his blog, he discusses same lessons learned. The first edition was published in 1997, so much, but not everything has changed. Read ”What we Learned Writing the Second Edition of the TP Book.”

He sees a dichotomy in this field..

Fascinating to me are the different assumptions people make in the different worlds between the REST/HTTP “scale out” designs and the mainframe-derived “scale up” designs. This is likely to remain an area of continual evolution.

Oddly, or ironically, SearchSOA.com just ran a piece rolling up some various transaction monitoring events. Read ”End-to-end testing for SOA and enterprise transactions, or Show me the transactions.”

OSGi angle on Snorkle (Sun-Oracle) deal

Communicated recently with Eric Newcomer about Oracle and Sun, which is big news this week. Parts of our e-mail conversation are included in the SearchSOA.com story entitled “Java side of Sun seen strengthened by Oracle buy.”

There are a lot of questions yet to be resolved in this ongoing story – What will happen to Java? Where for art thou, MySQL? Will Oracle become a hardware company? Whither Netbeans? And so on.

Eric Newcomer, in his role of OSGi champion, has an additional question: How will this merger affect OSGi? We have featured OSGi more than a bit on both this blog and on the SearchSOA.com site, and therefore are glad to share some of Eric’s thoughts on OSGi in the light of the proposed mega merger here. He suggests he may clear up some murkiness on the Sun side that previously seemed to be out and about.

He writes:

“Oracle has been a strong supporter of OSGi. They are well represented on the enterprise expert group that I co-chair, and one concrete action I expect is that they will move to eliminate Sun’s formerly schizophrenic attitude toward OSGi for Java modularity.

Sun had supported OSGi through its adoption in GlassFish, but had also competed with it in Project Jigsaw and to some extend in the JSR 294 work as well.  Among other things this created uncertainty over the role of OSGi in Java’s future, especially for enterprise applications.  Given Oracle’s strong participation in the OSGi enterprise effort to date I expect this acquisition will have a positive impact on the OSGi enterprise initiative.”

OSGi and future directions for Enterprise Java

By Eric Newcomer
Whether the Java Community Process has completely lost its way or not, it is increasingly influenced by external activities. The Spring Framework and Hibernate influences on EJB3 and JPA are good examples. Another influence being increasingly felt is the growing adoption of the OSGi Specification and its implementations, especially the open source frameworks Eclipse Equinox, Apache Felix, and Knoplerfish.

The OSGi Specification defines a dynamic module metadata system for Java and a service-oriented programming model with which the modules interact. The specification defines a registry for service lookup, and a collection of built-in services for common functions such as security, lifecycle management, and logging. The OSGi framework has been adopted by the Eclipse Foundation and by every major Java vendor as a platform on which to build and ship middleware products and open source projects, including application servers, enterprise service buses, and IDEs.

As the core platform has become widely adopted in products and open source projects, the OSGi Alliance began to receive requirements for more explicit support of enterprise applications. The OSGi Specification began its life as JSR 8, back in 1999, intended for use in home automation gateways. Since that time OSGi technology has achieved some level of adoption in various embedded applications for the automotive, mobile telephone, and home entertainment. By September, 2006, the OSGi Alliance had received sufficient indications of interest in an enterprise edition to hold a workshop to explore the possibility of chartering an enterprise expert group (EEG).

Since its first meeting in January, 2007, the EEG has spent the past two years creating detailed requirements and designs intended to better support enterprise Java applications. The work will result in a major update to the specification in mid-2009 (two prerelease drafts have been published) that extends core framework services and adapts existing enterprise Java technologies to the OSGi framework to meet enterprise application use cases. The major features include a mapping of the Spring Framework component model called the Blueprint Service, a mapping of existing distributed computing protocols to the OSGi service model, and mapping key parts of Java EE such as Web apps, JDBC, JPA, JMX, JTA, JNDI, and JAAS.

The industry has already embraced the benefits of OSGi-enabled modularity. Next is to improve its support for enterprise Java applications by adapting technologies already used in those applications. This goal is to help OSGi developers more easily create enterprise applications in a standard way.

Eric Newcomer is a distributed computing specialist and independent consultant. Newcomer is a chair of the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group and former CTO of IONA Technologies. He writes a blog on OSGi matters.

Another take on OSGi

Last week, WSO2 released an update tailored around OSGi to its SOA framework. Rob Hailstone, analyst, The Butler Group told us that he rated the WS02 implementation favorably, because it ”does seem to have built out a more comprehensive set of features than most of the competitive open source offerings.” Continued »