Dietrich Schroff

Just to complete the list of UMPCs on this blog:

The A120 from One.de comes with a price from 279 Euros. Here are the details:

- VIA C7®-M-ULV 779 Prozessor mit 1.0 GHz
- 512MB DDR2 Speicher PC400
- 4GB Flashspeicher
- WLAN
- 64MB Onboard Grafik
- inkl. Windows XP Home + Open Office
There some rumors, that with the resolution of 800x480 some buttons in Windows XP can not displayed. But there is a note at the official site, which says, that this is no problem....

Last week i read the book "Test and analysis of web services" to get some new tips and tricks how to deal with web services in projects or how to integrate webservices from other vendors into our product "Xyna Service Factory"

Here a short summary:

very academic
not up to date
some chapter refer to webpages (like www.bpelunit.org), which are not reachable
no references to real projects

If this was too short, take a look at my review at amazon.de (It is written in german, sorry...)

On my journey through the Oracle documentation universe i found this link (Release notes of Oracle BPEL PM 10.1.3.3.0).
On page 25 the integration of Oracle BPEL PM with ILOG JRules and JDeveloper is described. You have to perform only 3 steps:

1. Customize your JDeveloper with just copying one jar-file into a JDeveloper directory:
Perform the following steps at the operating system command prompt:
cd ${JDEV_HOME}/integration
mkdir thirdparty/ilog/lib
cp ${JRULES_HOME}/executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-session-java.jar \
${JDEV_HOME}/integration/thirdparty/ilog/lib

2. You have to change the server.xml:
Search for shared library oracle.bpel.common and add the following JAR files

<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-execution.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-manage-tools.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-session-java.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/jrules-engine.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/commons-digester.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/commons-logging.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/sam.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
       /executionserver/lib/xercesImpl.jar"/>

3. Start your application server again.
4. Verify that bpel/system/services/config/DecisionServiceConfiguration.xml is configured to ILOG JRules:

<ruleEngine name="Ilog" description="Ilog JRules 6.1">
  <ruleEngineClass>
    oracle.bpel.services.rules.rpi.ilog.IlogRuleEngine
  <ruleEngineClass>
  <properties>
    <property name="jndiXuConnectorName">
       eis/XUConnectionFactory
    <property>
    <property name="ruleSessionProviderClass">
       ilog.rules.bres.session.j2se.IlrJ2SERuleSessionProvider
    <property>
  <properties>
<ruleEngine>

<factContext name="XOM" description="Ilog JRules 6.1 XOM">
  <factContextClass>
    oracle.bpel.services.rules.rpi.ilog.XOMFactContext
  <factContextClass>
<factContext>

If you want to use ILOG JRules with Oracle BPEL please read the Original release notes to configure your application server. The points 1 to 4 are only an impression of how easy you can integrate JRules to an Oracle BPEL.

But there are some limitations:
Parameter type support — The input and output parameters of the rule set you want to expose as a decision service must be derived from an XML-schema element. The decision service does not currently support type models based on JavaBeans or others.

Deployment of Ilog JRules decision service — Some Ilog JRules specific deployment artifacts must be copied into the Web archive suite of the decision service prior to deployment. This may include configuration files for the JRules XU resource adapter (ra.xml) or any other Ilog specific file. See the Ilog JRules documentation for details.

HP starts selling an EEE-like PC.
Take a look at their online shop. Here the details:

VIA C7-M ULV processor (1.0 GHz, 128 KB L2 cache, 400 MHz FSB
512 MB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
4 GB Flash Module
8.9-inch diagonal WXGA
Broadcom 802.11b/g

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 it costs just 499$. This is really a competitor for the EEE....

I found a nice tip about Oracle clusterware on this blog.
The scope of the article is that you can use Oracle clusterware on Oracle Unbreakable Linux without an additional license, but i found the following paragraph very interesting:
Now you can download the clusterware and use it as an extension of your Linux to make virtually any application highly available even without having an Oracle Database Server.

If you start searching on otn.oracle.com:documentation for some information about this, you will not find anything. But here the white paper from Oracle, which explains the concept making applications high available with application vips and Oracle clusterware.
The ability to protect non-Oracle applications from failure was not part of Oracle Database 10g Release 1. With the advent of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, non-Oracle applications running on a cluster can benefit from the same level of protection as existing Oracle Database processes.

and
Customers and Oracle partners can now place their own applications under the management and protection of Oracle Clusterware, such that they restart on process failure or failover to another node on node failure.
With this enhancement Oracle provides an easy way to provide high availability not only for the database but also for its application server and the best:
You must only maintain one software stack...

Elitegroup launches a EEE like PC. Take a look at this announcement. Here are the specifications:
CPU: Diamondville
Chipset: Intel 945 GSE (w/o S-Video) + ICH7M
Operating System: Windows XP/Linux
Memory Slot: 1 slot up to 2GB
LCD Size: 8.2"/10.2"
Webcam: 1.3 mega pixel CCD
Storage: HDD/SSD
Battery: 4 cell/6 cell
Dimension: 259 x 180 x 28.5 (mm)
This UMPC should be available in the next few months...

SUN Microsystems announced end of life (EOL) for V125, V215, V245 and V445. For SUN Fire servers powered by UltraSPARC IIIi last shipment is July 11, 2008. After this date only SUN Netra servers with UltraSPARC IIIi processors will be available.
If you are interested in the SPARC family follow this link to wikipedia.
SUN provides several upgrade paths:

Move to UltraSPARC T1 or T2 if single thread performance is not critical (e.g.:Sun Fire T1000 Server, Sun Fire T2000 Server)

Move to SPARC IV+/IV single thread performance is critical and you have to stay on SPARC architecture (e.g.: Sun Fire V490 Server, Sun Fire E2900 Server)

Move to AMD Opterion if single thread performance is critical and you only have to stay on Solaris (e.g.: Sun Fire X4200 Server, Sun Fire X4200 Server)

Everyone who ever used a synchronous BPEL process, has seen this exception in the opmn/logs of the BPEL engine, if the process needs more time than 45s:
Failed to handle dispatch message ... exception ORABPEL-05002
Message handle error.
An exception occurred while attempting to process the message "com.collaxa.cube.engine.dispatch.message.instance.PerformMessage"; the exception is: An exception occurred during transaction completion: ; nested exception is: javax.transaction.RollbackException: Timed out

If you search for this error on forums.oracle.com, you will get an easy answer:
change the syncMaxWaitTime via BPELConsole and you are done.
But this does not help... So what parameters have to be changed, to achieve that synchronous BPEL processes do not get this timeout?
The Oracle BPEL team knows about this problem, because they have written the answer in this document in the paragraph "Troubleshooting and Workarounds". But the problem is the misleading title "Setting Properties for BPEL Processes to Successfully Complete and Catch Exception Errors".

Here a short summary what you have to do:
1.) $Oracle_Home\j2ee\home\config\transaction-manager.xml:
change the transaction-timeout parameter t1
2.) $Oracle_Home\j2ee\home\application-deployments\orabpel\ ejb_ob_engine\orion-ejb-jar.xml:
change the transaction-timeout parameter t2, t2<t1
3.) BPELConsole:
Change the syncMaxWaitTime in all domains, where you need a bigger timeout
4.) OPMNCTL:
restart the application server

Now you can write synchronous BPEL processes without getting this timeout error after 45 seconds. But be careful! You will block threads by using long-running synchronous invokes. And if many of this processes are invoked, this can stall your BPEL engine ...

MSI has shown its version of a low cost laptop on CEBit.
There is one photo on www.heise.de:
take a look at this link
The following specs were shown

CPU 1,6 GHz
512 MByte RAM (up to 2 GB)
533 MHz FSB
10" LCD
OS: XP or Vista
But nothing about about harddisk or the price. But it should be a competitor to ASUS EEE....

Elonex has announced the specifications of ONE. Here an image from their site with all details (click to enlarge):

As you can see, the parameters of the Elonex One are not very different from the Asus EEE.
Now there is a gallery online and a summary of the software, which is shipped with it...

If you are interested in the new features of Oracle DB 11g, you can read the Oracle documentation or some other summaries provided by Oracle or you can buy this book:

If you are interested, read my review (in german) on amazon.

In an service oriented architecture the deployments of webservices and bpels have become more and more complex. This creates additional challenges for securing applications or message exchange.
You can use an old, mature standard to address these challenges:
transport-level security. With SSL it is very easy to secure the data . But this solution gets a little bit difficult, if you want to implement message routers, which should look into the payload. You have to distribute certificates to all routers. This is not feasible for large installations involving many department or many contractors...

Is this all? No! There are some new options like the WS-* specifications...
Now you will say: "Ok, these WS-* things are very helpful. I like the WS-makeitfast and WS-generateitwithoutwork..."
You can find a diagram which shows all this WS-* specifications here (from www.innoq.com)
Yes there are many WS-* specifications and here the attempt to explain WS-Security. To achieve this goal we have to start with two other specifications:

1.) XML Encryption can encrypt the whole element (example from www.w3.org):

  <?xml version='1.0'?>
  <PaymentInfo xmlns='http://example.org/paymentv2'>
    <Name>John Smith</Name>
    <CreditCard Limit='5,000' Currency='USD'>
      <Number>4019 2445 0277 5567</Number>
      <Issuer>Example Bank</Issuer>
      <Expiration>04/02</Expiration>
    </CreditCard>
  </PaymentInfo>

or just the content:

  <?xml version='1.0'?>
  <PaymentInfo xmlns='http://example.org/paymentv2'>
    <Name>John Smith</Name>
    <EncryptedData Type='http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element'
     xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#'>
      <CipherData>
        <CipherValue>A23B45C56</CipherValue>
      </CipherData>
    </EncryptedData>
  </PaymentInfo>

2.) XML Signature can add a signing entity (example from www.w3.org):

<Signature Id="MyFirstSignature"  
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"> 
 <SignedInfo> 
  <CanonicalizationMethod  
      Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xml-c14n-20010315"/> 
  <SignatureMethod 
      Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#dsa-sha1"/> 
  <Reference 
      URI="http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/"> 
   <Transforms> 
    <Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/
        REC-xml-c14n-20010315"/> 
   </Transforms> 
   <DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> 
   <DigestValue>j6lwx3rvEPO0vKtMup4NbeVu8nk=</DigestValue> 
  </Reference> 
 </SignedInfo> 
 <SignatureValue>MC0CFFrVLtRlk=...</SignatureValue> 
 <KeyInfo> 
  <KeyValue>
   <DSAKeyValue> 
<P>...</P><Q>...</Q><G>...</G><Y>...</Y> 
   </DSAKeyValue> 
  </KeyValue> 
 </KeyInfo> 
</Signature>

WS-Security is using XML Encryption to provide confidentiality and XML Signature to provide data integrity. The SOAP headers of WS-Security can be enhanced for authentication purposes with X.509 certificates, kerberos tickets, SAML or some others....

Oracle support WS-Security and there was a very nice article at Oracle magazine where Mike Lehmann explained how to use WS-Security with JDeveloper.

So with Oracle AS 10g and JDeveloper you can easily secure your SOA and the webservices with SSL or WS-Security....

There is another new competitor for Asus' EEE. A british company named Elonex announced a umpc for less than 130 Euro (without tax). Here the link to the homepage of the Elonex ONE.
The laptop should contain
integrated WiFi, flash-based memory (undisclosed amount), "tough" outer shell, a wireless music server, and a three-hour battery life.
(cited from http://www.mobilemag.com) and it should run on Linux. Further details will be provided on the Education Show 2008 at 28th february:

So here a short summary of all the UMPCs described further on this blog:

Noahpad (touchpad, no keyboard)
Belinea s.book 1 (touchscreen)
FIC CE260 (integrated bluetooth phone)
Asus EEE ....

On w3.org they celebrate 10 years XML and they have created a batch for everyone, who want to celebrate with them:

w3.org provides a page, where they try to explain XML in ten points.
Nice icons illustrate the points like this one adding structure into data by using XML
...XML is a set of rules for designing text formats that let you structure your data. XML is not a programming language, and you don't have to be a programmer to use it or learn it. XML makes it easy for a computer to generate data, read data, and ensure that the data structure is unambiguous. XML avoids common pitfalls in language design: it is extensible, platform-independent, and it supports internationalization and localization...
It is a really nice introduction for all, who are not so familiar with programming. I think, they should add an eleventh point:
XML is today the key point for data exchange in the world of service orientation and it is the base for WSDL, BPEL and other languages, which will influence the evolution of IT for the next ten years.

Oracle has integrated native XML handling into their Application Server 10g. There is an XML developement kit with the following key features available:
XML 1.0 (Second Edition)
DOM Level 2.0 Specification
DOM Level 3.0 Specification
SAX 2.0 & SAX Extensions
XSLT/XPath 1.0 Specifications
XSLT/XPath 2.0 Specifications
XML Schema Specifications

If you download the XDK, there are many demos included. I liked the XSLSample.java which you can invoke with two command line arguments. First one is the XSLT, the second one is the XML. With this example you can easily verify XSLTs and on the other hand you can learn how to write Java code to do it...
The SOA Suite uses this XDK for all XML processing. For all details take a look at this page. Examples are provided here.
I think everyone should be familiar with details of SAX/DOM (or XSLT or XPATH or...) and should know how it could be coded in Java or C.
Ten years after the specifiation of XML it is very well supported on all platforms and programming languages. Many generators are provided to help the programmers for their daily work with XML.
Let's see where we going in the next ten years....

Last week i read the book "Soa Approach to Integration" (www.packtpub.com).


This book is really excellent. It covers in nearly 360 pages all things you should know about SOA and it will provide you with examples, guidelines and historical backgrounds.
If you are not familiar with XML, XSD, WSDL and BPEL you will get a tight introduction with many best practices. The authors came up with a very good balance of going in to details and coverage of different technical infrastructures like Java or .NET.
If you are interested (and if you understand german), read my review at amazon.de.
If you are not able to read german, you can read the reviews on www.amazon.com.
In my opinion, everyone who is talking about SOA should know the content of this book!

PS: The BPEL-chapter is based on Oracle BPEL PM and one of the reviewers of this book was Clemens Utschig, the SOA guru from Oracle!

Last week i read the book "Soa Approach to Integration".


This book is really excellent. It covers in nearly 360 pages all things you should know about SOA and it will provide you with examples, guidelines and historical backgrounds.
If you are not familiar with XML, XSD, WSDL and BPEL you will get a tight introduction with many best practices. The authors came up with a very good balance of going in to details and coverage of different technical infrastructure.
If you are interested (and if you understand german), read my review at amazon.de.
If you are not able to read german, you can read the reviews on www.amazon.com.
In my opinion, everyone who is talking about SOA should know the content of this book!

PS: The BPEL-chapter is based on Oracle BPEL PM and one of the reviewer of this book was Clemens Utschig, the SOA guru from Oracle!

On the web it is very difficult to find the lifetimes or end of life dates for Oracle products. So here the attempt make this easier:
The lifetimes for all Oracle product can be found in this PDF including Siebel, Peoplesoft, etc.
Here a screenshot of this PDF for the most important software pieces:


If you do not know what is meant with premier support, extended support or sustaining support, take a look here.

A few days ago i spent an evening to become an Oracle Technology Support Champion. Why does Oracle offer such certificates? I think there are many people, who have no glue where to start for getting support and informations about the lifecycle of Oracle products.

For this certificate i had to answer many questions about end of life, premier support, extended support, etc...
Here a short summary:

A very important thing is a metalink account (metalink.oracle.com). It is not for free, you have to purchase support for your Oracle databases, application servers, ...

Oracle provides five years support for their main product from their general availability date (Database, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications). This is calles Premier support.
You can extend this support for another three years. (Extended Support)
After that you can buy Sustaining Support (For the details look at the tabular below)

For the details of the Premier Support follow this link.
Oracle says about its support:
more than 14,000 application and technology developers and 7,500 support professionals worldwide
24x7 real-time support with MetaLink—over 1.3 million registered users
Global Support Center Hubs offer proactive support anytime, anywhere, from 18 major hubs on 5 continents
Extensive global reach with support in any of 27 languages
Faster problem resolution with our integrated case-resolution and escalation processes
Knowledgebase of over 400,000 solutions on over 650 products

Sometimes people award prices just on marketing flyers and never take a deeper look into the software...
InfoWorld has given one of their Technology of the Year Award to the Oracle SOA Suite. Yes the SOA Suite is a very good piece of software especially the Oracle BPEL PM is the best BPEL engine on the market. But in their article about the SOA Suite they are talking most of the time about the Oracle ESB and the Rule Engine.
Ok, i am on Oracle Certified Professional and i am glad when Oracle wins some prices. In my opinion the ESB is a well done piece of software but it was released two years ago. Noone believes that such a newbie is better than Websphere MQ or Tibco?
Here the link to InfoWorld.

If they want to award a price to Oracle SOA Suite, they should give it because of the Oracle BPEL PM which is really the best BPEL engine around and this is the major building block of the Oracle SOA Suite....

Today SUN announced that they are going to open source SUN Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT). For the press release take a look at the SUN press room.



The target of SPOT is

Sun has been very successful in spreading Java to over 6 billion devices throughout the world. Well over a billion cell phones run Java. We in Sun Labs are interested in what comes next. In order to help make sure that the next generation of gadgets is based Sun technology, we developed Sun Small Programable Object Technology (SPOT)

If you are interested you can order a development kit for 299$ and you will get two SUN Spots and a base station. Bot devices with processor, radio, sensor board and battery and the base station only with processor and radio.
Here the parameters of the device:
180MHz 32-bit ARM920T core processor
512K RAM
4M Flash
2.4GHz radio with an integrated antenna

But if you only want to write software without getting in touch with the hardware you can try to use the emulator (read this pdf)

The API and some tutorials are available at this site. So if you are interested in programming a PDA like device download the SDK and the emulator and go ahead...
For more appetizers take a look at this site (some movies about SPOT at youtube).

I hope this was enough to start you up ;-)