It had been announced at Oracle Open World 2011 and sort of promised for December 2011 – a promise or at least a suggestion reiterated in early December even. But for whatever reason, it slipped – not shipped – and Christmas break that perfect time of the year for playing with new software came and went. Now at last, it has arrived. As of midnight CET on 22nd February, PS5 (11.1.1.6) was published on OTN and eDelivery (https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=11493752) for download.
One of the reasons for the delay was the certification of FMW 11gR1 PS5 with Fusion Applications that was done over the last few months. Apart from the additional wait time (that is now over), this is quite good and important news: when Fusion Applications certifies software components, they put those components through very rigorous and extensive tests. Additionally, when Fusion Applications adopt a specific release – even a PS release – it makes that release more important to Oracle. So we now know that PS 5 has both been tested to the max and is of strategic importance to Fusion Applications and thereby to Oracle. Adopting PS5 for us mere mortals is therefore a safe bet – safer than some other PS or even major releases may have been.
Oracle states that PS5 is not a major release with lots of new functionality – but still, a lot of interesting stuff was made available, including functionality previously only available in intricate ways (for example Feature Pack for PS4, BPM customers that politely asked support etc.) that is now accessible in an easier way.
So there I was, tracking Twitter, tweeting a little myself and downloading, downloading and more downloading:
And of course: browsing through the documentation library (http://t.co/fyV6HAHM) and comparing the 11.1.1.5 documentation with the 11.1.1.6 release to find differences and hence new features.
Some early impressions and finds from the documentation:
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BPMN: Correlation (added in FP4 and now in PS5): BPMN Correlation ttp://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/doc.1111/e15176/correlations_bpmpd.htm#sthref561
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Modifying running BPM Process instances (FP4 and now also FMW 11gR1 PS5): http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/doc.1111/e15176/alt_flw_mig_bpmpd.htm#BABBICAG
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SOA Suite 11gR1 PS5 – BPEL new aggregation pattern: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/dev.1111/e10224/bp_correlate.htm#CHDEIGCG routing multiple messages to same instance
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Also in SOA Suite PS5 new BPEL Component testing – http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/dev.1111/e10224/bp_testsuite.htm#BABIGECH
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Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Scheduling Service – new (?) in FMW 11gR1 PS5 – see http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/dev.1111/e24713/intro.htm#sthref10
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Database Adapter/Coherence integration (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/integration.1111/e10231/adptr_db.htm#BDCICAEG) #PS5 – I’m not sure whether it only works for Exalogic or for any Coherence
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Strongly improved support for testing Business Rules at Design Time in #PS5 see http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/user.1111/e10228/testing.htm#sthref580\
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JDeveloper has support for connecting and deploying to the Oracle Public (Java) Cloud
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ADF Faces and DVT components are now certified on iPad. All ADF Faces and Data Visualization components now support touch gestures .ADF DVT Graph and Gauge now support HTML5 output format. ADF Web Crawler Support: when crawled by search engine, it outputs pages in a simplified format Supported engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo. Thai Buddhist Calendar Support: The inputDate, chooseDate and calendar components now support the Thai Buddhist calendar. ADF BC Customization Support for Groovy Validation: Groovy triggers can be modified as part of a seeded customization
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MySQL Support: ADF Business Components have been tested with MySQL 5.5
What’s New sections in Documentation
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New in ADF 11g R1 PS5 Web UI Developer Guide: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/b31973/whatsnew_adfui.htm#sthref8
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What’s New in Fusion Developer’s Guide 11gR1 PS5: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/b31974/whatsnew_adffd.htm#sthref8
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New Features (and bug fixes) for ADF and JDeveloper: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/index-088099.html
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WebCenter Portal 11gR1 PS5 – new features: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/webcenter.1111/e10148/jpsdg_whatsnew.htm#sthref9
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New features in WLS 10.3.6 #PS5 : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13852/toc.htm
Installing
As the software downloads started to roll in, I started to install as well. JDeveloper 11gR1 PS5 obviously
with the SOA, WebCenter and BPM extensions.
In the SOA BPEL Editor I discovered the entrance point for one of the new features: BPEL Component level testing. More on that feature at a later moment.
