This article does not necessarily discuss the big themes and major stories of Oracle OpenWorld 2014. It does mention a number of facts that I discovered, overheard, observed or otherwise found out about during last week’s conference. They are not necessarily from formal Oracle sources, they have have been part of conversations on the demo grounds or sessions for which no slide evidence exists. Do not base major decisions on these notes – but perhaps look out for more evidence and/or quiz your local Oracle representative.
The acronyms of last week are probably API, REST, JSON and JS – in addition of course to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. NoSQL (Larry said it himself, it is Not Only SQL!) made some appearances of course. An important technology – Server Side JavaScript and Node.JS (a JavaScript application server). When it comes to authentication, OAuth 2.0 was the talk of the town.
Live SQL is a soon to be released feature on OTN where database developers will be able to live run SQL statements. SQL Code samples that before would have required a local database to run can now easily be tested. Blog articles can refer to LiveSQL to have their sample code tried out. Oracle Documentation is said to refer to LiveSQL for its SQL statements to have them live executable.
Oracle Rest Data Services (formerly known as Oracle APEX Listener) provides several key capabilities for the Oracle Database. REST Data Services accepts RESTful Web Service call URIs and directs them to the appropriate SQL statement or PL/SQL block. REST Data Services marshals data returned from SQL statements into JSON or .csv format. Oracle REST Data Services is a Jave EE-based provides flexibility by supporting deployments using Oracle Web Logic Server (WLS), Oracle Glassfish Server and Apache Tomcat. (see: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/rest-data-services/overview/index.html)
Oracle SODA: Simple Oracle Data API – an API from Java, C and C# and perhaps others to more easily work with JSON documents in the Oracle Database. Working through (JSON aware) SODA promises to be much more convenient than for example having to go through the JDBC API in order to retrieve [data from] or manipulate JSON documents. The SODA API is organized like REST services – with Collection Management, CRUD operations, Query by Example on JSON documents. (thank you Marco Gralike for this information)
APEX 5.0 will soon have a formal Beta program. The production release may take until deep into Spring 2015.
Oracle Enterprise Manager now also for managing MySQL: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2301492 …
WebLogic 12.1.3 has been certified against JDK 8 – it is has been declared fit for use with Java VM 8.
The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is going to be tremendously important for partners such as AMIS to publish and sell extensions, integrations and add-ons to Oracle SaaS products as well as PaaS Services. Unfortunately, the marketplace is still in its infancy, as became clear on the demo grounds. We can publish and show case our products – to generate leads. However, there is not yet a mechanism to sell or monetize (subscription based) through this marketplace. The one key feature I would really expect and desire a marketplace to have.
The one cloud service I do not believe Oracle wants us to buy:
Stream Explorer is one of quite a few tools show cased by Oracle targeted at the Line of Business User (the non-technical IT consumer). This tool provides a visual, declarative, browser based wrapper around Oracle Event Processor and Oracle BAM. With Stream Explorer (whispered to be available within a few months) it is every easy to create explorations and dashboard on live [streams of] data – reporting in real time on patterns, correlations, aggregations and deviations.
Another Line of Business User tool is the Visual Analyzer in the BI Cloud. This cloud service allows anyone to upload data from for example Excel sheets and quickly create dashboards and reports on top of those. Currently you can upload up to 15 GB of data and once the BI Cloud fully integrates with the Database Cloud Service you can go way beyond that number. After the initial upload – which will create tables ‘under water’ – you can continue with additional uploads that will append data to these tables. Thus you can step by step create a Data Warehouse in the cloud.
The Oracle SOA Suite Cloud Service will provide the full (or almost full) functionality of the SOA Suite (including Service Bus) as part of the Oracle PaaS platform.
Before this service is launched, we will first see the ICS (Integration Cloud Service) – to be launched in the next six months or so. This service is targeted at not-very-technical-users, to allow them to create fairly straightforward integrations between SaaS products.
After creating the mapping (visually, declaratively using the Oracle Recommends TM mechanism for suggesting mappings) between the messages, the integration can be activated and invoked from the upstream system. The service offers facilities for monitoring and tracing the interactions. This image shows a failed interaction, for which some form of recovery should be performed.
Cloud Adapters have been and will be released for integration between SOA Suite on premise and various SaaS applications. Additionally, a Cloud Adapters SDK has been released to create additional custom adapters, not just for Cloud integration with SaaS products but also for on premise integrations. The Cloud Adapters SDK could easily have been called the [general purpose] adapters SDK. Oracle uses the Adapters SDK itself for creating the new SaaS adapters (for SalesForce, Eloqua, RightNow and others).
Oracle is working on two products in the area of API management and governance, in addition to the 12c version of the Oracle Enterprise Repository (which seems slated for Summer 2015). The next few months should see the release of API Catalog – a fairly light weight browser based tool that presents APIs (services) to potential consumers of these services. In the API Catalog UI, developers can find meta data about the services and their usage. API Catalog uses harvesting to discover services from various directions including – but not limited to – Service Bus and SOA Suite. API Catalog is targeted at the design time. At run time, the API Manager also presents information about APIs in a browser based UI. This API Manager sits on top of Service Bus and – as its name suggests – is more than just a reporter on the APIs that are available. The API Manager is also used for collecting and analyzing metrics on the usage of the API.
SOA Suite will have end-to-end REST support: in 12.2.1, Service Bus pipelines can operate directly on JSON variables – using JavaScript for JSON manipulation directly, without requiring JSON to XML conversion. In BPEL, a similar option will be available with variables of JSON type and an activity that manipulates JSON (and can if necessary for invoke actions to XML based partner links) convert between JSON and XML. Note that the Mobile Cloud Service – based on Service Bus technology – uses JSON and JavaScript as primary format and data shaping language in its v1 release.
ADF 12.2.1 (Summer 2015) will also have more REST support: the ability to publish an ADF BC Application Module as REST service.
The @adf_emg XML Data Control 1.0.0 available through JDeveloper Help -> Check for Updates.
Some recent ADF DVT features – released in ADF 12.1.3 and MAF 2.0 – were demonstrated
and some new ones as well (probably for 12.2.1?): The very cool Thematic Map Mashups:
And the N-box (already available in MAF) (here shown poorly visible as a mashup wit thematic map).
The new company wide user experience based on the Alta theme is documented and available for our own usage at: bit.ly/oraclealta .
And a picture of the Oracle UX lab at HQ in Redwood Shores – with UX VP Jeremy Ashley proudly keeping watch:
The Oracle Developer Cloud will be extended with Coding in the Cloud: in browser editors for various types of code. JavaScript applications are explicitly targeted- with support inside the Developer Cloud for tools such as Bower, Gulp, Yeoman, Grunt and npm – on par with similar tooling in the Java EE domain. The code editors will be library aware – with syntax highlighting and code completion.
The Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service – not in the near future – is to be an in browser, visual, declarative drag and drop development environment for rich client applications. It seems to be something like the webapp alternative to MAX (the Mobile Application Accelerator for MAF apps)
The demo grounds had a pod for Oracle Forms. Really. Here is the proof:
I liked the animations where the cloud services are presented as the elements in the periodic table:
and solutions are created like molecules:
Is a yellow elephant in the sky similar to the pink elephant in the room?
And the finally, the statue of the triple-limbed Oracle salesman who can shake your hands and shake you out simultaneously, just off Moscone North (and of course a spare foot for to put in your door):
