Watching Oracle Development Tools
Sep 25th 2008vesterliConferences & Oracle Portal
I’ve booked an Unconference slot today, Thursday at 2 p.m. for a meeting of Oracle Portal users. I’m not going to be presenting anything, but with all the WebCenter and Beehive hype here, it might be useful to meet other Oracle Portal users and discuss where we go from here.
So if you’re in San Francisco, head over to Moscone West, 3rd floor and look for Overlook 3C.
Sep 23rd 2008vesterliConferences & Oracle Portal & Oracle UCM & Oracle WebCenter
In the morning, I saw fellow ACE Director Eric Marcoux present an overview of all Oracle Portal Products - an ambitions undertaking, given that Oracle has four portals and Eric also covered Universal Content Management. With such a wide topic, it is probably unavoidable that some errors creep in - for example, I noticed that he erroneously claimed that Oracle Portal does not support JSR-168 and WSRP, which since 10.1.4 it does. But while I feel he showed Oracle Portal in too negative a light, there can be no doubt that Oracle WebCenter is the strategic product.
In the Unconference, I heard Bex Huff (another ACE Director) present on Enterprise 2.0. His sobering observation was that most Enterprise 2.0 initiatives fail (at least initially), and the failures are more likely to be cultural than technical. But that’s supposedly OK, because nobody know how to build an Enterprise 2.0, so you’ll have to accept some failures along the way.
In the Middleware General Session, Thomas Kurian once more announced the imminent release of JDeveloper 11g. One interesting focus area of JDev11g is Application Lifecycle Management, which includes integration with all kinds of third-party tools for version control, build, bug tracking etc.
Oracle is into process modeling (again - remember Oracle Designer?) with both Business Process Analysis and Business Process Management. While I understand where BPEL fits in, the distribution of work between BPA and BPM is unclear. But Oracle claims round-trip engineering between BPA/BPM and BPEL, so you can supposedly let an analyst draw a flowchart and give it to the BPEL developer, at least as a starting point.
With JRockit (a Java VM that doesn’t freeze every once in a while to do garbage collection) and Oracle Coherence (middle-tier long-term object cache), it seems that Oracle has now purchased the technology for some very high throughput middleware architectures. The performance metrics they presented on fairly modest hardware were impressive.
In the Database General Session, Andy Mendelsohn went through all the reasons people should move to 11g - for example you can now use compression on everything, sometimes even getting a performance benefit, because you need to read fewer blocks from disk. There was also the fact that you can now read and write files as fast to/from the database as from a file system - amazing! And there’s a graphical Explain plan in Grid Control (coming to DB Manager), data modeling and E-R diagrams in SQL Developer (another point were we’re getting what we had in Designer…), and a wizard in Application Express that you can feed a Forms XML file and let it build an ApEx application with similar functionality.
It has also become much easier to upgrade. If you have the luxury of a separate environment, you can record your actual workload and play it back on the upgraded environment to see how it performs. And for those (most people), who do upgrade-in-place, you can set the wonderful parameter OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE to your current version. This means that your 11g database will use the same execution plans as the old one would. You can then set OPTIMIZER_CAPTURE_SQL_PLAN_BASELINE to capture how your SQL is being executed. Once you have a baseline, you can then keep the plans from the baseline, but let the Oracle optimizer store all the alternatives it comes up with. A DBA can then review the suggested new plans and decide whether to implement them. Cool.
Jun 16th 2008vesterliOracle Portal & Oracle WebCenter
During the general session this morning at the ODTUG conference in New Orleans, Oracle VP Vince Casarez said that there would be a separate “WebCenter Services” license. This is intended for Oracle Portal customers who want some WebCenter functionality without having to pay for the whole WebCenter product. (You’ll have to upgrade your Oracle Portal to 11g in order to get the necessary WSRP 2.0 capabilities.)
This sounds like just what Oracle Portal customers have been waiting for - we get to use the cool new WebCenter features without having to throw away our portal. Official announcement including pricing is supposed to be made by Oracle Senior VP Thomas Kurian on July 1st.
Jun 9th 2008vesterliConferences & Oracle Portal & Oracle WebCenter
The session catalog for the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld conference has now been published. Being interested in the great Oracle Portal vs. Oracle WebCenter debate, I naturally looked for both WebCenter and Portal.
Oracle is giving 8 presentations on WebCenter + one hands-on session. (If you search the catalog yourself, be aware that the phrase “standards-based portal” is Oracle-speak for Oracle WebCenter, not Oracle Portal.) Since no new functionality is annouced, these are likely to be similar to the presentations last year. One presentation is titled “WebCenter and Beyond” - so maybe we can get a preview of what’s coming in WebCenter 12g while we wait for 11g. WebCenter is also mentioned in three of the mandatory (con)fusion architecture presentations, placing it squarely in the center of Oracle’s strategic direction. Oracle Portal is not mentioned by Oracle at all - but then again, we got the “Portal 11g New Features” presentation last year and are still waiting for the software…
There are also two customer presentations. One is by Oracle ACE Director Eric Marcoux from the University of Laval on an actual WebCenter deployment - so they do exist! Interestingly, in a nod to the Oracle Portal community, Oracle has also chosen a user presentation on Oracle Portal by Gregory Pike from Piocon Technologies.
Jun 5th 2008vesterliConferences & Oracle Portal & Oracle WebCenter
Only just done reviewing papers for one conference (ODTUG Kaleidoscope, coming this month), and already it’s time to reviews abstracts for the next conference (UKOUG Conference, in December).
One interesting thing I spotted in the abstracts was the difference between Oracle Portal and Oracle Webcenter:
That supports my own gut feeling that WebCenter is still Oracle’s “next great thing,” but isn’t really being used in real life yet. Maybe that’ll change once we get WebCenter 11g - but the very high license fee is definitely holding the adoption of WebCenter back. If you want an affordable WebCenter that’s not bundled with ECM, SES, etc., please register at Oracle Mix and vote for my idea Please make a WebCenter Standard Edition product.
Apr 9th 2008vesterliOracle Portal & Oracle WebCenter
On a recent Oracle Portal-based project, I wanted to use JSR-168 portlets. Both because it’s always good to follow the standard if there is one, and because Oracle is not quite clear about whether JPDK portlets will be supported in Oracle WebCenter 11g.
Being used to Oracle portlets, where we’ve had parameters forever, I was much surprised to discover that JSR-168 portlets are completely stand-alone and do not take parameters. This feature only comes in JSRT-268, which is still being finalized.
JDeveloper 10.1.3 and later will build JSR-268 portlets (using Oracle’s understanding of the standard), but Oracle Portal 10.1.4 doesn’t understand the WSRP 2.0 communication used by JSR-268 portlets.
So there is still a place for JPDK portlets…
| Type | Language | Use | Parameters |
|---|---|---|---|
| PL/SQL | PL/SQL | Oracle Portal only | Yes |
| JPDK | Java | Oracle Portal only | Yes |
| JSR-168 | Java | All standard portals | No |
| JSR-268 (upcoming) |
Java | All standard portals | Yes |
Jan 9th 2008vesterliOracle Portal
When you upload content to Oracle Portal, it ends up in the WWDOC_DOCUMENT$ table and the content can be retrieved using WWDOC_ADMIN.GET_DOCUMENT_BLOB_CONTENT.
But what happens if you upload files to a portlet and they are not used as items? Do they just hang around, cluttering WWDOC_DOCUMENT$?
Fortunately not. You might not be aware that Portal installs a session cleanup job (with DBMS_JOB), running every 24 hours. This job cleans up after sessions more than 7 days old, and one of the things cleaned up is records in WWDOC_DOCUMENT$ that have not become items (i.e. the PATHID column value is 0 (zero)).
This of course also means that you should move the content to a table of your own if you intend to keep it…
Refer to the Portal documentation or Metalink note 336203.1 for more information.
Nov 13th 2007vesterliOracle Portal & Oracle UCM & Oracle WebCenter
I’ve been considering how to describe the difference between Oracle WebCenter, Portal and Unified Content Management (what used to be Stellent), and I’ve come up with this picture:
It considers your requirements in two dimensions: How much content management do you need and how much application development do you need. To put in in another way: Unstructured data like documents need document management, and structured data needs applications.
If you need a lot of document management, you need Oracle UCM. If you need sophisticated applications, you might need WCS. But in general, Oracle Portal will cover quite a lot of application functionality as well as content management.