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The first thing I wish for in 2010 is a WebCenter standard edition product at a reasonable price.

Currently, WebCenter is available as WebCenter Suite - which is a massive bundle with everything, and a corresponding massive price tag ($125,000 per CPU). There is also a WebCenter Services license, but at $80,000 per CPU for just content management, secure search and a couple of Oracle-branded open source products, this is even more overpriced.

What I wish for is “standard edition” product containing the core WebCenter product, the JSF Portlet bridge, OmniPortlet/WebClipping and the open source parts (Wiki/Blog and Discussions). This product does not need to include WebCenter Spaces, WebCenter Composer, Universal Content Management, Secure Enterprise Search, Presence etc.

This product should provide a way forward for the many existing Oracle Portal customers who are currently defecting to SharePoint in droves, as well as promoting ADF Faces at the way to write portlets.

If you agree, please vote for this idea on Oracle Mix - and feel free to comment below or to sten@vesterli.com.

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Leaving the details of the individual sessions aside, the impression from this year’s OpenWorld is that of a shift in Oracle’s perception of themselves.

Oracle used to present itself as a technology company that happened to use its technology to build applications. Now, Oracle is an applications company that happens to build some technology (software and hardware) as needed for its applications.

This was evident from the main keynotes that focused almost exclusively on Oracle applications present and future. There was no mention of any news in either database or middleware - this was relegated to the smaller Oracle Develop sub-conference. Looking at the tag cloud in the official Schedule Builder, you search in vain for any mention of PL/SQL or Application Express - even Fusion Development (ADF) get only a small mention.

For a developer this means:

1. The core products used for Oracle applications (Fusion/ADF/BPEL) will be around for a very long time.
2. The non-core products (ODP.NET, Application Express, etc.) will live only as long as there is a significant community using them.

This does not mean that either ODP.NET or APEX is going away (both have strong communities), but it means that it is up to the developer community to keep Oracle interested in these products.

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In one of my presentations at this year’s UKOUG Conference, I made a comparison of the five Oracle portal products:

• WebCenter Services
• WebCenter Suite
• Oracle Portal
• WebCenter/AquaLogic Interaction
• Weblogic Portal

The comparison included framework capabilities, content management and built-in functionality, and I came to the following conclusion:The evaluation applies to the currently shipping 10g products. The WebCenter Suite license includes WebLogic Portal as a separate product - for clarity, the line for WebCenter Suite evaluates only the core WebCenter functionality and WebLogic Portal is evaluated on it’s own.Oracle Portal is licensed with Oracle Application Server SE1, SE and EE. AquaLogic Interaction cannot be licensed separately except by existing BEA customers that need more licenses. WebLogic Portal can be licensed separately or as part of the WebCenter Suite.Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment here (registration required) or by e-mail to sten@vesterli.com.

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The UKOUG conference in Birmingham is over, and I have placed PDF files of my two presentations on the papers page.

I was only there for two days this year, but did pick up a few interesting things:

• Oracle is now promising App Server 11g (including WebCenter) first half of calendar year 2009. On past form, that probably means a July to September timeframe
• Oracle will be moving to a new Access Management solution for App Server 11g. The existing Oracle SSO solution will not  be part of 11g, which means that you will have to keep a 10g infrastructure around if you use Oracle Portal, mod_osso or Oracle Forms with Single Sign-on. Migration path? Nope, you’re on your own.
• It seems Oracle is backing away from an earlier commitment to use JCR-170 content in Portal 11g. If you want to use UCM with Oracle Portal, you’ll have to make do with the standard UCM portlets. Migrating Oracle Portal content to UCM? Once again, you’re on your own.
• Forms 11g: It’s ready on the shelf waiting for the App Server 11g release.
• Application Express: On it’s own release cycle - expect APEX 4.0 in second half of 2009. The WebSheet feature is really cool - you have Edit-in-place of table values without everything having to be in a text entry field, you can create LOVs from existing column values, and an end user can add columns to an existing table from the WebSheet.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

• There are five abstracts on Oracle Portal from customers and partners, but none from Oracle
• There are no abstracts on Oracle WebCenter from customers or partners, but two from Oracle

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.

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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…

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