Oracle Redefines Middleware

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the first real attempt to integrate the Oracle Fusion suite with the recent BEA products it acquired in 2008. According to Oracle this "Completes the integration of BEA into Oracle".

Oracle seems to be redefining "middleware" to include such things as Business Intelligence, Content Management and Collaboration which has typically been considered user-facing software. At the other end of the software stack Oracle looks at infrastructure services such as virtualization utilities.

"We take a broad view of what is included in Middleware" Rick Schultz of Oracle says on his podcast. According to the materials that Oracle make available, Middleware seems to be defined as a "Set of components that all applications need". This includes

• User Interaction (Web 2.0, RIA, Mobile, Search)
• Enterprise Performance Management (Planning, Budgeting, Scorecards)
• Business Intelligence
• Content Management
• SOA and Process Management
• Application Server
• Grid Infrastructure
• Development Tools
• Enterprise Management
• Identity Management

Depending on the spin, redefining middleware could be a good or a bad thing. I always felt I understood what middleware was. I agree with Wikipedia that "Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications." To put it more plainly it is the glue that holds together different parts of a computer application and helps integrate computer applications.

The Oracle list is huge, and I suggest Oracle needs to come up with another name for all this software infrastructure (like Software Infrastructure Suite) which does not suggest it is simply the glue that holds the application together. User facing software infrastructure such as Web 2.0 collaboration facilities, Search, budgeting software, score card software and business intelligence is much more user facing than most custom built software. Other products on the list are part of the operating environment. This is infrastructure that the software developer should have little concern with.

This is not to say that the Oracle Suite is a bad idea. We have to accept that with SOA there is far more of an application that can delivered out of the box rather than written anew by developers. True middleware such as the ESB, is still a significant part of the Oracle Suite but the other components also need to be part of the solution architecture. Oracle focuses on some important aspects from the traditional middleware space including:
• Support for SCA (SOA Component Architecture).
• Support for Event Driven Architecture.

Oracle now has a concerted push to explain its offering to the world. This has resulted in seminars and workshops around the world. I attended a couple and they are worth the time to get an idea about what Oracle is proposing. I wish to thank the presenter for the descriptive term "Marketecture" (aka Marchitecture). This term seemed to gain popularity through Dilbert cartoons in 2009, after having some more serious uses back in 2003. Marketecture is the IT architecture as presented by marketing people and therefore has limited detail and may bear little resemblance to the technical architecture.

In conclusion, there seems to be much goodness in the new Oracle Suite. SOA can benefit from a large number of products to support the approach. Oracle Suite is much more than middleware, but Oracle should not try to cover everything under the "middleware" term just because its long list of acquisitions allows it to do so.

Other references:

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-03-02/, Marketect cartoon
http://www.uml.org.cn/success/pdf/marketecture.pdf, Marketecture vs Tarchitecture
http://www.it-director.com/technology/content.php?cid=6173, Architecture Marchitecture (spelt differently but same idea)
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/middleware/index.html, The list of products in the Oracle Middleware stack
http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/docs/microsite09-flashmedia-pdfs/fmw11g-overview-solution-brief.pdf, Overview of Oracle Middleware

SOA Governance

I listened to a good Podcast on SOA governance today. It was Phil Windley and Scott Lemon interviewing Tod Biske and Ed Vasquez of Momentum SI. It is clear to me that SOA governance is important in managing SOA and SOA metadata. This podcast provides some ideas on what shape this governance can take and how products may or may not assist with this.

SOA has often been compared with Object Oriented development or even structured programming. The question was asked in the Podcast about why Governance was such an issue for SOA in comparison to these earlier approches. The answer is that the implication of an SOA decision goes beyond the IT group and single applications. The users of the service are significant stakeholders in an SOA and are directly affected by the policies. Organisation partners or organisation divisions sharing services need to agree on a service approach and comply with service interfaces in order to provide effective reuse.

Todd Biske emphasised three key aspects of governance in relation to policies that need to in place. These three aspects can be assisted by automation. They were

• Enforcement of policies
• Creation of policies
• Storage of policies

Later in the discussion two more aspects of governance were provided:

• Communication of polices
• Feedback on policies (policies evolve)

A strong theme of the podcast was that you cannot buy governance. It has to be appropriate for the organisation and a product is not yet out there that provides integrated assistance over all the aspects of governance. The process of building governance occurs by assessing the current situation, working out what processes are involved and then providing the appropriate level of manual operations and automation to support these processes.

Storage of policies is provided by registry and repository products. Registry products are moving toward providing more repository functions. The term "Regository" was coined in this podcast. A parallel can be drawn with LDAP. The registry is becoming much more of a managed data set which is configurable and provides information to humans not just automated processes.

Feedback on policies and services is very important. Without proper feedback the organisation can become a lame duck. Portfolio management is important for services as well as for applications and projects. The discussion reminded me of getting feedback on this statistics for my blog site (using http://www.mybloglog.com/). This tells me where my links are coming from and also gives me a warm feeling that people actually see this stuff. The same thing is true of getting feedback on a website with a product like Webtrends. Services are no different. Metrics about who is using a service, when they are using it and how often, provide valuable feedback.

This feedback and the process of understanding the customers of your services gets the IT person closer to the business. It was suggested in the podcast that in general SOA involves IT doing more tasks previously understood to be business tasks. If you are not experiencing the pressure to do more work related to the business then you are not really doing SOA.

There can be hundreds of policies associated with SOA. Design time policies will include technology choices, product choices and methodologies. Run-time policies include your service contracts and service level agreements (SLAs). These SLAs may apply to each producer-consumer pair and include security policies, operational policies, compliance policies and integration policies.

SOA policy should not be a police state. The approach to implementing policy should be that "The path of following policy is the path of least resistance". An organisation should not reach a gridlock because there are so many policies that the developer cannot move. Policies are something that involves discussion with service users and should not be confined to the IT group.

Effective policy agreements will save time by avoiding the need to build using more than one technology (eg. SOAP, REST and JMS). The value of an agreement is that it saves the cost of building with multiple standards.

Greater governance enables the services in SOA to be more loosely coupled. Loose coupling is about reducing dependencies between services and making those dependencies explicit. The fact that the service contracts are written outside service code and are clearly defined is a key determinate of loose coupling.

Todd's two most important points were

1. Use a service or application portfolio technique to identify what services are good, bad, expensive or good value.
2. To get started on a project ask
   - What services dose this solution expose or use?
   - What business events does this solution publish or subscribe to?
   - What business processes do this solution support?

There were some good insights in this podcast. Governance in SOA is important. It may stop your SOA becoming JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Old Web Services). It makes sure that your organisation gets the best of reuse and does not get lost in mire of standards, products and methodologies.

Footnote:
JBOWS (or JaBOWS) was a term I heard this week in a talk from Glenn Smyth. There is a good post from Joe McKendrick on this acronym. Another reference can by found in an article by Rich Seeley which in turn refers to another artlicle by Brent Carlson which uses the acronym ABOS (A Bunch of Services). It would have been more accurate to write about ABOS in my posting but JBOWS has a nicer ring to it and seems more likely to catch on.

Chasers War on Wikipedia

I went to see a live show on Sunday. The performers were Julian Morrow and Charles Firth from the television program "Chasers War on Everything". This is an Australian comedy program. Some of the clips from it have been put on YouTube and circulated around the Internet. One of their more famous clips is where they put stockings over their heads and walked into shops to see what the reaction would be to this fashion statement. Charles Firth set himself a challenge to beat Michael Moore's record of being thrown out of 34 global corporate headquarters in a month by getting thrown out of 35 headquarters in a day. You get the idea. These guys like to have a dig at the Establishment.


Julian and Charles were doing a talk as part of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, which is a talk-fest that brings together some of the most respected intellectuals around the world to discuss the important issues, like global warming, inequality and indigenous rights. The Festival this year was subtitled "Which Way to the Future". Julian and Charles's session had a theme of new technology. It started with everyone SMS-ing questions to the two presenters and them responding. The performance was entertaining although not the typical serious material provided in the Festival of Ideas. Julian and Chas were good enough to give my kids signatures at the end of the show.

The purpose of this article is to not review their performance. This will probably done by others in the references below. I want to focus on the second part of their show which was about Wikipedia. Charles introduced the audience to Wikipedia and then proceeded to attempt to deface it by putting in spurious entries. On the Wikipedia entry for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) who is his employer, he wrote "Bunch of no-talent fascist dictators" or something similar. He made changes to other Wikipedia entries for politicians. Charles also related how he had edited his own Wikipedia entry to say something like "Charles is the greatest living intellectual on the earth" only to find that 15 minutes later he got a call from someone saying sternly "You can't do that".

My interest in this is not that it is possible the deface Wikipedia but that Wikipedia survives this type of onslaught. The ABC site and the other sites were fixed by the end of the show by a group of unseen and proably voluntary Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia is a testament to what can be achieved through collaboration throughout the world by a large group of well-meaning content providers and despite a few malevolent (albeit humorous) deeds the Wikipedia remains an amazing resource.

This point is put well by Lars Aronsson

"Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a website that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well"

The Wiki concept is something we have put in place in my organisation in a limited form. The software developers exchange and record information on Wiki software. It works very well. The organisation's intranet however is tightly controlled. The content management system provides the ability to have a work-flow of authorisation to publish almost anything. One person still has to authorise any content on the intranet. This I hope will change shortly. The tightly controlled nature of this information means that the information on the intrnet is not as complete or current as a Wiki might be. The sensitivity to freedom for internal content authors is curious given the Wikipedia success for a much more open content source.

References

That great picture is by Nattalia Alonso and appears on the blog John Beohm's blog http://idents.tv/blog/2007/05/. Spot the similarity with the Simpson's couch.

Chasers War on Everything Website: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/

Some video clips of Chasers War on Everything including the global headquarter record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ344JGAUYo

Adelaide Festival of Ideas: http://www.adelaidefestivalofideas.com.au/about.html

Other blogs on the Festival of Ideas:
http://ff.moobaa.com/blog/

http://pavlovblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/adelaide-festival-of-ideas-2007.html

http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/opinion/2007/07/adelaide_festiv_3.php

http://www.frogworth.com/stuart/blog/?p=94

Lars Aronsson's quote was from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#_note-1

Someone using Wiki for the enterprise (Spot the "bottoms-up approach"!) http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/firstlook/2007/06/scalable_wikis_made_easy_by_mi.php