WESOA 2010 - SF December 7th

This year, both the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing and the long running companion Workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications will be in San Francisco. I have had a long involvement with both as a program committee member, presenter and author and have always found them to be valuable as an attendee. I am particularly pleased this year that the program is in the bay area, as it is bound to bring out some very smart and very "plugged in" participants from the vendor community.

In any case, I'll be delivering the keynote presentation for the WESOA conference, so please stop by if you are there. I have not been able to attend in person since Amsterdam, so this will be a real pleasure and I hope to see you there.

Oracle SOA 11g Books

I'm impressed: a list of books that have been published for users of Oracle SOA and BPM portfolio products. I'm very proud to know many of the authors as friends and most of the developers.

Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developers Guide

The Definitive Guide to SOA Oracle Service Bus

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

OpenWorld Focus on SOA

Hope to see many long time and new friends and colleagues at Open World and JavaOne this year. Take a look at the Focus on SOA document to get oriented this year.

Warming Trends: a taste of things to come?

While I was in Moscow a few weeks back, the temperatures were stably higher than anything ever experienced in the history of record keeping: temperatures were literally unbearable. Traveling to India after that - where temperatures were thankfully cooler - I was impressed by exactly how difficult it will be for any country including more recently developed countries to put the brakes on the rate of increase of consumption of fossil fuels.

This brief news article describing the temperature trends and fires in Russia as a result of climate change is worth reading in its entirety. It does not do justice to the fires themselves and the havoc they are wreaking. A taste of things to come?

"Meteorologists say air temperature in central Russia by Friday might reach 41 degrees Celsius, which is likely to cause more forest fires in the region.

The recent sporadic rains in central Russian regions have not been brought by a cold weather front, so there is no hope for the drop of air temperatures, an official from the Russian meteorological service said yesterday.

“On the contrary, we expect that air temperature will go up to 41 degrees Celsius by Friday,” he added.

He also said that according to Internet-modelled forecasts, the weather might change after August 8, although such forecasts cannot be fully trusted. “The possibility of an error considerably increases starting from the forecast’s fifth day, so its accuracy nears zero by the eights day,” he said and once again confirmed that short-term forecasts testify to hot weather.

Meteorologists also say the winds are likely to change direction from south-eastern to south-western, thus bringing Mediterranean rains. Moreover, thanks to such winds smoke from peat-bog fires will go to less populated areas.

Meanwhile, according to the Russian Emergencies Ministry, a total of 227 wildfires were registered in central Russian regions in the past 24 hours. The bulk of fires, 130, were registered in the Moscow region, 48 was the tally in the Vladimir region, 9 in the Voronezh region, and another 9 in the Ryazan region. The total area hit by wildfires is 11,038 hectares. "

Source: The Hindu

ICSOC 2010

Just a brief note to remind people that the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing will be in the San Francisco Bay Area this year. I have for a long time worked with ICSOC - as a program committee member on the industrial track, in several workshops, panels and papers. It is the best conference combining industry and academic participants on the topic of service orientation in my opinion.

Russian Tech Center

More on the efforts to draw outside capital and pull back talent in the developing technical center outside Moscow, covered by the NY Times. I'm thinking that President Medvedev is a bit over-optimistic about the influence of word of mouth here...

A recap meeting on the American VC trip spotlighted in the Times article will be held this week in Palo Alto. Details linked.

Taterware

Another great green idea: disposable utensils made from potato starch and limestone. Breaks down in 60-90 days. They are using them at Oracle HQ cafeterias - I'm going to have to drop in and see how they perform.

One reason Exadata is so cool

Flash cache. This video barely scratches the surface, but Exadata is one of the best examples of hardware-meets-software done right.

Andrei Voznesensky, RIP

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky has just reposed. I always feel a special loss when we lose a poet of quality - the ability to speak to the human condition (not to say to understand it) is a remarkably rare thing, that requires the language of metaphor and analogy rather than forceful syllogisms. This is why poets are the only people that can provide us relief and protection from scientists, politicians and economists - the classes that I am a part of and that so often despise our humanity. Somehow this contrast was sharpened rather than lost in the revolution - I am thinking of many writers now, not just (or primarily) of Voznesensky.

One evening this week, I will try my hand at translating я Гойя ("I am Goya") and post the results, with apologies in advance for the damage I do. I may intersperse the phonetic Russian to give a feel for the force of the poem.

250 Million US PE in Skolkovo

Interesting play from Sigular Guff and Company - the deal centers on infrastructure and services for what will surely be an area with a high level of investment for IT.

Larry on Oracle+Sun

Gotta love the candor.

Brazilian growth outpacing India and China

For those in the Bay Area whose economic radar hasn't been working of late, Brazil's economy, the largest in South America, expanded by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2010, outpacing China and India. Click through to read the whole piece.

Oracle BPM 11gR1

April 27th marked the release of the Oracle BPM platform, which is, I believe, a bit more revolutionary than evolutionary for this space. I wanted to quickly copy some feedback from one of our partners (Hajo Normann - a SOA expert and ACE director - to give a feel for exactly what is differentiating about this product:

"“I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” "

The eternal problem with BPM has been the disconnect between business-user ease of use and the technological bridge to interface with real systems. Oracle's new BPM release starts to remove this barrier and is in many ways the first product set in the market to provide a truly integrated system for automating core business processes across human-centered workflows and IT systems.

JavaOne Call for Papers open

This year should be one of the most interesting in a decade.

Buzz opt out

Apologies for the mundane posting, but if you find the sudden appearance of Google Buzz has you thinking of dropping gmail - there is a "turn off buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail screen. It works just fine: glad to have it gone.

Haiti Aid

If you read this, please consider donating to help the victims of earthquake in Haiti. This blog entry links to the Red Cross.