Thursday, July 2, 2009

Oracle's "componentized" SOA suite

Yesterday Oracle announced a major refresh of their middleware platform - basically the result of merging in BEA to Oracle. Some stuff (like getting rid of OC4J and using WebLogic would've been a no-brainer "thank god we're done with that" decision) but other stuff must've been quite painful, especially for the people involved!

From their press release:
Oracle SOA Suite 11g delivers a complete, integrated and hot-pluggable SOA platform that enables next-generation business applications by simplifying service access, integration, orchestration, Complex Event Processing (CEP), monitoring and management.
Wow, that's a mouthful. Given that WSO2 is also in the business of building "complete, integrated and hot-pluggable SOA platform", I thought wow let me see what's so hot about Oracle SOA Suite 11g. So I thought let me check this out and visited their download site to see whether I can get my hands on that beast.

Wow, its BIIIIIIIG:
  • Basic download: 1.5GB
  • Required components:
    • WebLogic Server: 600-800MB
    • Repository Creation Utility: 280-360MB
    • Oracle Database: 1.7-2.3GB
    • JDeveloper: 934MB-1GB
  • (Let's ignore all the optional components)
So, in order to try out their SOA Suite, I need to download somewhere between 5GB and 6GB of stuff. Um, wow?

Yes we know imitation is the best form of flattery but that's on the order of 20x the size of ALL of our platform. Yes yes I know Oracle is so much bigger and better and more powerful, but 20x better??

BUT, remember who the consumer of this stuff is: the poor brain-hurtin' developer. When I first started doing Java stuff (with JDK 1.0.8 in '94 I think), I knew every class in the JDK public APIs and quite a bit of internal stuff. Today, no Java developer even knows all the junk that's in the JDK. On top of that throw in 5-6GB of stuff and you'll have developers committing suicide!!!!!

SCA, the foundation on which Oracle's suite is built, was an abstraction layer designed to overlay JEE and WS-*. What?? Isn't that what WS-* can do too? Yep, but IBM and BEA weren't happy with losing JEE's place in the world .. and SCA was born. OK I am simplifying a bit but I do know the history as I was in IBM at the time :-).

Today's biggest problem for developers is not lack of choice of tools. There are 7 of everything. How can the average developer handle 5-6GB of stuff and figure out where to get started? That's if they were able to get it all installed.

If this is the best the Java world can offer SOA developers then Microsoft and .Net people will be very happy - they know how to make things simple for developers!

Luckily there's always WSO2 Carbon and our SOA products :-).

Or, you can always wait for Oracle 12g, the composition of Oracle, BEA and Sun.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice post - a reference.

OSS v. Commercial SOA

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taruni said...
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