Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launched

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g has been launched today. It has been in the making for 3+ years, and is the first release after the completion of integration between Oracle and BEA products into unified suites. Also, see Q&A with Thomas Kurian, Oracle Newsroom, podcasts, and explore new videos, whitepapers, and more.

What's new in OWSM 11g?

• Unified management and monitoring through Oracle Enterprise Manager.
• Built-in agents (no install required)
• Policy governance including reusable policies and policy impact analysis
• Enhanced WS-* standards support
• Interoperability with .NET and other security stacks
  
• Automatic identity propagation through chain of services
  
• Common authentication across web services and web applications
  
• JDeveloper integration for policy attachment at design time
• Audit and reporting with built-in correlation of audit logs for a given transaction
  

For further details, visit OWSM's page on Oracle Technology Network (OTN) and download the 11g whitepaper.

FAQ - OWSM 10.1.3: What are the different types of agents OWSM support?

OWSM supports the following agents as of 10.1.3.4 release

• Client and server agents for Oracle 10gR3 BPEL and Oracle 10gR3 ESB. The BPEL and ESB app could be running on OC4J or other supported application servers.
  
• Client and server agents for 10gR3 OC4J application server
• Client and server agents for AXIS 1.1 and 1.4 on 10gR3 OC4J
• Server agents for Weblogic Server 9.2
• Server agents for Websphere 6.1.x
• Server agents for JBoss 4.0.5

Google Wave: Going to change the way we would communicate and collaborate

Google Wave made me so excited that I couldn't stop sharing my thoughts on it. It's good in a way that it has prompted me to come out of hibernation and start blogging again.

Last week during the Google I/O conference, Google unveiled developer preview of it's new collaboration tool "Wave" that in my view is going to change the way we communicate.

 

It's built by the same Rasmussen brothers who built the famous Google Maps.

Check out the recorded demo on youtube here http://wave.google.com/. Wave runs entirely in a browser, is based on HTML 5 and a new protocol http://www.waveprotocol.org/.

Wave will be interacting with email, IM, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, Document sharing and revisions, all under a single Wave interface. Wikis which we find tremendously useful will become thing of the past.

 

I found 3 features delivering the "Wow factor"

- Sharing is as easy as drag and drop.
- Other person sees as you type eliminating wait and watch.

- Playback of change history

 

Also, see techcruch article covering it.

 

What are other notable announcements from the conference?

• AppEngine for Java - Platform to write webapps in Java that runs on Google's scalable infrastructure. Google is providing it's own servlet container, datastore and service interfaces. Authentication will be provided using OAUTH , Google's authentication mechanism. For more info http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html
• Google Elements - easy way to embed google products into websites
  

Complete details on the conference can be found here http://code.google.com/events/io/.

Support tribal children in India through grant from AMEX

American Express is providing $2.5 million in funding to carry out winning projects, based on the total votes they receive in the final round of voting. Winning project gets $1.5 million in funding, with the rest $1 million given to the other top 4 out of 5 projects.

The Jharkand Tribal Project is an investment in a bright future for generations of tribal people - education for children and adults, caring for the environment and providing employment through organic farming practices, preserving indigenous crafts such handcrafts & weaving and preserving cultural identity and values through holistic education. We aim to strengthen the individual in every community by teaching life skills such as yoga and meditation.

The fullfilling organization for this project is "Art of Living Foundation".

Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 released

After BEA's acquisition by Oracle, the first release of Weblogic server now known as "Oracle Weblogic Server" has been released as Oracle Weblogic Server 10.3. More information including download link is available here.

OWSM 10.1.3.4 Patchset released

OWSM 10.1.3.4 Patchset (as part of SOA Suite patchset) has been released.

• Download 10.1.3.4 Patchset
• Documentation (incl. release notes and updated OWSM admin and deployment guides)
  

In summary, this patchset for OWSM includes

1. Horizontal migration/SDLC (Test -> Stage -> Prod) tool
2. Cloning tool
3. AXIS 1.4 agent
4. Command line tool for purging old policy versions
5. Critical bug fixes
   

Book on Oracle Web Services Manager

A book on Oracle Web Services Manager has just been published written by Sitaraman Lakshminarayanan and reviewed by Marc Chanliau(Oracle). It should complement the official product documentation by providing examples of real life use cases and how to solve them using Oracle Web Services Manager(OWSM).