My colleague, Mr. EJB, Debu Panda just published a nice overview and example of publishing an EJB 2.1 as a Web service.  Check it out: 

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2004/jw-0802-ejbws_p.html

We are in the midst of building tooling, design time around this.

12:13:57 PM    

As the result of prioritizing our bugs in our OracleAS 10.1.3 release and writing up some labs for a J2EE/Web Services/BPEL roadshow we are starting next week, I was painfully reminded of why JAX-RPC sometimes tees me off.  While the basics are fine and perfectly usable, sometimes I wonder if someone wanted to invent a harder way to do Web services they might have to work pretty hard to beat some of the things that came out in JAX-RPC 1.1.  Holy moly.

Yes, its got all the checkboxes down pat - WS-I compliance, RPC/encoded and Doc/Literal, Handlers, Attachments, standard configuration with JSR 109, configuration capabilities for anything you want via mapping files ... the list goes on.  Depending on the vendor, you can get seduced during the bottom up publish process - implementation class, interface class, the standard webservices.xml, a mapping file and, in our case like every other vendor, a proprietary oracle-webservices.xml - and away you go.

Build a client or look at changing the mapping file and all bets are off.  For a simple doc/literal Java class with 2 parameters - 9 classes generated.  Come on, that sucks.  Four lines of code to invoke from a J2SE static client a doc/literal service endpoint (sample below for a simple two parameter service)?   Sure, elegant and all using factories but easy? Remember Web services and SOAP were SIMPLE to begin with.

ServiceFactory factory = ServiceFactory.newInstance();
CreditService service = (CreditService)factory.loadService(CreditService.class);
CreditCheck port = service.getCreditCheckPort();
GetCreditDecision input = new GetCreditDecision(1, 1000);

I almost had to laugh at a JavaOne session I attended on how easy JAX-RPC is.  Yes, at face value and if your vendor bends over backwards to smooth the rough edges, yes, then it is possibly easy to use.  Make sure you try out your implementation first or you might be surprised.

As we close down what I have been writing about in the last several months in Oracle Magazine our 10.1.3 release where we have a full J2EE 1.4 implementation, usability has been a big focus of the Web services team.  Little polish things like organizing and naming the generated files in a fashion so the focus is on what the developer needs to do rather than what JAX-RPC needs for runtime infrastructure and providing helper classes to jumpstart the novice developer are baby steps in the right direction.

The one place where I think there is huge opportunity and we as Oracle have a first cut of this already shown in the examples of our OTN preview is early support for the JSR 181 Web services annotation approach.  If you have ever explored a JAX-RPC mapping file, it makes writing BPEL look like childs play - yes you can do lots of things, if you can figure it out.  Cries out for an editor - isn't the requirement of an editor for ease of use the sign of too much complexity?  The cool thing about annotations is they give a reasonably human readable form to the task you would like to do - e.g. I want a parameter name x to map to y in my WSDL - to the 4 or 6 lines of XML I would have to enter in the mapping file to to do the same.

JAX-RPC 2.0 promises to fix many and more of these complaints, but J2EE 1.4 is pretty much here and now for most people over the next 12-16 months while J2EE 1.5 shapes up and eventually is released for the vendor community to implement.  I vote for annotations and probably will be making that my next Oracle Magazine article for November as it will make me feel better about Web services and usability!

10:43:24 PM    

Infoworld recently did an interesting article surveying four vendors in the Web services intermediary space - check out: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/02/27TCwsi_1.html.  A hot space that becomes naturally viable when you have a well defined message on the wire - SOAP - over a standard protocol - HTTP - defined by a rich description language - WSDL.  Simple but amazing useful functionality for those in the space.  Related but not quite as explicitly, I covered a bit of the topic at a 1000 foot level in this Oracle Magazine article a few months ago: http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-may/o34dev_web.html

8:46:39 PM    

A few things have happened at Oracle since my last blog entry many months ago ... most notably for me being the acquisition of Collaxa, now located at http://otn.oracle.com/bpel  and known as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager - a thinly disguised project to BPEL insiders that I spent close to a year involved in getting to know the amazing folks on that team and getting a huge amount of satisfaction when they decided to join forces with Oracle.  That Oracle has the industry leading BPEL implementation and the folks who built it is in my opinion will be defining piece of our SOA/Web services story going forward.

My role has changed somewhat now as a result of that - the team is part of our integration team whereas I made a long winded decision to stay in the core J2EE and Web services team to focus on the core Web services runtime environment.  The downside is that I will not be working day by day with Edwin and his great crew; the upside is that we have a lot of equally interesting work to flesh out the rest of our Web services story of which OracleAS 10.1.3 (http://otn.oracle.com/tech/java/oc4j/1003/content_preview.html) which will be our foundation for  JAX-RPC, WS-Security, WS-Reliability, WS management and the WS environment that the Oracle BPEL Process Manager will be running on (currently they run on OC4J 9.0.4 as that is our production stack). 

Just like I said for BPEL over the last year that we have lots on the go, trust me that that the 10.1.3 release will be a pretty interesting one for the core Web services runtime.  Not quite as dramatic as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager but a significant amount of engineering has gone into the Web services area in 10.1.3.   Over the last few months in my Oracle Magazine articles have been discussing various features in that release as they become available in the developer preview on OTN and will continue to do so going forward.

Hopefully this entry marks the return to regular blogging -- combined with a job re-focussing, many events like JavaOne, Oracle year end,  internal activities etc etc ... I simply ran out of cycles for keeping up the blog.  A couple of articles I have written during this quiet period that might be of interest to folks:

* Opening the Blackbox of Integration: Moving toward a standardized integration architecture - http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45525&; - Hmmm ... did I have BPEL on the brain when that was happening?

* Weaving Web Services Together: Business Process Execution Language streamlines connecting and coordinating Web services. http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-jul/o44dev_web.html - this one has some entertainment value as it also was in the physical copy of Oracle Magazine a day or so before the official announcement of Collaxa (a calculated gamble that worked nicely!)

Going forward I will continue to drill down in Web services areas in this blog ... focusses going forward for me will be core Web services issues but you will see a lot more discussion on Web services management, WS-Security, reliability and foundational pieces that make for a feature rich, high performance, highly interoperable Web services runtime and development environment.

8:30:41 PM