Apr 28, 2008

Oracle BPEL: Integrating ILOG JRules

On my journey through the Oracle documentation universe i found this link (Release notes of Oracle BPEL PM 10.1.3.3.0).
On page 25 the integration of Oracle BPEL PM with ILOG JRules and JDeveloper is described. You have to perform only 3 steps:

1. Customize your JDeveloper with just copying one jar-file into a JDeveloper directory:
Perform the following steps at the operating system command prompt:
cd ${JDEV_HOME}/integration
mkdir thirdparty/ilog/lib
cp ${JRULES_HOME}/executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-session-java.jar \
${JDEV_HOME}/integration/thirdparty/ilog/lib

2. You have to change the server.xml:
Search for shared library oracle.bpel.common and add the following JAR files

<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-execution.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-manage-tools.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/jrules-bres-session-java.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/jrules-engine.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/commons-digester.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/commons-logging.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/sam.jar"/>
<code-source path="${JRULES_HOME}
/executionserver/lib/xercesImpl.jar"/>


3. Start your application server again.
4. Verify that bpel/system/services/config/DecisionServiceConfiguration.xml is configured to ILOG JRules:

<ruleEngine name="Ilog" description="Ilog JRules 6.1">
<ruleEngineClass>
oracle.bpel.services.rules.rpi.ilog.IlogRuleEngine
<ruleEngineClass>
<properties>
<property name="jndiXuConnectorName">
eis/XUConnectionFactory
<property>
<property name="ruleSessionProviderClass">
ilog.rules.bres.session.j2se.IlrJ2SERuleSessionProvider
<property>
<properties>
<ruleEngine>

<factContext name="XOM" description="Ilog JRules 6.1 XOM">
<factContextClass>
oracle.bpel.services.rules.rpi.ilog.XOMFactContext
<factContextClass>
<factContext>


If you want to use ILOG JRules with Oracle BPEL please read the Original release notes to configure your application server. The points 1 to 4 are only an impression of how easy you can integrate JRules to an Oracle BPEL.

But there are some limitations:
Parameter type support — The input and output parameters of the rule set you want to expose as a decision service must be derived from an XML-schema element. The decision service does not currently support type models based on JavaBeans or others.

Deployment of Ilog JRules decision service — Some Ilog JRules specific deployment artifacts must be copied into the Web archive suite of the decision service prior to deployment. This may include configuration files for the JRules XU resource adapter (ra.xml) or any other Ilog specific file. See the Ilog JRules documentation for details.

Apr 22, 2008

UMPC: HP 2133 Mini-Note PC


HP starts selling an EEE-like PC.
Take a look at their online shop. Here the details:

VIA C7-M ULV processor (1.0 GHz, 128 KB L2 cache, 400 MHz FSB
512 MB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
4 GB Flash Module
8.9-inch diagonal WXGA
Broadcom 802.11b/g

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 it costs just 499$. This is really a competitor for the EEE....

Apr 3, 2008

Oracle Clusterware

I found a nice tip about Oracle clusterware on this blog.
The scope of the article is that you can use Oracle clusterware on Oracle Unbreakable Linux without an additional license, but i found the following paragraph very interesting:
Now you can download the clusterware and use it as an extension of your Linux to make virtually any application highly available even without having an Oracle Database Server.

If you start searching on otn.oracle.com:documentation for some information about this, you will not find anything. But here the white paper from Oracle, which explains the concept making applications high available with application vips and Oracle clusterware.
The ability to protect non-Oracle applications from failure was not part of Oracle Database 10g Release 1. With the advent of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, non-Oracle applications running on a cluster can benefit from the same level of protection as existing Oracle Database processes.

and
Customers and Oracle partners can now place their own applications under the management and protection of Oracle Clusterware, such that they restart on process failure or failover to another node on node failure.

With this enhancement Oracle provides an easy way to provide high availability not only for the database but also for its application server and the best:
You must only maintain one software stack...