Web 2.0: Oracle Mix

I know that this is not a new information, but have you heard about Oracle MIX?
Here a screenshot:
There are groups for most of the Oracle products. I just joined the SOA Suite and BPA group. Let's see, if these groups (and all others on Oracle MIX) are helpful the daily work.
If you are interested: Take a look at ORACLE MIX and sign in ;-)

UMPC: One A120

Just to complete the list of UMPCs on this blog:

The A120 from One.de comes with a price from 279 Euros. Here are the details:

- VIA C7®-M-ULV 779 Prozessor mit 1.0 GHz
- 512MB DDR2 Speicher PC400
- 4GB Flashspeicher
- WLAN
- 64MB Onboard Grafik
- inkl. Windows XP Home + Open Office

There some rumors, that with the resolution of 800x480 some buttons in Windows XP can not displayed. But there is a note at the official site, which says, that this is no problem....

Review at amazon: Test and analysis of web services

Last week i read the book "Test and analysis of web services" to get some new tips and tricks how to deal with web services in projects or how to integrate webservices from other vendors into our product "Xyna Service Factory"

Here a short summary:

very academic
not up to date
some chapter refer to webpages (like www.bpelunit.org), which are not reachable
no references to real projects

If this was too short, take a look at my review at amazon.de (It is written in german, sorry...)

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.