SUN: open sourcing Small Programmable Object Technology

Today SUN announced that they are going to open source SUN Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT). For the press release take a look at the SUN press room.



The target of SPOT is

Sun has been very successful in spreading Java to over 6 billion devices throughout the world. Well over a billion cell phones run Java. We in Sun Labs are interested in what comes next. In order to help make sure that the next generation of gadgets is based Sun technology, we developed Sun Small Programable Object Technology (SPOT)

If you are interested you can order a development kit for 299$ and you will get two SUN Spots and a base station. Bot devices with processor, radio, sensor board and battery and the base station only with processor and radio.
Here the parameters of the device:
180MHz 32-bit ARM920T core processor
512K RAM
4M Flash
2.4GHz radio with an integrated antenna

But if you only want to write software without getting in touch with the hardware you can try to use the emulator (read this pdf)

The API and some tutorials are available at this site. So if you are interested in programming a PDA like device download the SDK and the emulator and go ahead...
For more appetizers take a look at this site (some movies about SPOT at youtube).

I hope this was enough to start you up ;-)

Data Management for Oracle BPEL PM

If you are searching for documentation to manage the Oracle BPEL schema, you will find the following:

FIRST: Official links:
Tables Impacted By Instance Data Growth
Best Practice Guide: Dehydration Store Management: 10-25
which leads to this link.
and last but no least:
Clemens Utschigs Best Practices: unzip the file and look at BestPractices/BPEL/BPEL_Purging_DehydrationStore.
SECOND: Unofficial blogs:
Delete BPEL instances and if you use some search engine you will find some more blogs with similar content...
THIRD: Metalink:
Note:341102.1
Subject: How to purge BPEL audit tables to avoid growing tablespace issues ?

Ok. For BPEL installations with few workflows per day this is enough but what is with high rate systems, where no downtime is allowed?
Oracle provides very nice features like transportable tablespaces and partitioning (see my blog entry here) . Why are these features are not included in the Oracle BPEL installation?
But this is not really a problem, because at this point Oracle Partners like GIP can provide additional features in their products....

Review at amazon: Transactions with Web Service... (transl.)

I read a book which was promoted with:

Web services fit very good for distributed transactions. ... The author will introduce the basics and explain the standards WS-Coordination and WS-Atomic-Transaction. The book will show a realization in detail.

But the book does not live up with its promise. The author modelled the coordinator with BPEL (from Active Endpoints) and ended up with the conclusion: Only the A from ACID was realized. The CID was ignored....
To read my recension in detail take a look here.

If you really want to modell the coordinator in BPEL then use Oracle BPEL PM, because this persists the complete BPEL with its state (ok only before , checkpoint(), ) in the Oracle Database. And you have native adapters to Websphere MQ or Oracle AQ, which gives you a transaction save protocol for message communication....

Oracle buys BEA

The next big deal only a few hours later:
Oracle buys BEA

Charles Philips (President of Oracle) says:

The addition of BEA is expected to accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure and will further increase the value that Oracle delivers to its customers and partners.

and

After the closing, Oracle intends to preserve and enhance customers’ investments in BEA products as Oracle has done with its other acquisitions, while Fusion Middleware will continue to be the center of Oracle’s current and future middleware and applications strategy. After the closing, BEA customers can continue to use their existing BEA products going forward, or choose to use Oracle and BEA products as part of the ongoing evolution of Fusion Middleware. Either way, it will be the customer’s choice.

Oracle pays 8.500.000.000$ for this deal. Not bad...
I think, i should buy a software company, too ;-)

But joking aside: Is Oracle really continuing its Application Server? Or will they switch to BEA? Time will tell us....