tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-119244772024-03-23T11:43:30.069-07:00Open for BusinessInformation you need to separate the signal from the noise in the <b>Open Source Software</b> world and occasional other thoughts on the software business.
<br/><br/><i>The views expressed in this blog are my own and not necessarily those of Oracle. </i>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-64624218944648828862007-07-12T16:54:00.000-07:002007-07-12T17:02:41.705-07:00Eclipse JSF Tools Turns 1.0I would like to congratulate Raghu Srinivasan from Oracle (Eclipse JSF Tools Project Lead) and his team for helping the community produce its first official release of the JSF Tools Project. A couple of weeks ago the Eclipse Foundation announced the Europa release which among other things included Web Tools Platform (WTP) 2.0 of which the JSF Tools Project v1.0 is an important piece.<br /><br />JSF Tools v1.0 is a key milestone as it simplifies the development of JavaServer Faces applications in the Eclipse environment. The highlights of this release include performance improvements, a new Web Page Editor as well as a graphical editor for building HTML/JSP/JSF web pages. This release is also extensible by design, it comes with an extensibility framework that allows third party developers to come up with their own enhancements.<br /><br />This release is yet another milestone in delivering "<a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html">productivity with choice</a>" to our customers. For more information on other recent activities around Oracle's involvement with Eclipse check out <a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-eclipselink.html">this blog entry</a>.<br /><br />- Download Eclipse Europa: <a href="http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R2.0/R-2.0-200706260303/">http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R2.0</a><br />- Release notes for Eclipse WTP 2.0:<br /><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/releases/2.0">http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/releases/2.0</a><br /><br /><p/>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com121tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-70639719774399771772007-07-10T17:04:00.000-07:002007-07-10T17:14:20.012-07:00Another Trinidad MilestoneLast week the Apache MyFaces Trinidad team announced another milestone, the release of Trinidad v 1.2.1. This release comes with a JavaServer Faces <span style="font-weight: bold;">1.2</span> component library initially based on parts of Oracle's ADF Faces. Featured tags in this release include : breadcrumbs, navigation panels, panes, and tabbed panels. More tags can be found on <a href="http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/trinidad-api/tagdoc.html">this page</a>. JSF 1.1 is still supported via Trinidad v 1.0.1.<br /><br />Trinidad 1.2.1 <a href="http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/download.html">binary and source distributions</a> can be found in the central Maven repository under group id "org.apache.myfaces.trinidad". Downloads are available <a href="http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/download.html">here</a>.<br /><br />If you need more frequent information on Trinidad, visit <a href="http://matthiaswessendorf.wordpress.com/">Matthias' blog</a>.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com189tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-37057088259986055462007-06-19T10:31:00.000-07:002007-06-19T10:58:13.226-07:00Montreal, Je Me Souviens...After a short but efficient visit to Austin last week where I had the pleasure to speak at the <a href="http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=225:1:5560160307935092::NO">Austin Oracle User Group</a> and meet wonderful and equally interesting people, I am on the road again, precisely in Montreal. One of the people I wanted to meet F2F is <a href="http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/wh-bio">whurley</a> who attended my talk in Austin and posted a <a href="http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/oracle-and-open-source">great summary</a> on his blog. BTW, nice hanging out with you whurley!<br /><br />The only thing that could be misleading in whurley's summary is when he says: "Their customers already use Eclipse for Java/Java EE development..." This is not true, our Java EE and SOA customers continue to enjoy <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html">JDeveloper</a> as a superior development environment for their enterprise Java development. That said, we do have a well defined Eclipse strategy which is centered around "Productivity with choice" whereby we want to provide some of our customers who for whatever reason choose to develop using Eclipse the same level of productivity as they could have gotten using JDeveloper. That is one reason why we are<a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-eclipselink.html"> stepping up our involvement in the Eclipse community</a>.<br /><br />Today I am in Montreal to speak at the <a href="http://www.oragec.org/">ORA*GEC</a> conference and meet key customers and partners in the region to share our view on open source and share some very cool features in our increasingly rich SOA stack. Although French is my native language I just realized it's more challenging than I thought to present tech stuff in French. To all my friends in Quebec, I promise to do my best!Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-50467872049554209882007-04-30T17:02:00.000-07:002007-04-30T17:15:04.817-07:00Apache Trinidad Graduates!About a week ago and after 12 months hanging out in the Apache incubator, project Apache Trinidad received all the votes necessary from the Incubator PMC to graduate. Trinidad got 12 binding +1 votes by the Apache Incubator PMC, and two more non-binding by the Incubator community. It's been an exciting time in which we've seen more and more people from Oracle and of course outside Oracle join the community as users and even as committers. The traffic on the Trinidad mailing lists is really encouraging and the community is growing rapidly. In addition to Oracle which relies heavily on Trinidad for its own development, several companies are using including consulting shops who find the Trinidad components very useful and mature enough to build highly interactive web applications for their clients.<br /><br />Trinidad is now going to be an important part of <a href="http://myfaces.apache.org/">Apache MyFaces</a>. You know where to go, we're working on the logistics to migrate the project from the incubation infrastructure to the MyFaces side of the house. Try it and let us know what you think.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-70457966850659971632007-04-30T16:40:00.000-07:002007-04-30T16:58:10.860-07:00Congrats to the Eclipse BPEL Designer Team!<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/"><img src="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/images/outline.png" style="float: right;" hspace="2" vspace="1"/></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> I simply want to congratulate Michal and the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/">BPEL Designer</a> crew for winning the <a href="http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/88856">4th prize</a> at the popular <a href="http://jax.de/">JAX</a> conference in Germany. Check out the news <a href="http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/88856">here</a> if you can read German. Keep up the great work!<br /><br />I also want to point out for those of you who don't know yet, there are other Oracle-led Eclipse plug-ins which we are really proud of:<br />- <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/jsf/main.php">JSF Tools Project</a><br />- Project <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/dali/main.php">Dali</a> JPA Tools<br /><br />Finally we have announced last month project <a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-eclipselink.html">EclipseLink</a> which will provide developers with world-class O/R mapping capabilities (via the TopLink product line donation).<br /><br />Go ahead and try those Eclipse projects out and let me know what you think. We also welcome your participation ;)Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-32940929912751517272007-04-26T16:38:00.000-07:002007-04-26T17:03:14.472-07:00Quick Thoughts on Flex and Open Source<p><span style="">Adobe plans to open source Flex, its development framework for building Flash-based web applications this should take effect when they go beta in June with the next Flex version code named Moxie (will be called Flex 3). Adobe is planning to use the Mozilla Public License or MPL. They are still planning to sell their Eclipse-based <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/">Flex Builder</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p><span style="">I read on CNet that "</span>the move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code." Also read on the same article that Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit said "For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor, this will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our <u>openness</u> and commitment to community."<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am sorry Jeff but this says ABSOLUTELY nothing about Adobe's openness. Flex is as proprietary and as far from open as it gets. Adobe still locks me in when I use Flex whether the source is open or not it doesn't really matter. Only one vendor defined Flex and only one vendor provides runtime for it. In my opinion, open source is not enough. We at Oracle continue to step up our open source contributions but we believe in a much more important source of openness and that is open standards to which we religiously adhere. That's what really gives you the freedom you are looking for as a user. The freedom to switch vendors down the road should you need to. So when we open sourced our reusable user interface components (Apache Trinidad), in addition to opening the source to which the community responded very positively, it was a 100% standards-based contribution (in this case the standard in JavaServer Faces). </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am not trying to take anything away from the success Flex/Flash enjoys it definitely helps build much more interactive web pages and seems to be very popular. I personally block Flash animations on my browser (Firefox) but advertisers like to use flash to make your pages look like fireworks which really annoys me. The way Oracle believes pages should be built is using JavaServer Faces (JSF) components (typically embedded in JSP pages) and if you need richer UI you do that by injecting some <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ajax</st1:place></st1:city> into it. We believe <st1:city st="on">Ajax</st1:city> and JSF go very well together and hold such great promise that we have decided to donate our Rich Client Framework (RCF) to the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">OSS</st1:place></st1:city> community. Stay tuned for a bunch of OSS-related announcements in a couple of weeks at JavaOne. Using JDeveloper (100% free), Apache Trinidad or ADF, one can build highly interactive standards-based user interfaces without knowing anything about JSF, JavaScript, XML DOM, CSS, DHTML, etc. Developers are shielded from the complexity of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ajax</st1:place></st1:city> development… I would like to disclaim that we do support Flash as one of the rendering options for JSF components like charts. You build your JSF-based page and later you could potentially make the decision to render the chart in Flash. Because the JSF component definition is separate from the rendering you can still do that in an elegant way and we support that in ADF Faces as part of the Rich Client Framework.<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To make the long story short my point in this entry is the following: Flash is not a bad thing, some people seem to like it and use it quite heavily. But open sourcing it or parts of it (especially the tooling) doesn’t make it open enough for me and the kind of people I talk to in the developer community. They understand very well that openness comes from standards not necessarily from opening the kimono and showing the code even under a friendly license like MPL.</p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-62651981480119417822007-04-08T18:43:00.000-07:002007-04-08T19:09:39.226-07:00Dial 1-800-GOOG-411<img src="http://labs.google.com/goog411/images/logo_sm.gif" style="float: right;" hspace="2" vspace="1" /><p class="MsoNormal">This might not be open source but it is FREE. If you are tired of being charged $1.5 by your cellular carrier for every 411 call, try Google's <a href="http://labs.google.com/goog411/index.html">Voice Local Search</a>. It is still experimental but we know what Google means by experimental or beta. It's usually pretty darn good. Although it was released earlier this month I just had a chance to try it today and I it worked just fine. About 75% of my attempts worked, when I'm not lucky I just say "back" and I get another chance. This service doesn't include residential requests but you can use it to find businesses. You can try "San Francisco California" and "Mas Sake Sushi" and it'll connect you or just say "text message" and it'll send you an sms (both free of charge).<br /><br />This is a $7B/year market, more than 2.5 billion 411 calls are made every year in America. AT&T is toying with the free 411 calls but competition for this service comes from <a href="http://www.free411.com/index.php">Jingle Networks</a> which seems to have captured more than 5% of the 411 U.S. market in 2006. Another serious player is <a href="http://www.tellme.com/">TellMe</a> which was recently acquired by guess who... Microsoft of course.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-38723766332068983772007-03-29T16:07:00.000-07:002007-03-29T17:15:13.869-07:00IBM wants to finish JBossAfter <a href="http://news.com.com/JBoss+founder+departs+Red+Hat/2100-7344_3-6157917.html">losing its founder</a> and leader to music and other personal interests shortly after being acquired by Red Hat, JBoss has a new set of issues to deal with. Marc Fleury left after sharing with his colleagues how he felt about working with Red Hat: "I am increasingly experiencing diminishing returns on my emotional and professional investments at Red Hat."<br /><br />The new danger comes from outside. IBM and Covalent announced today that they had each contributed a significant amount of IP to Apache's Geronimo to help users migrate from JBoss to Geronimo. Although I personally consider this a serious attack on JBoss, <span class="artText">Shaun Connolly (VP of product management in the JBoss division of Red Hat) begs to differ calling the</span><span class="artText"> IBM-Covalent initiative "uninteresting". I still think that JBoss today is far more superior than Geronimo if they play a feature war. But we all know the better products don't always win. I also believe that existing JBoss customers may not want to switch to a less performant application server if they are already in production. If it works why fix it? But I still think that when giants like IBM or Microsoft go after a much smaller company, we know how that movie ends.<br /><br />Speaking of movies let's rewind the JBoss/IBM movie. Let me refresh your memory on a few events that put together are confusing to say the least:<br /><br />- In September of 2003, JBoss and IBM team up to cool off the growing popularity of Microsoft's C#<br />- Not too long after this Marc Fleury started bashing BEA and IBM on his blog<br />- In May of 2005 IBM purchases Gluecode a company that employed most Apache Geronimo contributors and positions this acquisition as their entry level, lightweight application server. They later called the Geronimo-based product WAS Community Edition.<br />- Exactly two years after deciding IBM was nice and C#/Microsoft evil, Marc Fleury partners with Microsoft (Sept 2005). Their partnership <a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2005/09/can-you-believe-this.html">shocked me</a> (and I was not the only one) but I thought it was pretty clever after all. Marc described that day as his <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=453">best day ever.</a><br />The idea there was that half JBoss servers were running on Windows so let's work together on making JBoss work even better on Windows and SQL Server, </span> Active Directory and single sign-on, <span class="artText">etc.<br />- Then Red Hat buys JBoss, Microsoft becomes great friends with Novell and Fleury doesn't like working for Red Hat, fakes a paternity leave and never comes back to work. [Sorry I had to compress the story]<br />- Next IBM feels JBoss is kind of vulnerable and decides to partner with Covalent to hurt them even more, hence the announcement.<br /><br />Concretely IBM </span>(which roughly employs half of Geronimo's committers) <span class="artText">and Covalent (which already provides support for </span>Apache's Tomcat, HTTP Server and Axis)<span class="artText"> are getting together to provide quality support for Geronimo and lure people away from JBoss. </span>Paul Buck, director of IBM WebSphere open source said that they were going to provide a migration tool that would go through the J2EE application itself and look for any required changes at the source that we know are different between JBoss and Geronimo.<br /><span class="artText"><br />I am interested in your thoughts, do you think IBM with this move is going hurt JBoss' business in a significant way? Can somebody tell me why we never see Glassfish in these battles? It's also a Java EE open source application server but no one seems to take it seriously. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who reads this blog who uses Glassfish in the enterprise.<br /></span><br /><p/>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-40212244485678395542007-03-29T11:21:00.000-07:002007-03-29T11:36:42.379-07:00Oracle on The Linux Foundation BoardIt's no news that Oracle has been a serious player in the Linux community. Our commitment to the Linux community started way back in 1998 when we released the industry's first commercial database on Linux. We also like Linux because we run our own IT systems on Linux and realize first-hand the benefit of lower IT costs from using Linux in a grid computing infrastructure. Additionally, Oracle's Linux kernel team contributed a cluster file system OCFS to the Linux kernel under the GPL license. OCFS2 was the first ever cluster file system in the mainline Linux kernel. Finally we recently announced Oracle <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/ubl-faq.pdf">Unbreakable Linux 2.0</a> which is a support program that provides enterprises with world-class global support for Linux.<br /><br />All this to say that <a href="http://www.linux-foundation.org/wordpress/?p=336">Oracle/Wim's nomination</a> on the Linux Foundation board is no accident. Who better than Wim Coekaerts to represent Oracle on that diverse board?<br /><br />Congrats Wim!Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com62tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-72048090069083821072007-03-26T17:24:00.000-07:002007-03-26T17:27:47.411-07:00Apache Trinidad version 1.0.0-incubating<p class="MsoNormal">A little more than a year ago <a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2005/12/another-oracle-donation-to-open-source.html">Oracle donated</a> a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification to the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF and the community chose the name it Apache Trinidad. Today we’re excited to announce that we reached another milestone: the release of Apache Trinidad Core version 1.0.0-incubating.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Both binary and source code are available at the Apache Incubator <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/adffaces/download.html">Trinidad Podling page</a>.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.irian.at/trinidad-demo/faces/index.jspx">Live demos</a> and <a href="http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/ADF_Faces/core_release_1_0_0-incubating">release notes</a> are also available.<a href="http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/ADF_Faces/core_release_1_0_0-incubating"></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Enjoy!</p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-58554712740578154962007-03-08T16:57:00.000-08:002007-05-09T11:06:07.151-07:00What is EclipseLink?Hopefully by now most of you know that Oracle has been actively contributing resources and IP to the Eclipse community. Oracle has been an active member of the Eclipse community since its inception and a leading participant in both the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and the Technology project. Oracle currently leads the JavaServer Faces tooling, Dali JPA tools and BPEL tools projects. Before diving into to the announcement, I would like to personally thank all the developers they know who they are who spontaneously stopped by the Oracle booth at EclipseCon'07 to tell me how much they thought Oracle is doing a better job of working with the OSS community and how much their perception of Oracle had changed.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">So what’s new?</span><br /><br />- First, Oracle is now a board member of the Eclipse Foundation.<br />- Second, Oracle steps up its involvement from simple membership to “Strategic Developer” status. Based on the size of our latest donation (see below) and the level of involvement required for this project and Oracle’s interest in the success of the Eclipse platform we decided to upgrade our status.<br />- Third, Oracle is donating its award winning Java persistence framework, Oracle TopLink, to the open source community. What’s the big deal TopLink was already donated to the JCP and project Glassfish as well as Spring 2.0? That was TopLink Essentials (TLE) not TopLink. I will post another blog entry soon explaining the difference between TLE and TopLink. Basically Oracle TopLink which has been around for 13 years is hands down the industry's most advanced persistence product with object-to-relational, object-to-XML, and Enterprise Information System data access through all of the major standards, including the Java Persistence API, Java API for XML Binding, Service Data Objects, and the Java Connector Architecture. TopLink supports most databases and most application servers and most development tools.<br />- Last but not least, based on this major contribution (TopLink source code and test cases), Oracle proposed an Eclipse project to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform. The project’s name is Eclipse Persistence Platform (EclipseLink). EclipseLink will be led by Oracle.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Can you provide more details about EclipseLink?</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">(from the <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/eclipse/pdf/eclipselink-faq.pdf">EclipseLink FAQ</a>)</span><br /><br />EclipseLink will deliver a number of components (listed below) which together will constitute a solid framework with support for a number of persistence standards. Here is a list of some planned components:<br />- EclipseLink-ORM will provide an extensible Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework with support for the Java Persistence API (JPA). It will provide persistence access through JPA as well as having extended persistence capabilities configured through custom annotations and XML. These extended persistence features include powerful caching (including clustered support), usage of advanced database specific capabilities, and many performance tuning and management options.<br />- EclipseLink-OXM will provide an extensible Object-XML Mapping (OXM) framework with support for the Java API for XML Binding (JAXB). It will provide serialization services through JAXB along with extended functionality to support meet in the middle mapping, advanced mappings, and critical performance optimizations.<br />- EclipseLink -SDO will provide a Service Data Object (SDO) implementation as well as the ability to represent any Java object as an SDO and leverage all of its XML binding and change tracking capabilities.<br />- EclipseLink -DAS will provide an SDO Data Access Service (DAS) that brings together SDO and JPA.<br />- EclipseLink -DBWS will provide a web services capability for developers to easily and efficiently expose their underlying relational database (stored procedures, packages, tables, and ad-hoc SQL) as web services. The metadata driven configuration will provide flexibility as well as allow default XML binding for simplicity.<br />- EclipseLink -XR will deliver key infrastructure for situations where XML is required from a relational database. The metadata driven mapping capabilities EclipseLink-ORM and EclipseLink-OXM are both leveraged for the greatest flexibility. Using this approach to XML-Relational access enables greater transformation optimizations as well as the ability to leverage the Eclipse Persistence Platform’s shared caching functionality.<br />- EclipseLink -EIS provides support for mapping Java POJOs onto non-relational data stores using the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) API.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Oracle's love story with Eclipse seems to be getting stronger, is JDeveloper dead?</span><br />I keep getting this question over and over. So before anybody posts it in the comments I will address it. At Oracle we believe in "<a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html">Productivity with Choice</a>". Oracle remains fully committed to JDeveloper as the IDE of choice for Java and service-oriented architecture development. That said, we are also committed to helping our customers who for whatever reason choose Eclipse for their development. So the answer is crystal clear, JDeveloper is stronger than ever and Oracle will continue to invest in making it better.<br /><br />These Eclipse-related announcements are yet another proof that Oracle continues to deploy significant efforts to initiate, lead, and contribute technology and resources to the OSS community. Stay tuned for more on Oracle and OSS!Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-73587659088681064522007-02-14T14:39:00.000-08:002007-02-14T14:51:09.267-08:00Productivity with choiceThis article published in the Oracle Magazine <a target="_top" href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-mar/index.html"><span class="bodylink"><span style="">March/April 2007</span></span></a> issue explains well our tooling strategy and why Oracle is committed to both JDeveloper and Eclipse to increase our customers' productivity no matter what <span class="bodycopy">development platform</span> they end up using. Thanks to Rich Schwerin for putting it together:<br /><a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html">http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/</a><br /><a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html">oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html</a>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com283tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1149203383935046322006-06-01T16:00:00.000-07:002006-06-01T16:09:43.936-07:00Oracle supports UC Berkeley lab to work on OSS systemsOracle along with IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., NNT Multimedia Communications Laboratories Inc., and Nortel Networks, are pledging annual contributions of up to $170,000 for the next five years. This financial help will help the <a href="http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/">RAD lab</a> to innovate and make its creations freely available under the open source Berkeley software distribution license. In addition, these companies are going to make some resources availble to act as consultants. In 2005 the RAD lab was launched with a $7.5M donation from Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.<br /><br />The projects will be focused for the most part on Artificial Intelligence based systems to help maintain large distributed computing systems used by data-intensive Internet businesses.<br /><br />More on this in the <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/060530/1295294.html?.v=1">press release</a>.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1149202535813899862006-06-01T15:49:00.000-07:002006-06-01T15:55:35.836-07:00Oracle's Ajax-enabled contribution coming upOn May 17th during <a href="http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/sessions/general/day2.jsp">Oracle’s general session</a> at JavaOne 2006, Thomas Kurian announced that Oracle is about to open source yet another exciting technology. Indeed, a year ago Thomas announced at JavaOne that we were going to open source our ADF Faces components which are server-side user interface components based on the JavaServer Faces standard. Thomas also announced that same year that we were going to make Eclipse better by leading a couple of initiative. Well, Oracle delivered. Today we have open sourced ADF Faces and we are leading three different Eclipse plug-ins which are <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/dali/">Dali</a> (O/R mapping design time for EJB30 and JPA), <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/">JSF tooling</a> and co-leading the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/">BPEL design time</a> with IBM. As for the ADF Faces components (excluding the rich client or Ajax-enabled components) they have been donated to the Apache software foundation. The project is currently waiting to graduate out of incubation and more information can be found here:<br /><a href="http://incubator.apache.org/projects/adffaces.html">http://incubator.apache.org/projects/adffaces.html</a><br /><br />So what’s exciting about these Ajax-enabled JSF components anyway?<br /><br />Oracle has enhanced its already extensive JSF component library ADF Faces, with a set of rich and interactive components that will be part of the ADF Faces Rich Client donation to the open source community. All these components leverage extensively the technique referred to as Ajax. Ajax is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by asynchronously exchanging data with the server, so that the page does not have to be entirely reloaded each time the user triggers an event. Ajax applications are typically more responsive and provide richer interactivity.<br /><br />Oracle has already donated 100+ server-side (or thin-client) components to the Apache community. Additionally, Oracle will be donating a new set of rich Ajax-enabled components, which will bring the total number of donated components to 150+ JSF components.<br /><br />The list below is a subset of the JSF rich component library that Oracle decided to contribute to the OSS community:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1- Table</span><br />The new table comes with the same functionality already provided by the current ADF Faces table component, plus some extra features that will dramatically enhance the end-user experience. The new table component comes with full support for asynchronously fetching data from the underlying services using the XMLHttpRequest object. The table provides scrolling through records, sorting, and single and multi-select out of the box, as well as built-in support for swapping columns at runtime.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2- Pop-up Menu </span><br />One of the coolest and most requested features in a rich and interactive end-user environment is the ability to right-click and display a popup menu at runtime. The new rich-client version of ADF Faces provides a popup component that can be attached to components such as a table. This will allow application developers to provide end-user actions via a popup menu that otherwise would have to be hard-coded in JavaScript. Now the developer experience is purely JSF/Java while the end-user gets the desired "thick-client" behavior in the browser.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3- Accordion </span><br />This is a common component in most desktop applications and helps the application developer optimize the use of real estate on the client side. The end-user can click on an accordion and display its content. The new ADF Faces component library comes with two different accordions: one that only displays one accordion at the time and one that can display multiple accordions at a time. So, now application developers will have the same type of functionality in the browser as they have in their desktop applications.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">4- Tree</span><br />For most application developers the hardest Web widget to implement is a rich Tree widget. ADF Faces comes with a Tree widget that has built-in support for asynchronously communicating with the underlying services. When interacted with, the Tree component will not re-render the entire page, which enhances the end-user experience.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">5- Menu</span><br />ADF Faces also comes with a "regular" menu component. This component can be used by application developers to create toolbars similar to what is used in desktop applications. The menu is leveraging Ajax and provides DHTML dropdown menus etc. From the application developer’s view there is no JavaScript needed to enable this JSF component - only JSF and Java.<br /><br />With this new rich client component library application developers will be able to leverage Ajax to its fullest without writing a single line of JavaScript to get the rich desktop user experience on the browser. We are not sure yet if this donation is going to end up in Apache it is not up to us it is completely up to the Apache MyFaces community. Stay tuned!Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1139533603300050392006-02-09T17:03:00.001-08:002006-02-09T17:06:43.303-08:00What is SASH anyway?One of the challenges most people I talk to have in dealing with OSS is integrating projects that were designed to work together. Many people are trying to use Struts with Hibernate and/or Spring with Hibernate and end up having integration problems…The reality is that enterprises run open source and commercial software side-by-side and will continue to do so. That’s why Oracle partnered with <a href="http://www.sourcelabs.com">SourceLabs</a> to solve this issue for Oracle AS 10g customers. SASH simply means (Struts, Apache Axis, Hibernate and Spring). SourceLabs provides services around their tested <a href="http://www.sourcelabs.com/?page=software&sub=sash">SASH</a> stack. Oracle customers using server-side Java are now able to improve productivity, reduce operational risk, and adopt open platforms with confidence.<br /><br />I find this exciting and it’s inline with Fusion Middleware’s Hot-Pluggable message (believe me it’s not just a marketing buzzword) which essentially means that we are willing to compete on industry standards and if you find a module that works better than one of the components in the Oracle stack, you can seamlessly swap it out with the equivalent module of your choice. Oracle’s middleware is engineered to work well with third-party products, including open source and IBM's WebSphere line.<br /><br />To get more information and even download SASH for Oracle AS 10g, go to the <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/sash.html">SASH section on OTN</a>.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1139533564788203102006-02-09T17:03:00.000-08:002006-02-09T17:06:04.820-08:00What is SASH anyway?One of the challenges most people I talk to have in dealing with OSS is integrating projects that were designed to work together. Many people are trying to use Struts with Hibernate and/or Spring with Hibernate and end up having integration problems…The reality is that enterprises run open source and commercial software side-by-side and will continue to do so. That’s why Oracle partnered with <a href="http://www.sourcelabs.com">SourceLabs</a> to solve this issue for Oracle AS 10g customers. SASH simply means (Struts, Apache Axis, Hibernate and Spring). SourceLabs provides services around their tested <a href="http://www.sourcelabs.com/?page=software&sub=sash">SASH</a> stack. Oracle customers using server-side Java are now able to improve productivity, reduce operational risk, and adopt open platforms with confidence.<br /><br />I find this exciting and it’s inline with Fusion Middleware’s Hot-Pluggable message (believe me it’s not just a marketing buzzword) which essentially means that we are willing to compete on industry standards and if you find a module that works better than one of the components in the Oracle stack, you can seamlessly swap it out with the equivalent module of your choice. Oracle’s middleware is engineered to work well with third-party products, including open source and IBM's WebSphere line.<br /><br />To get more information and even download SASH for Oracle AS 10g, go to the <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/sash.html">SASH section on OTN</a>.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1139453836162932002006-02-08T18:48:00.000-08:002006-02-08T19:00:23.806-08:00Is this where OSS is going?When I saw this <a href="http://news.com.com/Funds+flow+for+open-source+document+company/2110-1014_3-6036623.html?tag=nefd.hed">deal</a> today I thought it summarized pretty well where open source seems to be going. The news in itself is not very exciting but it’s yet another open source startup raising a pretty good round from top tier VCs. In a nutshell, <a href="http://www.alfresco.com/">Alfresco</a> which offers a document management platform raised an $8M series B investment round from Mayfield and Accel (which had already led round A). This confirms that:<br /><br />- Open source is more professional. Open source developers are not what they used to be (midnight hackers working from their garage). More often than not, open source developers today are professional developers employed by large vendors (like Oracle or IBM) or well-funded startups like Alfresco or Spikesource (backed by Kleiner Perkins). Additionally large vendors offer professional support for open source projects (for example Oracle, IBM, Novell and HP support Linux).<br /><br />- Open source is (slowly but surely) moving up the stack. First, the debate is not limited to Linux vs. Windows anymore. Also, the target open source end user profile is changing as open source moves up the stack. With Linux and Eclipse, typical users are system administrators and developers. Open source is moving beyond infrastructure software and tools into different areas with various degrees of success. Alfresco seems to be doing a good job in document management and <a href="http://www.asterisk.org">Asterisk</a> seems to offer a very popular PBX/VoIP telephony system (I am a happy Asterisk user without knowing much about PBX systems).<br /><br />Is open source ready for ERP or CRM? Those of us who have been around a while in this industry know full well that VCs are not always right but in the last 18 months they have been very active investors in open source based startups with services-based business models. Time will tell if they were on the money! Let's not get too excited for now I don’t see traditional commercial software going anywhere anytime soon.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1137795300988501622006-01-20T14:10:00.000-08:002006-01-20T14:17:53.770-08:00Orbeon delivers an amazing mix of AJAX and XFormsJust wanted to congratulate the <a href="http://www.orbeon.com">Orbeon</a> crew for putting out the 3rd major release of the LGPL-licensed Orbeon PresentationServer. OPS 3.0 features an AJAX-based XForms engine. The new engine brings responsive XForms user interfaces to mainstream web browsers without the need for plug-ins.<a href="http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/home-changes-30"></a><br /><br />It’s all open source and available from ObjectWeb at:<br /><a href="http://forge.objectweb.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=168">http://forge.objectweb.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=168</a><br /><br />Examples and documentation for OPS are available online:<br /><a href="http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/">http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/</a><br /><br />Talking about ObjectWeb, Erik Bruchez (Orbeon’s Chief Architect) will give <a href="http://objectwebcon06.objectweb.org/xwiki/bin/Main/DetailedSession#bruchez">a talk</a> about XForms at ObjectWebCon '06 in Paris on January 31. The talk will mainly consist of a live XForms tutorial built on top of OPS 3.0, with the goal of showing the audience that using the right platform, XForms is really cool and productive and can be used on mainstream browsers without plug-ins (if you use platforms like OPS 3.0).<br /><br />I will also <a href="http://objectwebcon06.objectweb.org/xwiki/bin/Main/DetailedSession#tazi">present</a> at the same conference, come say hi if you’re around (see you there Erik):<a href="http://objectwebcon06.objectweb.org/xwiki/bin/Main/DetailedSession#tazi"><br /></a>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1137726428296146132006-01-19T19:00:00.000-08:002006-01-23T10:20:28.276-08:00Oracle and NetBeansFollowing the Sun-Oracle town hall <a href="http://news.com.com/Sun+to+subsidize+Oracle+database+software/2100-1012_3-6025568.html">meeting</a> last week at Oracle headquarters where Larry and Scott made a few exciting announcements, I started getting questions about Oracle's position vis-a-vis NetBeans. The reason is that Scott (and later Jonathan Schwartz on <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=why_i_wasn_t_at">his blog</a>) mentioned some kind Oracle "adoption and endorsement" of NetBeans. <p>Oracle's IDE strategy is very clear, Thomas Kurian's <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/kurian_ofm.html">interview</a> on OTN earlier this week doesn't leave much room for interpretation and at the moment Oracle's tools strategy is limited to JDeveloper and Eclipse. Here is the statement from Thomas, <span class="boldbodycopy">Oracle's Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware</span>:<span class="bodycopy"><i style=""><br /><br />"At Oracle, we have our own development tool, <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html">Oracle JDeveloper</a>, which is available for free download. Our new version, JDeveloper 10</i></span><em><span style="font-style: normal;">g</span></em><span class="bodycopy"><i style=""> Release 3, has an extensive list of new features and is the single biggest release we have ever done of the product…<br /></i></span></p><p><span class="bodycopy"><i style="">...Because we are committed to providing developers with choice, we are also taking a leadership role within the Eclipse community. We are currently leading three different groups within the Eclipse Foundation for Java and BPEL technologies, and we are actively involved in integrating our Fusion Middleware products with Eclipse. Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse. We certainly think Sun's NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and we're watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true."</i></span></p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1137547619283781992006-01-17T17:23:00.000-08:002006-01-23T10:25:02.943-08:00Is open source software more vulnerable?<p class="MsoNormal">Do you think that more eye balls looking at open source projects make all bugs shallow or quite the contrary that some of these eye balls looking at the code could be malicious and take advantage of the exposed code to attack your open source based systems?<br /><br />Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, stated: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." by Eric S. Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.<br /><br />Apparently The U.S. government's Department of Homeland Security thinks otherwise. It is investing in an ambitious 3 year project aiming at improving reliability and security of widely deployed open source projects. In late 2004 the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">San Francisco</st1:place></st1:city> based auditing software company Coverity found that the <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1741077,00.asp"><!-- start ziffarticle //-->Linux kernel had far fewer security vulnerabilities</a><!-- end ziffarticle //--> than a typical commercial software package. According to <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1909946,00.asp">this article</a>, this same company was selected for this project along with engineers from Stanford and anti-virus vendor Symantec to pinpoint and fix dangerous vulnerabilities (such as buffer overflows and memory allocation bugs) in widely used open source projects such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla and Sendmail.<br /><br />Can't wait to see the results of this project will confirm Linus' law or not. In my opinion, there is no general rule in this case. Open source is not safer nor is it more vulnerable than commercial software. It really depends on what we are comparing. An open source project is going to be more or less reliable based on its popularity (nobody was interested in attacking Firefox until it became successful) the governance behind it, the size of the community (the more the better)...<br /></p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1135217184009063672005-12-21T17:38:00.000-08:002005-12-27T14:56:12.296-08:00Another Oracle Donation to Open Source<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>This is exciting news web developers who believe in J2EE, so buckle up!<br /><o:p><br /></o:p>I am pleased to announce that Oracle is contributing a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification to the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF. What it will be called in the future is yet to be determined by the <a href="http://myfaces.apache.org/">Apache MyFaces</a> community. <o:p></o:p><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />What's in it for Oracle?</span><br />We like to get behind technologies we believe in. We think JSF holds great promise and Apache MyFaces is a great JSR-127 implementation. By supporting JSF and MyFaces we are hoping that more vendors are going to join us and strengthen the Faces community.<o:p> </o:p><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Why should I care?</span><br />I would say wait till you try it. This is going to give a big boost to the JavaServer Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code comes with great functionality out of the box. How would you like to have high quality capabilities such as: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, internationalization and accessibility? This donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been thoroughly tested and come with high quality documentation.<o:p> </o:p><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />How about tools?</span><br />Oracle developers are also leading the Eclipse JSF tooling project, we are going to make sure that this plug-in works well with MyFaces and its components to help J2EE developers develop and deploy great looking web applications using open source technology donated by Oracle.<br /><br />After several months of effort, I'm very excited to see this donation go forward. We know that our donation is being placed in very good hands, and we look forward to seeing more components "blossom" as part of the Apache MyFaces project.</p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com87tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1135215428641576482005-12-21T17:29:00.000-08:002005-12-21T17:37:08.643-08:00I'm Back!<p class="MsoNormal">I would like to apologize to my readers for being so quiet for the last couple of months. I've been too busy and on the road quite a bit. I had a chance to speak at the <a href="http://www.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/os1_section.jsp">Gartner Open Source Summit</a> in <st1:state st="on">Florida</st1:State> as well as <a href="http://www.apachecon.com/">ApacheCon</a> in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">San Diego</st1:place></st1:City>. I hope you like the news in my next blog entry!</p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1129545151012442552005-10-17T03:20:00.000-07:002005-10-17T03:32:31.020-07:00EuroOSCON 2005I just landed a couple of hours ago in Amsterdam after a rather smooth flight from SFO through Chicago O'Hare. I came here to attend <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/eurooscon/">EuroOSCON </a>2005. I am looking forward to this conference where I will also be <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/eurooscon/view/e_sess/7989">speaking</a> on Wednesday and reconnecting with all my <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/41/speakers.html">OSS buddies</a>. I am sure a lot of people are wondering what Oracle is doing for open source, my presenation will touch on this of course but I will also be at the Oracle booth answering questions. Feel free to stop by if you're around.Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1129246629606414172005-10-13T16:21:00.000-07:002005-10-13T16:41:01.126-07:00What did Oracle and Zend Announce this Week?<p class="MsoNormal">Earlier this week, Oracle and Zend <a href="http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_oct/10112005_oraclegawindows_finalsite.html">announced general availability</a> of Zend Core for Oracle. This is exciting news, yet another sign that Oracle understands <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">OSS</st1:place></st1:city> and how commercial software can complement open source. Oracle is doing all it can to help developers out there with the performance, reliability and robustness they need. Let me try to shed some light on this announcement by answering some of the questions I have been getting.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who's </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.zend.com/">Zend</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> anyway?</span><br />Zend is really the PHP company. They have Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski on their payroll, they are Zend's founders and also the original developers who helped PHP founder <span class="italicbodycopy"><a href="http://lerdorf.com/bio.php">Rasmus Lerdorf</a> rewrite a new PHP parsing engine in 1997.</span> Andi and Zeev created the very popular open source Zend Engine. <span style=""> </span>Zend's products are used by 8,000 companies worldwide including Lufthansa, Avaya, Sprint, HP and Boeing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What's Zend Core for Oracle?</span><br />Zend Core for Oracle provides out-of-the-box IT organizations with a stable, high performance, easy-to-install and supported PHP development and production environment fully integrated with the Oracle Database. Without Zend Core for Oracle customers had to download all the pieces individually (Apache server, PHP, Oracle DB…) and cobble it all together. This was a very tedious, unpredictable experience that serious enterprises did not want to go through. Zend Core for Oracle is a one stop shop where you get one install file and you know it's going to work and if god forbid, it doesn't you get support from Zend (for PHP-related issues) and Oracle (for database-related issues). Safe feeling, isn't it? <span style=""></span><o:p></o:p><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Why should I care? LAMP is FREE!</span><br />This is the most frequent question and the answer is very simple. If free was the only criterion, then why is Geronimo not everywhere and why is Oracle still showing strong DB and application server sales, etc.? The truth is, people care deeply about more important things. We worked with Zend to do this because their customers as well as ours wanted us to deliver a solution like Zend Core for Oracle. There are 18 million websites out there written in PHP, scripting languages are <a href="http://otazi.blogspot.com/2005/07/scripting-tsunami.html">too popular</a> today for Oracle to ignore them. Zend is the leader in PHP deployments. It's also important to note that 25-30% of their customers run on Oracle (not all of them are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29">LAMP</a> worshipers). Oracle and Zend noticed that many already had their data in Oracle databases when they started using PHP to write web application. They enjoyed the quick turnaround and easy to deploy experience they got out of PHP. Others come from the LAMP stack and want more stability, performance, security and reliability and moved to Oracle DB. Also organizations with a significant investment in Linux and Oracle now have the option to deploy PHP apps on top of these databases and worry less about the issue of drivers then they may have seen in past. Zend Core for Oracle delivers an updated PHP OCI8 driver, which both companies have worked hard to make more reliable and stable for Oracle Database-driven Web applications.<o:p></o:p><br /><br />Have you heard of OPAL? Well it's an acronym just like LAMP but it stands for [Oracle, PHP, Apache and Linux]. Believe me, it is more popular than you think. Zend Core for Oracle is an OPAL system - technically an OPA, it also runs on IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and Windows (currently still in beta).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bottom line:</span> The real challenge for open source software is to provide the ease of use and a clear chain of accountability that IT organizations require for mission-critical systems. Zend Core is a good answer to that.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />What happened to Oracle's commitment to Java/J2EE?<br /></span>Today, you cannot think ONE language. This is the SOA age. Web services don't care what flavor the portal or the back-end business or persistence logic is written in? We don't need to pick a winner, we support open standards and interoperability. Also, we make sure we keep our finger on the pulse. Scripting languages particularly PHP are very popular, our customers use them, therefore we need to provide them with a pleasant/seamless experience to their job. We are more committed to Java/J2EE than ever, our app server is the fastest growing J2EE container in the market, our tools support the latest Java and J2EE specifications as soon as they are out (and most of the times before – EJB3.0 basis or RI in Glassfish for example).<br />PHP is actually interoperating quite nicely with Java on various levels. First we have been supporting PHP for 2 years in the Oracle application server. One can write a PHP page and deploy the HTML file on the Oracle container and it will be parsed and rendered seamlessly. Second, PHP5 (unlike PHP4) has great support for SOAP, this means Java can call PHP-based web services and vice versa. Also using BPEL PM, users can orchestrate Web services such that PHP-based partner links can call Java-based services. Finally there is a JSR we are planning to support as soon as it’s ready. It's <a href="http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=223">JSR-223</a>, Oracle and Zend are part of the expert group. It essentially allows Java to call scripting languages and vise versa. With all this in place in the Oracle stack, people could rapidly write PHP pages (if they choose not to use JSF or they already have existing PHP code) and easily talk to back-end business logic written in Java that makes DB calls.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">OK, I'm interested where do I start?</span><br />I recommend the <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/index.html">PHP technology Center</a> on OTN (Oracle Technology Network). In there you'll find a bunch of links to useful resources including upcoming events, installation guides, articles, blogs, best practices and last but not least a link to download Zend Core for Oracle. Zend also has a page on their website specifically for people who are interested in Zend Core for Oracle: <a href="http://www.zend.com/core/oracle">www.zend.com/core/oracle</a>. Finally I will be <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/eurooscon/view/e_sess/7989">speaking at OSCON</a> next week on this topic. So if you're planning to be there, feel free to drop by the Oracle booth and ask all the questions you want. If you are in the bay area I highly recommend attending the <a href="http://zend.kbconferences.com/">Zend/PHP Conference</a>. Definitely check out Oracle's Ken Jacobs (aka Dr DBA) who will talk about Zend Core for Oracle and the relationship between Zend and Oracle.</p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11924477.post-1129178257236475832005-10-12T21:20:00.000-07:002005-10-12T21:40:23.890-07:00Microsoft Befriends Foe and Takes Aim at iTunes<p class="MsoNormal">Yesterday (10/11/05) Apple announced <a href="http://us.ft.com/ftsuperpage/superpage.php?news_id=fto101120051906592780&referrer_id=yahoofinance">record numbers</a> and amazing profits. A third of Apple's revenue comes from iPod sales. So Apple takes the music/media business very seriously. Today Steve Jobs <a href="http://news.com.com/Apple+unveils+video+iPod%2C+new+iMac/2100-1041_3-5893863.html">unveiled</a> a new video iPod along with a new complementary version of iTunes that allows people to buy music videos. To top all this Walt Disney and Apple Computer have reached an agreement under which ABC and Disney Channel television shows will be available for download from iTunes for $1.99 per episode. Apple is clearly on a media roll.<br /><br />All this is beautiful, Right?<o:p></o:p><br /><br />Not really. Microsoft astutely chose this moment to settle its problems with RealNetworks in a two-part deal under which Microsoft pays $460M in cash to RealNetworks to settle the antitrust claims and $301M in cash to support RealNetworks' music and games efforts. Microsoft will recoup money by earning credits (amounts were not disclosed) for each Rhapsody subscriber referred through MSN. RealNetworks will support MSN Search and Microsoft will be a huge channel for RealNetworks music and also assist in the performance of RealPlayer on Windows. Here is another big win for RealNetworks: users of MSN Messenger will be able to play music from the Rhapsody catalog of 1 million songs while chatting. More details on this deal can be found <a href="http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=172300189">here</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bottom line:</span><br />Apple has iTunes the leading online music store, as well as iPod the leading digital music player. I hate to say it but the benefit of the M$FT/RealNetworks alliance is interoperability and openness. The truth is that Apple's strategy is based on customer lock-in (in fact I am one of those locked-in customers). Apple does all it can to make sure people who buy music via iTunes play it on the iPod. Can they continue to do this and maintain market leadership? Microsoft and RealNetworks beg to differ. Let’s see how all this media business unfolds and what role will Yahoo and AOL play in this battle. So stay iTuned... or not.<br /> </p>Omar Tazihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08918531580818540651noreply@blogger.com124