All things general

SOA Pattern Books

25 Monday Nov 2013

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Just as I wrap up the tech reviewing of one book, Packt invite me to start another. This time a book has the working title of SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform (no link yet – too early). This is certainly going to be a substantial book with about 12 chapters running to about 50 pages per chapter (certainly for the first 4 chapters). Unlike a lot of the more functional Oracle books I’ve seen from Oracle this is low on graphics and screen shots and high on textual content.

So far the book has given me cause to stop and think hard about the points the author is trying to make and then demonstrate. In some respects like the definitive texts by Thomas Erl, however where Erl is solution agnostic, this book is trying to bring the patterns to life through placing them into a scenario and describing the challenges and implementation approaches in terms of the Oracle platform, particularly BPEL, Mediators, rules engines and SCA (i.e. Oracle SOA Suite). I have laughed, as I found the book referencing back to Apache Camel.

All of this does mean that the review process is more time consuming than I had anticipated, if the review feedback is taken then I think it will have been a very worthwhile experience. Watch this space, and I’ll blog on this one once we see the final copy, if not before.

Art of the Conference Session

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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Presentation conference OOW

I am fortunate enough to work for a company who is prepared to fly its staff across the Atlantic to attend a conference – which means I’m at one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) IT conference in the world – Oracle Open World.

Day 1 is a bit of a precursor with all the sessions being driven by various user groups. With about 30 sessions running at anyone time today it’s a job just to work out which sessions to attend.

This gives me my 1st observation of the day – if session is a panel based then say in the title. I attended one session that was meant to cover the development ecosystem, with the expectation of either getting a better handle on tooling around development of things like PL/SQL or perhaps the adoption of more contemporary tooling such as Maven or Git. What happened we heard was a conversation between a couple of panelists which really left me thinking that a lot of Oracle development is still in the dark ages technically, didn’t really appreciate what Agile says about documentation and the world was either agile or waterfall – the fact that Oracle Unified Methodology (OUM) is a derivative of the iterative RUP model.

The second observation is, tell me something don’t just throw facts at me with just slides full of bullets, you won’t hold people’s attention. In fact one session resulted in people walking out in droves.

That said, we also saw some very good presentations, and in fact these tended to keep amount amount of slide content down, but there is a narrative, building and emphasising key points. The presenter spoke with an intonation that showed that they where presenting because it was a subject they cared about and wanted to share their understanding, not because they want kudos for appearing.

The last lesson, is declare whether slides etc will be made available, so you have people’s full attention, rather than them bashing at their mobile devices making unnecessary notes. Although this sounds counter intuitive to the previous point you can enrich the slides with notes, to support later slide review.

SQL Static Code analysis for MySQL

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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analysis, app, code, MySQL, sql

With MySQL now capable of features such as stored procedures and functions the need for tooling to support SQL code quality is greater than ever. A number of tools provide editors with syntax support and all the fancy features you’d expect from a modern IDE (see Toad as a leading product).

However the means to assess the quality of the procedures or scripts written for MySQL or the divergence from ISO standards doesn’t exist, although plenty of options exist for T-SQL (MS SQL Server), PL/SQL (Oracle) and even some tooling for DB2 and Informix.

The value of the static analysis tool means you can implement quality measures, controls and reporting through Continuous Integration tooling such as Jenkins, Sonar etc. All of which is a little ironic when you consider a lot of energy in CI (and Continuous Delivery appears to come from the open source community) which usually supports MySQL as one of the 1st options for databases.

Does this mean there is a gap in the market? Such capabilities dont seem to be in the MySQL WorkBench roadmap. Would love to know what people think?

Of course if you can support MySQL, then the offshoots such as MariaDB wouldn’t be too difficult.

The Waze Way

02 Monday Sep 2013

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satnav, Waze

I have recently been introduced to the Sat Nav app Waze with its social capabilities that users to update the maps with events such as traffic jams, accidents speed cameras and so on.

This weekend, we went away and as my wife has the family car, she tends to do the driving – great I can have a beer. But on the long motorway runs I get bored and nod off, much to my wife’s disatisfaction. So this time I elected to keep from nodding off by comparing my wife’s car built in Sat Nav (which has data feeds on accidents etc) and Waze with its social feed information and its routing algorithms.

In terms of routing – the car and Waze are as good as each other, Waze might even have a slight edge as when we had to divert to avoid an accident it took us around a town’s high street where as the car took straight through the middle of a town with its particularly slow traffic.

The car did at least give us earlier warning of events ahead on the route we where following, although Waze allowed us to get a better sense of the severity of the issue based on the number of traffic jam reports, how old they where and so on.

What really was amusing was as a passenger I could sit looking for problems and broken down vehicles etc etc to report and pickup points (given I told friends given I travel a lot more I’d have to outstrip them on the social scoring soon).

This got me to thinking, what stops something like Waze from being extended to keeping the children entertained with a ‘car bingo’ or ‘eye spy’ given that children could add information to Waze to allow additional information and it be shared in the same manner as the serious stuff.

Book Review – MySQL Workbench: Data modelling & Development by Michael McLaughlin

02 Friday Aug 2013

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development, modeling, MySQL, Oracle, workbench

MySQL Workbench Data Modeling and Development

Having reviewed several books recently, and currently working on another book – I was offered the chance to look at MySQL Workbench: Data Modelling & Development by Michael McLaughlin which I took up as I was interested to know more about the Workbench tool (despite having worked with MySQL on and off for about 10 years, I’ve only really used command line and SQL editors or Eclipse plugins when working with MySQL).

From a pure readability perspective, this is undoubtedly technically well written. My difficulty with the book comes from the style, and presumed level of intelligence of the reader. The difficulty comes from several perspectives’ firstly the author can feel a little condescending, to illustrate my point on page 180 the book says ‘Select Schemata step (that’s a fancier word for the fancy word schema) ‘. Do you really need such a statement? Further the book spends the best part of the first 100 pages on walking through UI based installers for Windows 7, Linux (Debian and Fedora), and Mac OS X. Although the look and feel of these installers will differ slightly, aside from some of the environmental considerations (configuring your hosts file for example) the installation process is consistent enough (and obvious enough given it is UI wizards) to only need to explain the end to end process for one platform, and then just address the differences for the other platforms, not repeat the entire process. The only blessing in these first couple of chapters the author has thought to highlight a few common install issues and their resolutions (addressing my classic complaint people only think about the happy path). During the installation, the book makes reference to the use of DNS, but I don’t believe the use of DNS in a production environment is particularly well explained.

Having waded through to chapter 3 we can get started with the modelling aspect of the workbench. The chapter sets out first to explain some modelling concepts – starting with Object Orientation (OO) but doesn’t do a great job of it, starting out making reference to a number principles but then talking about the ‘principle of the one’, given my experience I did understand what the author was trying to express but, for someone experienced it could have been more simply expressed. after OO, Normalisation is explained, and what defines the different levels of normalisation, but not the mechanics that can be followed to go from the levels of normalisation (something I was taught over 20 years ago). Given that book talks about modelling, I had expected the book to at-least touched upon other modelling approaches used for delivering the needs of data warehousing (star schemas etc), but his didn’t even obtain an aside. Having spent nearly 100 image heavy pages on installation, all of these concepts are introduced in a single very text heavy chapter, which feels like we’ve swung too far the other way.

As the book goes on into development aspects it errs away from addressing SQL at all, and focuses entirely on designing with INNODB table behaviours. Admittedly INNODB is the common engine (and the default assumed behaviour when thinking about database tables) but isn’t the only table type. All of which is a shame as if you want to get the most out of MySQL the other table types have their value and benefits.

So, what value does the book bring. Well for a student learning about databases for the 1st time (hard visualize when you think how pervasive the technology is today – even smart phones carry DBs now) this book along with a good guide on SQL and you’d be well on your way to getting some practical experience with MySQL. to be honest the book would have setup far better expectations if it had been called MySQL Workbench for Dummies. For the seasoned engineer who has worked with MySQL, understands database design then you might want to think twice about getting this book; that said I did pickup a few useful titbits – but getting them was hardwork.

Useful Links for the book:

Oracle Press URL http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0071791884.html
Michael McLaughlin’s blog (author) http://blog.mclaughlinsoftware.com/
Book at Amazon co.uk

Java EE 7 Development with Netbeans videos

02 Friday Aug 2013

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Heffelfinger, JavaEE, netbeans, Packt, video

Java EE Development with NetBeans 7 [Video]

Earlier this year I reviewed some videos by David Heffelfinger on Java EE Development with Netbeans 7 . I’m pleased to say that the videos have now become publicly available on the Packt site – http://www.packtpub.com/java-ee-development-with-netbeans-7/video The videos come in neat bite sized chunks that allow you review how to do a particular task, with the videos back to back providing a solid joined up view of a range of activities using a common set of examples. I’d recommend checking them out if you want to know more about either Netbeans or common web development approaches with Java 7.

David also has a book out on the subject of Java EE 6 with Netbeans as well http://www.packtpub.com/java-ee-6-development-with-netbeans-7/book and his author page at packt – http://www.packtpub.com/authors/profiles/david-heffelfinger

Amusing paper article from Oz

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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humour, Newspaper

PERTH – An SAS trooper collecting toys for children was stabbed when he helped stop a suspected shoplifter in east Perth . The ‘Toys-R-Us’ Store Manager told ‘The West Australian’ that a man was seen on surveillance cameras last Friday putting a laptop under his jacket at the store.

When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, pulled a knife and ran toward the door. Outside were four SAS Troopers collecting toys for the “Toys For Tots” program. Smith said the Troopers stopped the man, but he stabbed one of them in the back. Fortunately the cut did not appear to be severe.

The suspect however was transported by ambulance to the Royal Perth Hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, possible broken ribs, multiple contusions, and assorted lacerations including a broken nose and jaw … Injuries he apparently sustained when he tripped whilst trying to run away. One of the Troopers said, “He was a clumsy bastard.”

Review of Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g – Chapter 12

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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This is the final chapter of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g, and unlike e rest of the book looks forward as to where Event Processing might go (and therefore Oracle) as well as a few observations on the Oracle solution itself. The obvious potential for Oracle is to bring the CEP tooling into JDeveloper rather than an Eclipse plugin as is presently the case.big JDeveloper gets the suggested changes (the book has no apparent link to Oracle product road map) would result in a more wizard centric approach to development.

In terms of technology approaches the only other major point made is the likely harmonization with SOA principles. What did surprise me is that the link to BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and BPM (Business Process Monitoring) wasn’t made despite the ever shrinking gap between business views onto data such that a business would be able to respond to to analysed events rather than BI reports well after the event. The most fascinating piece of this chapter is the relationship between CEP and Big Data (Hadoop etc) and the idea CEP could filter out data, or use Hadoop as a data source.

The rest of the chapter focuses more on possible directions for event processing in general, such as smart homes, cheaper devices feeding back more data allowing dynamic management and tracking of objects such as shipping containers and predictive analytics.

A well written chapter, but then by now you’d expect nothing less, but perhaps not as informative as the rest of the book, but then this chapter is far more speculative.

Overall Alexandre Alves, Robin J. Smith and Lloyd Williams should be very proud of the book and I hope that it sells well. As I said previously, this maybe geared to the Oracle product, but the way it has been written you could take the concepts and ideas and you could be confident of having some solid foundation understanding on any CEP solution.

Useful Links

Review of Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – chapters 10 & 11

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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11g, book, CEP, events, Oracle, Packt, packtpub, review

The penultimate chapters don’t dive into the core Event Processing technology but look at some uses cases and the combination of CEP with Oracle’s spatial extensions and database capabilities. My initial reaction was that these chapters are perhaps more niche than I’d want, but when I thought a little longer it occurred to me that a lot of CEP use cases would include make use of spatial. Intact a system development I lead some years ago, if built today could be built using these features.

The book focuses on the idea of notifying people about a public transport service, but think about the great many mobile services evolving for smart phones given their push notification capability now you can see how e spatial features could offer a lot of value.

The chapters like everything else in this book are very well written, and worth reading.

If anything the questions left in my mind, are more commercial dimensions of such a technology – enterprise Oracle database which contains a number of the special feature is not cheap, and I’d imagine that the spatial cartridge isn’t cheap. This leads me to a natural next question, given the common application scenarios like e one described, has anyone stood up a SaaS service using this technology, and how cost effective/competitive/attractive would it be?

As you can see a thought provoking book.