Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Analize This Business Rule!

Last week I attended a session in which the new-to-come SOA Suite 11g was being presented by Clemens Utschig-Utschig to Oracle Partners as well as internal employees.

Many great new things to come, like:
  • One integrated SOA Suite
    Regarding the versions up to 10.1.3 the SOA Suite consists of (at least) four different products (BPEL, ESB, BAM, OWSM) that happen to be on one installation CD and 'coincidentally' get all installed during one installation. With 11g this will have changed, from an architectural point of view as well as presentation-wise. For example, ESB will have become part of the infrastructure of the SOA Suite (taking care of routing requests to services), rather than a component on its own. And instead of four different consoles (that not only look like they have been created by independent teams, but probably are as well) there will be one integrated console.
  • Many enhancements regarding versioning, deployment and unit-testing of services.
  • Multiple BPEL processes in one project (and the possibility to drill down from one BPEL process to subprocesses)
Just to name a few.

One thing that I have not mentioned but for some reason want to point out in particular, is the fact that JDeveloper 11g will have the Rule Author of Oracle Business Rules integrated in the IDE. That's right folks, with 11g you will be able to connect to and maintain a rules repository using a Swing client rather than the current web client. Clemens did not demo that, so I can't tell you much about how that works, but at least it looked promising. Can't wait to get my hands on that!

But at the same time it raised the question what this means for having a 'stand-alone' Rule Author aiming at business analysts that (given the promise of rule engines and introducing agility to business rules with that) you would expect to be an important user group of rules engines. Not that I have seen that work in practice yet, but that is the promise. Will that disappear, meaning that we have concluded that we want business analysts keep their hands off rules repositories, at least not as long as Oracle Business Rules is concerned?

Fortunately, we seem to be working on a browser-based rule authoring tool as well, aiming at business analysts or any other user that for some reason you do not want to get starting to use JDeveloper. Off course, priorities, hurricanes or Bush eating a pretzel can change that any second, but I have not given up hope for business rules and agility yet!

1 comment:

victorculver said...

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