Where’s the Document Object?

The problem with CIS was that as a design it was, forgive me, a little weird.  It’s not that it didn’t work, it actually worked pretty well in most situations, but there were a couple of oddities.

• It  has what you might call and easy-to-use command pattern that hid underyling service calls from the application.  So for instance you would call if you wanted to make a DOC_INFO service call, you’d call the getDocumentInformationAPI method.  Not the end of the world, but also not really an intuative API for UCM.  I think the reason was that this pattern fit much better in Java web app and so it was designed a little more for that rather than as just a standard Java API.
• Because you’re working with strict objects, it makes it sort of tough to call new services, like Site Studio ones, directly.  There is a work around, which involves using what’s called the administrative API(sort of the base API for the whole thing).  Typically I’ve  just used this for all my calls,(and incidentally it would then look a lot like RIDC code), but looking at all of CIS, it just seems like you needed a lot of different classes to do really the same thing, make service calls.
• If you crack open the CIS jar, you’ll find that there’s a slightly loco version of Spring in there(based on 1.5 I think) along with a modified classloader.  I’ve only run in to issues in one location(you know who you are), but with all that extra code in there, I’ve always been hesitant to use it with other Spring versions for fear of class conflicts.
• Inside of UCM there’s already a Java API called the jspserver.jar.  It’s about 5-6 classes total, allows you to call any service, uses objects that look and acts very much like normal Content Server objects.  I’ve based all my remote API’s on it(.NET and ActionScript)..it was such a simple and elegant design, I always wondered why the CIS people never talked to the jspserver people.  Well that’s pretty much what RIDC is.

And here’s some code.

Since code samples always make for exciting reading, lets jump right in with some examples.

Here’s the example included in the CIS developer manual for how to make a DOC_INFO call.

//get the active API
SCSActiveAPI activeAPI = m_cisApplication.getUCPMAPI().getActiveAPI();

//create a document object
ISCSDocumentID documentID = (ISCSDocumentID) m_cisApplication.getUCPMAPI().createObject(ISCSDocumentID.class);

//set the dID
documentID.setDocumentID("10");

//make the call, get the doc response
ISCSDocumentInformationResponse docResponse = activeAPI.getDocumentInformationAPI ().getDocumentInformationByID(m_context, documentID);

//and there's the content
ISCSContent content = docResponse.getDocNode();

What do you think?  Granted I copied the CIS example out of the doc and it’s not a prefect one-to-one comparison to the RDIC one I’m about to show you(designed for a web environment where the connection is already established), but doesn’t that seem like a lot of casting and nested objects?  I know I’m complaining about code looking too complicated, but seriously try to explain that to someone.  It really just doesn’t even look like UCM.

Take a look at the same call with RIDC…..way simpler, and I think if you understand UCM at all, it follows a rather intuitive flow. If you’ve done any Java component development, you’re learning curve should be near nil.

//create the client manager
IdcClientManager idcClientManager = new IdcClientManager();

//and then create a client to the content server
IntradocClient client = (IntradocClient)idcClientManager.createClient("idc://localhost:4444");

//create a binder object
DataBinder binder = client.createBinder();

//add our service values
binder.putLocal("IdcService","DOC_INFO");
binder.putLocal("dID","10");

//and make the call...too easy.
ServiceResponse response = client.sendRequest(new IdcContext("sysadmin"), binder);


Binders, putLocal methods and clients…everything you’d expect in a remote API.  You can call any service; custom ones and new ones added via components like Site Studio and other Oracle add-ons are all there.  I haven’t opened up RDIC yet, but check out how much smaller the new API is vs it’s older sibling.

I’m not going to rush out and re-factor all of my CIS-based applications, I can solidly say I’ve moved on for future projects.  I have a couple of portal examples forthcoming and hope to have some RIDC in there, so check back soon.

Fedora the Explorer

When you start out creating a new blank instance, Amazon provides several templates to start with.  As you can see from the list though they all appear to be either Fedora or Windows(towards the bottom). I’m not sure of your experiences, but as far as the elements of a UCM instance(Web server, UCM and the database) go, the database can be the trickiest of all of them.  And also for me to consider this a complete install, I really wanted to have Oracle Text Search running, which requires an 11G database.

I am pretty sure that a Windows VM would have worked for all of this, but it’s more expensive per hour and if I’m honest it felt a bit like cope out since it’s so much easier to work with.  I really wanted this to all run on a Linux box, so rather than take the easy road I decided to give the Fedora install a shot.

Unfortunately Amazon Fedora template my not have been the best choice to begin with.  I’m sure I would have gotten it at some point, but the workarounds combined with the oddities of Amazon’s template kept sending me down some rabbit holes.  It was a lovely Sunday afternoon, surely there’s a better Linux instance for this little proof of concept than Fedora?

So I cheated

It turns out that besides Windows or even Fedora, there is a much, much better option.  And after an hour or so of dealing with my Fedora issues I decided to use a very clever tool to research the best way to do this install.

Oracle, as I soon discovered, is already way ahead of me in setting up their database in the cloud.  There’s a whole bunch of documents about the subject, a FAQ page, a wiki and most importantly several machine images anyone with an EC2 account can use.

You’ll find the Oracle images on the community tab when you create a new instance in the AWS console.  There are a bunch, but if you search for Oracle, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

When you SSH in for the first time, a script runs that will takes you through the DB setup and configuration.  The script seemed a bit light, so I think the VM might really be just intended for demo purposes.  Anyone familiar with the near innumerable number of options in a DB install will find this a bit light.  For folks like myself though who’d rather get on with other things than ASM backup configurations…it’s just about perfect.

How much does a Gazillion processor licenses for Oracle cost?

For a very long time Oracle didn’t really allow customers to licence by virtual procssor.  Organizations who planned on running on virtual machines had to purchase a license for every processor on the host system(the exception being IBM PowerVM as you can isolate processors to an lpar).  That policy, at least towards some vendors like Amazon has changed

For the purposes of licensing Oracle programs in the Cloud environment, customers are required to count each virtual core as equivalent to a physical core. This policy applies to all programs available on a processor metric.

When I saw that right off the first thing I thought when I started down the road of running UCM on an Amazon VM was “Great! pay for one processor license and then run it on the cloud across thousands of servers.  Silly Oracle how could they not have seen that huge loop hole”.  Yeah…not so much.

The thing is that Amazon commoditizes it’s processor power into things called compute units.  Virtual processors are then made up of these compute units.

One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor

So even though you’re running on the cloud, you’re supososably isolated off to your own little share of the processing power.  Besides IO, what’s really the advantage then?  If the processors or the same(or worse really) than anything you’d bring on house, why bother?  Well all is not lost..there definitly are still some serious advantages from a licensing perspective

1. According to the Oracle doc a virtual core is equivalent to a physical core.  Though my little sample VM had only one virtual core with one compute unit, there are a number of hosting packages where virtual cores house as much as 3.25 compute units.
2. Have you tried to purchase a server with one processor lately?  They just aren’t available, even the single processor servers have 2-4 cores.  With Amazon you could run a cluster of four one processor servers and get exactly what you want.
3. UCM is notoriously light and efficient; even more so now that verity is out of it.  Over and over again it’s continually made me look like a genius during load tests on hardware I wouldn’t run this blog on.  I think one of my next posts will be on where I think the real UCM sizing should be.  I just don’t see it needing a ton of processor power.  IO perhaps, which you should have a lot of, but not processor.

In addition to all of that, there should be a huge savings for you from the hosting perspective.  Frankly if you’re budgeting for UCM implementation and planning to run it on Amazon, hosting is effectively free.  To run the current instance I have out there right now, it will cost me $227.50 per year.  For the most expensive instance possible (64bit, 32gb of ram, 13 virtual cores), it would cost $6370 annually.  Bandwidth is even more comically cheap: $.15 per GB for the first 10 Terrabytes, after that it drops to $.11 per GB for the next 40 and so on.

Well can we see it?

I’m going to leave my virtual machine up for a bit.  If you email me I’ll give you the link to take a look…I’m not sure if it still counts as a developer license if I post the URL publicly.

So far there’s no content other than Site Studio; I think I’m going to set up a quick site and run some tests for that follow up post on scaling.  Check back and I’ll share the results.

There was of course some excitement for Solaris, but really it’s pretty clear that Java was the buy:

Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

Oracle really isn’t just a database company any more.  They really haven’t been that for some time, but now they are a software company that also sells a database.  The fact is that they now own the language and ultimately the platform of which many of the best selling enterprise applications are built on.  That fact would actually be a little more interesting to think about if they had not already purchased  all of the best selling enterprise applications already.

Who’s Next

I really know nothing about who or what Oracle wants to acquire(in fact I don’t think I could know less), but how much sense does Red Hat make?  Red Hat is just about the gold standard in Linux distros(I don’t want to hear it Ubuntu fans, I’m talking servers), plus they get the last real application server out there that doesn’t have “sphere” in the name and they, like Sun, are major, major proponents of open source technologies.

It’s really crazy…Java.com will be an Oracle site….wow…double wow.

Our session is called “5 Rules to Optimize Your Website for SEO, ROI, and New Site Creation” and is scheduled for 2:30, Tuesday March 31 in room 113A.  You’ll have to attend to find out what the five rules are, but from a high level we’ll be delving in to some of the concepts that can make a large scale enterprise web content management implementation be successful.

If you’re looking for a preview.  Molly and I did a webinar with Oracle for their “Thriving through Expansion” series a few weeks ago.  It’s available for download here.  The password is Oracle1(I hope I’m not giving away a secret with that).

I’ll be at AIIM both Tuesday and Wednesday, so if anyone would like to meet up, please shoot me an email.  I’ll also probably start twittering again(something that only seems to happen at conferences).

Hope to see some of you there.

A little background

In Site Studio there are two types of pages;  Primary pages, which are essentially the landing pages for a folder(think home, search and listing pages).  They are almost always named index.htm and what’s unique about them is that when they are called they only refence specific content items.  Secondary pages, which could be viewed as everything else in a folder differ as they are used in more of traditional templated, delivery fashion, where the content is delivered through a reuseable template.  I butchering those descriptions a little for simplicities sack, but for the most part that’s how they work.

Out of the box, Site Studio lets you reference a content item using it’s content id in the url.  So if you had a content item called 000525, it would be referenced in a folder with it’s content id at the end(http://SiteStudio.com/site/folder/000525 for example).  Since all templates are mapped to thier folder, everything you need to render a page can be found in the URL…it’s all pretty simple.  The thing is, what if you aren’t too crazy about the 000525 name though?  It’s not really all that intuative of a name; you could make the content id friendly or you could use also take advantage of the SSUrlFieldName property in Site Studio.  The SSUrlFieldName property allows you to map a custom metadata field(perhaps one longer than the 30 characters you get for a content id?) as the file name idenifiier used when reference in a URL.

So content item 000525 can also have a metadata field tagged as “autofillthatfriendlyname.htm” and so when refereced as a url, it could look like this: http://SiteStudio.com/site/folder/autofillthatfriendlyname.htm.  That’s pretty cool, right?  There is a bit of a catch though, like the content id the value used in the friendly name field should be unique.  The only problem though is that there’s no automatic validation for the values, so there’s nothing to tell the contributor if they’ve duplicated a value.

What the component does

The code for this component is pretty simple, we’re hooking in to the validateCheckinData event and then basically updating whatever field is identified in the SSUrlFieldName property with a friendly name.  I like the validateCheckinData filter quite bit for situations like this where I need to update or add some metadata at check in or update time.  If I have to kick a process off or do something to a piece of content that has just been checked in, so after it’s in the system, I usually prefer the afterLoadRecordWebChange, but that’s probably for another post.

Getting back on track, once a piece of content is checked in which has a xWebsiteSection value(meaning it’s been assigned a default URL in a web site), it pulls the dDocTitle value out of the binder and makes it friendly(removes any spaces or special characters I could think of).  It then appends a file extension(set in the environmental config) and checks the value against the database.  If the friendly name has been used before on another content item it goes back and adds a 1 to the end of the title part of the file name(I know…not very imaginative).  Each time the component assembles a name it checks it against a max character count also found in the component’s enviornmental config.

Installing this puppy

The install on this component is not really unlike any other.  You of course do need to make sure Site Studio is installed on your content server and that the SSUrlFieldName property has been set in the config.cfg file.  I should note that when you set the SSUrlFieldName property, you need to leave the little x prefixing all custom metadata fields off.  So no xFieldName formats…just FieldName.  You probably will need to tell the component what the size of your friendly name field is.  It’s defaulted to 80 characters, so if you  plan on using less or more, you might want to update it in the component’s environmental config file.

You can download the component here:  Auto Fill Friendly Name

Take away all the acronyms for a moment and basically we are talking about a language and repository independent method for communicating with content management systems.

The CMIS standard will expose core/common ECM repository capabilities in an intentionally generic way. These will allow for applications to be constructed that can work with content residing in one or more ECM repositories, without having to understand implementation differences between the individual repositories or worrying about interface inconsistencies between the repositories.  From CMIS Part I – Introduction, General Concepts, Data Model, and Services

There it is.  Abstraction, it’s a thing of beauty.  Code to an interface not an implementation.  This is exactly what the industry has been needing for some time, a standardized method for interacting with a content repository.  No more APIs, hierarchical repositories or windows explorer plugins, just a simple http-based standard for managing content.

Why is this cool

You’re talking about Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Oracle, SAP(and many others) getting together and agreeing on a standard way of doing things.  Assuming they not only implement the standard in their content repositories, but leverage in their other applications(portals, email servers, databases, app servers, BPM apps, search engines, ERPs, etc) we could be looking at a new wave of interoperability in these systems.

Everyone uses the JDBC example for ECM standards because of the obvious similarities between a content repository and a database, but I always thought that it was way to optimistic of a goal.  All of these systems are so very different that it’s been hard to imagine a single standardized method for communicating with them.  A change like that would require all the vendors to get on the same page and agree on a single integration method..that seemed like a pipe-dream until last week.

Some questions though

At the risk of bringing down all the positive feelings on CMIS, I did have a couple questions as I read through the documentation:

• Nothing about workflow – I have never seen a content management system that lacks workflow or at least some sort of approval mechanisam.  Even if it’s just an approve and reject, I think if you’re going to support creating and updating content, you have to have a way to approve changes, otherwise you still have folks heading back to the CMS.
• CMIS SQL – CMIS will leverage a SQL-92 subset for querying content in the repository.  There will be a full text search as well, but SQL?  Perhaps it’s me but I feel like you query for data and search for content.  Search, like workflow, is something that most CMSs provide natively and very often the language of search is the Universal Query Syntax.  CMIS SQL seems like a tough integration to implement, as you’ll have to bypass the search engine and directly query the database, in addition to it being a great place to introduce a security hole.

Why Oracle Should(and probably is) ALL ABOUT THIS

I am also little surprised that EMC and IBM are the first companies mentioned on this standard, when, to me at least, it so clearly gives Oracle such a clear advantage.  Not to sound like a sales pitch, but Oracle’s 11g database right now is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to storing files.  You can compress them, encrypt them, cache them and de-duplicate them.  The functionality is known as SecureFiles and Oracle’s latest CMS offering, Universal Online Archive, as well as (and this is all based on rumor) the next version of UCM leverage SecureFiles by default.  As the content repositories becomes more decoupled, I really have a hard time seeing how Oracle doesn’t end up just owning that space.  Get ready for SharePoint, powered by Oracle and CMIS.

And the wait begins

I’m a consultant, so like many of the current and potential CMS customers out there, I’m now starting the waiting game to see where this goes.  Open Source ECM vendor Alfresco apparently has already developed their CMIS integration, we’ll see how long it takes the other vendors to follow suit.  The real fun part will actually not be when the content management systems begin implementing the service, but when the other applications begin supporting it’s consumption.  This should be a lot of fun.

Happy Blog Anniversary

So it’s been a year since I “really” started the blog.  The URL and some amount of content has been out here really for two years, but the ContentOnContentManagment.com you know began about a one year ago in September.

I am not sure how to evaluate the “success” of a blog, but writing and maintaing this thing has been an extremely rewarding and also challenging endeavor.  I’ve met quite a few nice people across the globe and also engaged in some great discussions.  All I can say is that it’s been great fun and I look forward to another year of writing.  Thanks very much for reading if you do, I hope you’ve gotten something out of it it, I know I have from your participation.

So What Have You Been Doing?

For the past few weeks I have to admit to a small obsession with anything related to the Large Hadron Collider.  The collider, which while I write this is hours away from being started up, is the gigantic 17 mile long science experiment out in Geneva.  My interest started of course with all the doomsday stuff, I mean how can you ignore something like that?  I started doing some reading and now I am just hooked on it.  I’m still a little freaked, but wow some of the things they are going to discover are just incredible.

One possible outcome for the CERN LHC….this is a joke

 
The reality is that the LHC is aimed at discovering new things, and when you’re doing that it’s always easy for other to point out that there’s an unknown.  Just from a personal perspective(and I know nothing about physics), I have to imagine particles end up colliding all the time, if it was possible to spawn off planet eating black holes that way I am sure we’d see quite a few more black holes around then we do now.  Thats the general crux of the LHC team’s argument, in addition to the massive amount of research and science backing their predictions.  I could be wrong, they could be wrong, but I’m onboard…good luck to those LHC folks today.

Oracle OpenWorld

OpenWorld is just around the corner and I’m pumped.  Like last year, I’m planning on posting the daily log of what I am seeing.  I may also twitter, we’ll see how that goes…Perhaps this year there will be pictures, who knows.

While I’m out there I am hoping to meet some of you, so definitely shoot me an email if you’re going to be there.

One of the responses though came from a member of the Oracle UCM team and they had some great info that was definitely worth sharing:

• Apparently the answer to the title question, “JCR for UCM when did that happen?” is just before the end of the 4th quarter.
• The API is indeed a wrapper on top of CIS and it implements all of the JSR-170 (Level One) specifications.
• At the time of our email exchange last week, there was a new version coming out.  And then later in the week it arrived.  You can download it right off of OTN, under the document management section:  http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/content-management/index.html
• There are a number of nice ADF components that “just work” with UCM.  Probably more to come on that.  I’m also told that the new JDeveloper version is worth checking out, nothing explicitly in the email about it, but the components might be in there.

It was hiding there is plain site for, well I am not sure how long, I guess I just missed the memo on that one.  Very interesting though.  For those of you who are curious about what a JCR is, it stands for Java Content Repository and though it uses the word “Repository” it’s really more of a connector.  The big thing about it is that it’s a Java standard, specifically the JSR-170 standard actually.

BEA(now Oracle) WebLogic as well as WebCenter(the flagship portal of the Oracle fleet) both communicate to content management systems using a JCR.  UCM and before that Stellent have both traditionally not provided a JCR, rather they provided a pretty robust API known as the Content Integration Suite.  From the new document(and of course it’s location) it appears that the JCR is more or less a wrapper on top of CIS.

The Swiss are Clever

The JSR-170 standard has an interesting history.  It was submitted by Day, a CMS vendor out in Switzerland.  Thier content managment system(and I may be messing this up a little) Communique, leverages a proprietary content repository called CRX which of course is a JCR(and most likely the first).  The thing about Day though is that they are Swiss, and so very clever.  While many CMS vendors had interesting and/or creative content repositories, Day not only touted theirs as the best, they also submitted it as a Java standard.

Since then a number of other vendors began supporting the standard.  Apache released Jackrabbit, I think Vignette uses it too, but really when BEA started adopting it in Weblogic, it became quite a bit more credible.  The Day team and of course the standards committee has since updated it, there’s now a new version known as JSR-283, though I have not seen much use yet.

My Somewhat irrational dislike of the JCR standards

I really don’t like the JCR standards and my reasons really aren’t all that good.  There’s nothing technically wrong with them.  I think they are somewhat on the simple side, but honestly for a standard simple is probably better.  My problem really stems from the fact that they are Java based in a multi-language world.  Having a CMS with a standards-based connector that oh-by-the-way only works in Java, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  All of your content consumers must then be in Java, and that just really limits the whole “Enterprise” piece of the Enterprise Content Management system.

The unfortunate thing I would see though was that many CMS vendors would market their support of the JCR standard as a sort of money back guarantee for buying their product.  ”Go ahead and buy our CMS and if you don’t like it you can just switch it out with another, we support the JSR-170 standard”.  While of course that was technically true from a 10k foot level, I am sure the reality of the implementation was much different from the sales presentation.  Of course overcoming the “money back guarantee” argument with “the standard should not be Java-specific” never went over very well though.

Things are looking good

Despite my somewhat irrational dislike, I am pretty excited about this new connector.  There are a number of applications that support JCRs(though most of them serve like UCM), including a Spring module.  In addition it looks like there may be some movement on getting a “Service-like” standard for content repositories and actually we would have the JCR to thank for it.  Back in December, BEA filed a patent for a JDBC-like services wrapper for the JCRs.  Though many folks weren’t too crazy about the fact that they filed a patent instead of just releasing a connector, I think this is a pretty positive move.  Oracle obviously owning BEA won’t hurt the future UCM integration either I’m sure.

The Register has learned from individuals close to the company that BEA’s new owner Oracle is merging the AquaLogic and WebLogic professional service teams. Oracle is also splitting the AquaLogic products between “web products” – user interaction, collaboration and the Web 2.0 suite – and AquaLogic business process management (BPM).

So no big surprises there, merging the professional services for Web and AquaLogic makes a great deal of sense(shouldn’t BEA have done that already??).  And the “splitting” of Web Products and BPM probably just means those products are being aligned with similar groups within Oracle.

What really got my attention though was:

It is understood the web products may be taken over by the Oracle team running Stellent content management, acquired by Oracle in November 2006

So the UCM team might get AquaLogic?  Wow, that’s a bit of a surprise.  I personally had not given AquaLogic’s future a lot of thought, figuring their product teams would continue to operate as normal much as Stellent’s did.  There’s of course a big “may” in that quote though, for all we know officially they could be getting ready to launch SQL Developer Web 2.0 Portal.

It’s a little funny for me actually as one of the first Stellent projects was actually a Stellent/PlumTree implementation.  At the time they were both relatively smaller companies with some pretty cool ideas and applications.  It’s crazy that they could become part of the same product line now.  Amazing how quickly things change.

Oracle Universal Content Portal?

With that little tid-bit comes the game of what-ifs.  I’m actually working on a project right now using both ALUI and UCM/Site Studio, so this news has really peeked my interest.  Up until now I’ve more or less figured that the BEA applications would become part of Fusion-Middleware, probably joining forces with their Oracle counterparts.  Oracle has made it pretty clear that they intend on developing integrations for all applications within the middleware stack, but if AquaLogic becomes a part of UCM could we expect a more unified solution?  

Could ALUI become the new presentation layer for UCM?  For Site Studio?  We’re probably a little way out from hearing, much less seeing anything, but I’m actually pretty excited about the BEA buy now.