Oracle Java Cloud event 1st Septembre in Geneva

Tuesday, the 1^st of September, we attended an Oracle’s Java Cloud Platform as a Service demonstration in Geneva. Presentation was organized by Arrow – Switzerland.

Presentation aims to show us new opportunities of development in the Cloud, and we were invited to attend several live demonstrations of these new Oracle products.

Java Cloud PaaS allows developers and managers to have a complete software factory platform that can follow full development lifecycle of an application. But, application, once finished can also be deployed and made directly available on the Internet by the same platform.

We can distinguish several layers in Cloud Services on the Internet. First, the Application with the well known “Software as a Service”, the Platform for “Database”, “Middleware”, “Analytics” and “Integration” as a service. And finally the Infrastructure for “Storage”, “Compute” and “Network” as a Service.

Oracle is present in all scope of Cloud Services, and by conjunction, Platform as a Service is both a prerequisite and complementary to Software as a Service.

In fact today’s Software as a Service Clouds could be based on Platforms as a Service, but, most important, PaaS, is the complementary to SaaS thanks to flexibility given by service providers.

Indeed, SaaS is used to be cheaper than PaaS, but most of the times is too rigid in terms of functionalities for customers and end-users.

Conversely, by just providing a exploitable platform, service providers allows their customers to develop their own application SaaS in top of a PaaS infrastructure. Other advantage of PaaS usage is the guaranty of an easy path for more scalability and product availability on the Internet.

As already explained, and “highest” Service in the could relies on “lower” ones in the stack of components. Therefore, Java Cloud Platform as a Service is based on Database, Messaging, Storage, Developer and Compute as a Service layers. Every time a new workspace is provisioned in Java Cloud as a Service, same provisioning is done for each underlaying services.

There are 2 PaaS for Java developments in Oracle’s Cloud. One directly called “Java Cloud Service” which includes access to a full featured Weblogic environment, plus access to virtual machine operating system (ssh). And the other, eponymous, with “SaaS extension” option.

This second Java Cloud Service, called SaaS extension, has a longer name but in fact is more restrictive. This other platform only provides a Weblogic container for an application, there is no way of acceding underlaying operating system, as all underlaying maintenance is performed directly by Oracle.

There are other technical restrictions to this platform, like the impossibility of using RMI socket/services, essentially for security reasons, because it remains a shared/mutualized environment.

On both of these Cloud services, Oracle provides full required tools for software development such as a source control platform GIT, and Maven repository. In order to access the Service, developers must install a Software Development Kit (SDK) inside their IDE.

There are 3 IDEs supported: Eclipse, Netbeans and JDeveloper.

Oracle announced theses Services are currently reserved for Oracle’s partners only. Pricing list is pretty clear, and you can find in official website: https://cloud.oracle.com/

However, for becoming an Oracle partner, a company must follow a long administrative process. In short, a new candidate must:

• Be in oracle partner network (opn Account)
• Have the FUDA (full use distribution agreement)
• + full use distribution addendum for cloud
• + resell rights for PaaS

And here, pricing is much much complicated to assess, because each step also has its own requirements.

To conclude I would say sessions were very interesting for Java2EE developers, to get some knowledges about evolution of such new tools and platform on the Internet. But it was also for me as a Jave2SE developer, because Oracle also announced similar platforms for JavaSE, eventually with possibility to use other application servers like Apache Tomcat or Jboss.

Finally I also would like to thanks all referents and staff for their good and appreciable presentations.

Philippe Schweitzer