• Ruby/JRuby on Rails on Oracle (proposed by me) — details how to use Ruby, JRuby and Rails on an all Oracle stack using Mix as a case study
• Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle E-Business Suite (proposed by Raimonds Simanovskis) — Raimonds showed Jake and me some of the Rails apps he’s been building on top of E-Business Suite — pretty cool stuff that I’m hoping we’ll be able to blog about soon.

The Ruby panel I’m on will be joined by Mark Driver, Gartner, Thomas Enebo, Sun Microsystems (and JRuby co-lead), David Koontz, Happy Camper Studios (of Monkeybars fame), Sarah Mei, Independent Programmer, and moi.

If you go, twitter me at rmanalan.

Our vision for OpenSocial is different from all the consumer based social networks that are currently using it to catch up to Facebook.  One of the first things we learned here at the AppsLab is that there is large pent-up demand for social applications within an enterprise.  A large organization like Oracle can be more productive when the social aspect to day-to-day business is made available to employees.  We saw this demand first hand when we built Connect and IdeaFactory last Summer.

For those who don’t know much about OpenSocial, all you need to know is that it’s a big deal for enterprises, but most people don’t know it yet.  Here’s why it’s not on the radar of most enterprises:

• OpenSocial was built to satisfy the need of existing social networks who need a way to allow users to plugin applications into their network — it’s not being built with enterprise requirements in mind (i.e., “enterprise class” security and provisioning, and other “enterprise” technology jargon) — and to me, that’s a blessing.  The biggest thing that slows down IT projects inside an enterprise is the loads of crap that developers have to follow.  In most cases, all of that is overkill.
• OpenSocial participation (right now) is mainly by those thinking about the consumer market — with the exception of SalesForce.com (another founding member).
• OpenSocial is in early adoption mode.

I like to think that we’re a forward thinking bunch at the Lab.  Paul and I have extensive experience with enterprise portal since we spent many years before this gig dealing with portals.  From my perspective, OpenSocial is what enterprise portals should have been.  OpenSocial will make it easy for employees within an enterprise to build and deploy their apps in a decentralized fashion.  Death to IT.

As we move closer to upgrading Connect with OpenSocial apps enabled, we’ll blog about it here to give you a glimpse of this vision.  We think it’s a big deal and hopefully once we have something to share, you will too.

JRuby is fast becoming a solid (and possibly preferred choice) for deploying Rails apps. Rich Manalang from Oracle will talk about how he and a small team from ThoughtWorks developed the first public deployment of JRuby on Rails (https://mix.oracle.co…) last November. He will go over JRuby basics, the advantages of deploying on JRuby, the differences between JRuby and MRI, and run through several deployment options.

If you go, please introduce yourself.

We applied a ton of goodness on this latest update.  Under the hood, we upgraded to JRuby 1.1RC2 (which was just recently released (on Saturday!) — yeah, we’re blazing trails here.  We also upgraded a bunch of underlying libraries like ActiveRecord-JDBC, JREXML, Goldspike and a few others.  The JRuby 1.1RC2 upgrade was a big boost in performance.  Last week, I spent some time running some Apache Bench tests on my MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz/4Gb mem) and saw some AMAZING numbers.  Here’s a summary:

After running Apache Bench with 1000 requests (for my profile page) with a concurrency level of 100 (ab -n 1000 -c 100), I get these numbers:

Server Software:        Oracle
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8888Document Path: /user_profiles/10023-rich-manalang
Document Length:        100 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.920769 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      1000
Total transferred:      549000 bytes
HTML transferred:       100000 bytes
Requests per second:    112.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       892.077 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       8.921 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          60.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

One thing to remember with these numbers… I ran this test on my laptop. Yes, I know what you’re saying… my laptop kicks your laptop’s arse. Regardless, these numbers look very good — here are a different set of stats for comparison.  For those interested, my Rails app was configured with the Goldspike default of 4 JRuby processes max-active and 2 min-idle.  I ran these against Oracle OC4J 10g, but the numbers look the same with Jetty and Glassfish. Charles Nutter one of the guys behind JRuby has a great write up on what’s next for JRuby.  It’s a great read if you’re considering JRuby for your next project.

Ok… so, for those who don’t care about the guts that run Mix, here’s a list of the other changes we’ve applied:

• New logged in homepage — this slick new home page is smart.  It delivers you topics that are relevant to you based on the tags and products you’ve specified on your profile.
  
• New post image identifiers — Jake didn’t like my handcrafted vote box from the last release (he said it looked like a Kleenex box… bastard), so I switched to the more standard “Vote” button.  I hope we don’t offend any non-”red-white-blue” users — if we do, sound off in the comments.  Here are the three post images… can you guess which is for which?
  
• More feeds! — Anthony’s added more feeds.  Anywhere you see that little orange button, click on it to subscribe to the feed for that view.
• Groups you may be interested in — Anthony whipped up a nice feature that looks at the tags and products you specified on your profile and matches it with groups you may want to be a part of.

We’re not stopping there.  Justin K and his crew have lots of features they want… so, we’ll be busy with that and lots of other enhancements in the next few weeks.  If you haven’t done so, get in the Mix. Oh, and if you have a feature you absolutely want, sound off in the comments or, better yet, put in an idea in the Mix group.

The other big feature we rolled out last night is a revamped Group view. We decided to go with the “river of information” organization of ideas, questions and messages (which are basically blog posts). Now you’ll see ideas, questions, and messages intertwined in a single view ordered initially by how recently active they’ve been. Messages can now have comments. This makes it very easy to create a group blog within Mix (RSS feed support within groups is a few days away). We’ve got more work to do with filters and additional sorting capabilities, but for now, you should be able to get a good grasp of what’s going on inside a group. Here’s what that looks like:

Here are some other notable changes included in last night’s update:

• Small photo cards — most photo thumbnails now have names on them (like in the picture above)
• Employee “Badges” — Oracle employees are much easier to spot within Mix, now that they’re branded with the unmistakable . Here’s Jake’s profile card:
  
• Pagers galore — we’ve fixed a number of issues around our ajax based pagers (if you don’t know what those are, don’t worry about it). Plus we’ve added pagers where it makes sense.

We’ve got more coming up this week. So, stay tuned and remember to vote — in Mix and in the Primaries!

Update: Rich and Anthony just deployed RSS feeds for groups, one for Recently Active and on one for Latest Topics. Check them out on the Oracle Mix group. So now, you can consume feeds for the latest ideas, the latest questions and for the recent and latest topics of any group, w00t!

Also, Carl asked about feeds for ideas and questions (APEX, natch) in comments. Those feeds are now fixed. Behold: the feed for Mix ideas and the feed for Mix questions.

Jake

• Jim’s PeopleSoft Journal — Jim Marion took my old job building sales demos… he’s a PeopleTools rockstar.  If you’re a PTools head, you definitely should subscribe to Jim’s blog.
• Grey Sparling — these dudes are the PeopleSoft reporting experts.
• PeopleSoft Tipster — a PeopleSoft blog by Duncan Davies
• Extra Hot — don’t left the name fool you… it’s work safe.  Joe Ngo’s got some good PeopleTools tips up his sleeves… check out the archives.
• PeopleSoft Corner — the name says it all.
• PSADMIN — another PTools focused blog with good tips on the PeopleSoft Portal.

If you have a PeopleSoft/PeopleTools blog that’s not mentioned here, sound off in the comments.

1. January 6th marked my 11th year at Oracle (8 w/PeopleSoft and 3 w/Oracle). Seems like a long time to be in a company. The cool thing is that I’ve managed to wear many different hats since starting here in 1997 — been a consultant, developer, manager, sales engineer, and product strategist. By far the best job has been my current job as a labbie here in the AppsLab.
2. I used to fly 2 seater Cesna 152s. Well, sort of. I had about 55 hours under my belt and was well on my way to getting my VFR licence, but Winter came a long and I lost interest — didn’t feel like flying in crappy weather — and I never picked it back up. Probably a good thing since my wife would not be happy if I took up flying again. So, now I fly RC sailplanes — the Bay Area is a great place to fly sailplanes.
3. I have a bachelors degree in Math, but really suck at it. I often find myself pulling out a calculator to work out simple additions and subtractions. I was always better at the abstract stuff.
4. I love to travel — although haven’t done much lately. I’ve been to: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, China, South Korea, The Philippines… and a few other places. I can’t wait to travel again.
5. I was in marching band in high school (I played the baritone horn). Even worse, I was the Drum Major — I can’t believe I’m announcing this on the internet. I wish I could get back into music. I tried a few years ago with the guitar, but failed — my fingers suck.
6. I have two older brothers (4 years apart) whose names also start with an “R” (Ray and Ron). My dad’s name is Robert. Don’t ask.
7. My wonderful wife and I have twin boys (almost 3 years old). I’m so thankful that the “terrible twos” are almost over. They rock my world… in a good way.
8. I suck at blogging, but you knew that already. That’s why we have Jake.

Ok, back to work. Jim Marion, Chris Heller, Paul Pedrazzi, and Anthony Lai… you’re it!

+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers          |  1825 |  1504 |      22 |     145 |   6 |     8 |
| Helpers              |   248 |   217 |       0 |      28 |   0 |     5 |
| Models               |   976 |   802 |      20 |     105 |   5 |     5 |
| Libraries            |   463 |   364 |       7 |      45 |   6 |     6 |
| Components           |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Integration tests    |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Functional tests     |  3904 |  3087 |      24 |      89 |   3 |    32 |
| Unit tests           |   771 |   604 |       1 |      10 |  10 |    58 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |  8187 |  6578 |      74 |     422 |   5 |    13 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
  Code LOC: 2887     Test LOC: 3691     Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.3

Those who have kept up with this blog, know about the internal social network we created inside the walls of Oracle; we call that Connect. For those who don’t know anything about Connect, it’s basically a skunk works project that became really popular — you can read more about it here. Connect’s success has opened the minds of many people within Oracle. Many people know the potential of the community and network effects that we’re seeing with the large social networks, but it really hasn’t been applied to enterprise communities yet. Several people at Oracle recognized this and so about 6 weeks leading up to Open World, the Mix project was approved by a few senior Oracle execs and hence was born. Paul, kicked it off and told us we had 6 weeks to have a working application by Open World. I almost had a conniption at that point. Connect took about 6 weeks for me to build (by myself), but to build a web application that had more features, be publicly facing, and had to run on a tech stack (our own) that we had no idea would work well, was just crazy. We didn’t have hardware, data center space, and had a ton of Oracle security, legal and other hurdles to work through — not including development resources. I knew at that point that we needed help to pull it together. Luckily, I knew about people like Ola Bini and ThoughtWorks. I knew that they were doing lots of work around JRuby, and I knew that they practice preach agile development practices. So, we met immediately. It was a perfect match.

The team was comprised of four developers from TW (Ola Bini, Alexey Verkhovsky, Toby Tripp, and Matt Wastrodowski) and me from the Oracle side. We also had a project manager (Mike Royle) who whipped us into shape at the end of every iteration. We started coding about 3.5 to 4 weeks before Open World. At that point, we still didn’t have hardware and there were a ton of unknowns surrounding JRuby running on the Oracle AppServer (and if it did, what performance would be like). We bit the bullet and went for it. Rails was an essential ingredient to this project. I don’t know of other frameworks that would have enabled us to build this particular application so rapidly. The beauty of Rails is the plugin system. We leveraged a whole slew of plugins that made tagging, comments, ratings, paginations, search, authentication, and other common features a simple feature to implement and manage.

We built most of Mix using the standard Ruby interpreter (aka, MRI — Matz’ Ruby Interpreter) on Oracle DB XE using Ruby-OCI. Developing Rails apps is still much easier using MRI because JRuby takes a while to startup. While developing on the Oracle DB, we encountered several issues with the Ruby-OCI adapter (the Ruby-OCI adapter is in need of some official Oracle support… more on that later). While most of the team was using MRI/OCI, I was working on getting hardware and configuring what we had. Once we finally got hardware (4 x 2 cpu-single-core, 12 gb mem, small HDs — yeah… crappy hardware that was on its way to being decommissioned), I spent several days working with the sys admins to get one box set up with Oracle DB 10g (I would have gone with 11g, but the DBAs who were going to support us weren’t up to speed on the configuration of 11g yet) and the other 3 boxes with Oracle Application Server 10g. The 3 app servers were configured to be load balanced by a BigIP layer 7 based load balancer. I set up jRuby and the necessary pieces to allow us to deploy easily on Oracle App Server… namely installing admin_client.jar, which is a CLI for managing the Oracle App Server.

One critical part of the project was to support Oracle’s SSO policy. Meaning every web app that we deploy has to support SSO using the Oracle SSO service. It took me a few days to figure out how all this worked but once we did, it wasn’t difficult to plug it into the acts_as_authenticated Rails plugin that we were using. If anyone is looking to do something like this, leave a comment and I’ll send you the code — maybe I’ll release it as an acts_as_authenticated_through_oracle_sso plugin if there are enough people doing this sort of thing.

After I had the boxes primed, we started doing early deploys on JRuby. The performance was terrible. About 20-40 reqs/sec on a single app server. Turns out that I didn’t have some of the production settings configured properly (i.e., not caching ruby classes, etc.) Once I modified a few environment settings (standard rails prod settings), I got about 80 reqs/sec on a single app server… better but not enough. At the same time, Ola and the JRuby team found some interesting bottlenecks in the JRuby code. Within in a day or two, Ola and team had them patched up and we were beginning to see around 150-200 reqs/sec. After the app server warmed up, things got real interesting… the numbers went way up (400-600 reqs/sec). *Disclaimer: I’m not a performance guru. I did most of my tests using Apache Bench running against the logged in home page of Mix, which btw, doesn’t use any fragment caching at all (actually, Mix is not making use of any caching right now — we’ll get to it eventually, but it doesn’t seem like we need it yet).

The 3.5 to 4 weeks leading up to Open World was nuts. I spent a ton of time taking care of deployment/hardware issues rather than coding. The rest of the team worked remotely (Toby and Matt in Chicago, Alexey in Calgary, Ola in London) which is sort of against the agile mantra, but it was done to cut cost. We communicated through Skype’s bookmarked chat feature which is an excellent tool if you need to work as an agile team remotely. The week before Open World, Toby, Matt and I rendezvoused in San Francisco and knocked out a ton of functionality. Even though we had a productive week leading up to Open World, we knew that the app would still need a lot of polish past go-live, but it’s amazing how much a small team working mostly remotely could accomplish in that short period of time.

This was an amazing project to be a part of. And one thing I’ll say is that for anyone working in a Java EE environment where you have to use the stack that’s there, the future is bright and it’s all because of JRuby, Rails, and the speed and agility at which you can build applications on that framework. I’m convinced that JRuby is the best way to deploy a Rails app if you need performance and flexibility. My prediction: next year will be the year for JRuby’s rise into the mainstream.

So, far the buzz on Oracle Mix has been good. Just some clarifications to Paul’s comments on Mix’s tech architecture… it’s running on Oracle Application Server, Oracle Database, Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle SSO, and jRuby on Rails. As far as I know, Mix is the first and largest public deployment of jRuby on Rails. The best part is that we made this happen in less than 5 weeks… with the help of the wonderful people at ThoughtWorks.

More details to come…