So you improve fulfillment (improved quality) and customer service (reduced cycle time). Revenue increases. Try proving your improvements were the cause.

You can’t. You can’t even measure customer satisfaction accurately, let alone demonstrate its relationship to increased revenue.

Which is why those who “run a company by the numbers” so often rely on mindless cost-cutting: They can easily prove the connection to this-year bottom-line improvements, while those who complain about the long-term consequential damage have no proof — only their knowledge of and confidence in the business model.

Managing to the numbers | Bob Lewis @ Keep The Joint Running.

• is afraid of change
• not interested in improvement
• has a rigid top-down process development style
• doesn’t care what you think

I think the greatest problem is the organisation basically doesn’t trust it’s employees to know what they are doing. It doesn’t matter that you may know something better or that you care about improving the company’s performance.  I find when I hear this sort of phrase from in companies I’m consulting at, you soon discover all manner of other issues, idiotic decision making processes, strange convoluted internal processes, inflexible management styles, complete reliance on reporting and long meetings for project visibility, and completely rigid thinking.

What the upshot of all this is, is usually a company that then is left with workers that accept their situation rather then improving it. Ultimately, when such companies confront the reality of their situation and require change to avoid failure, they fail because their employees don’t want change – they’ve had it ground down out of them over the years.

Stasis as a corporate strategy only works for so long.

Overview

OSB installation in a development environment consists of a completely separate Weblogic instance and yet another ‘special installation’ of Eclipse. You can’t use existing Eclipse installations. Nor is it recommend to use one of the five other existing Weblogic instances that Oracle products thoughtfully demand their own copy thereof (SOA Suite, I am looking at you).

Installation process

This is the procedure for installing OSB development environment.

As network firewall policy prevents the downloading of files, you will need to use installation media located within <companyname> network. Take the files conveniently stored on network server <location redacted> and copy them into a directory on your local computer. This directory is hereafter referred to as ‘installation files directory’ below.

Install Weblogic

1. Go to the installation files directory.
2. Run the executable file wls1033_oepe111150_win32.exe
3. This action launches the Oracle Installer for the Weblogic instance. It takes some time to run so contemplate the meaning of your life for a few minutes while it does. Maybe get a cup of tea. Stretch your legs. Think about lunch or your next holiday. File a support request for more memory. You should get at least 8GB.
4. Okay that’s it, you’ll finally see the Oracle Weblogic 10.3.3.0 installer. Think about the fact that Oracle sees fit to put “instructions” on the first screen telling you what the “Next” button does. This is advanced JEE server technology you’re installing, and potentially, Oracle think you don’t know what the “Next” button does. Maybe this reflects the level of experience inside Oracle, or perhaps it is indicative of the depth of respect in which Oracle holds their customers.
5. Press the “Next” button. The next screen you will see  is very important. If you fsck it up you’ll have to uninstall and start over. It does not have any instructions, but that’s OK, we’ve done it here in this wiki page for you. Pay attention.
6. DO. NOT. ACCEPT. THE. DEFAULT. Especially if you installed SOA Suite or some other Oracle product before you installed this one. Double especially if you still want that product to work.
7. SELECT “Create a new Middleware Home” (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT)
8. TYPE a name of an Appropriate Directory. I used “C:\Oracle\OSB_Middleware”
9. PRESS The “Next” button. Use the “Back” button if you need to see the instructions about how to use the “Next” button that Oracle conveniently provided for you on the first Screen. No, don’t do that. If you do that you’ll probably have to do this proceedure again and it will just make this entire experience last longer than it needs to. This is not a recommended practice.
10. The next screen demands that you give Oracle your Email Address to get “security updates”. It also wants a thing called your “My Oracle Support Password” (I suspect this is what might have been known as Oracle TechNet). As we both know, the best possible security measure is not to give out your password to strange programs that demand it.
11. As I planned on giving them my <workcompany> email, and as my Technet sub doesn’t use that Email address, I also unchecked the “I wish to receive security updated via My Oracle Support” check box.
12. Are you Sure? YES I’M VERY SURE. I would like to be “ignorant of security updates” and also Oracle spam. Ignorance is Bliss.
13. Look at that, I can’t give them my email address after all, what they really meant was “type your Oracle Support user id”. Press “Next”.
14. Now you have to choose whether you want a “Typical” installation or a “Custom” one. I chose “Typical”, which, being an Oracle installation, I expect to require an 8-core 64GB RAM 2TB SAN SSD -based supercomputer with a external 4-way Oracle RAC for configuration (“infrastructure”) DB in order to have enough grunt to service about 3 requests a minute. Press “Next”.
15. There’s a lot of choices here about the various subdirectories under the Middleware Home Directory that you created further back. I recommend accepting the defaults, but you can probably cause yourself countless of fun trolling on the My Oracle Support forums as you get ever-more-desparate for a solution to a very obscure problem that the phone support have no idea about and that was likely caused by you mucking about these defaults, causing the support personel to simply recommend you to reinstall the product, if you really feel the need to change them here.
16. If you can remember the instruction about the use of the “Next” button at step 4, then Press “Next”.
17. Now you can choose whether you want to put the shortcuts for “All users” or just you (“Local user”). If you are the BOFH I recommend “All Users”. As this is the default, we can all safely assume that the BOFH works for Oracle and is now responsible for designing their installation processes. Accept the default, and press “Next”.
18. The next screen is a summary of what you’ll be installing. You can also select each item and see a summary of what it does. Ponder the mystery of Oracle, and press “Next”.
19. Keep pondering that mystery while Oracle Weblogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.3.0) is installed. It takes a little bit of time. While it does that, you might to book that Holiday, get another cup of tea, or chase up that support request for the additional RAM you’ll be soon needing.
20. Congratulations! Installation is complete.
21. I opted to leave the “Run Quickstart” option checked.
22. Press “Done”. There are no onscreen instructions for this button.
23. Quickstart will run. It’s just a link farm.

Install Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE aka “Special Eclipse”)

1. Go to the installation files directory
2. Extract the file oepe-galileo-all-in-one-11.1.1.5.0.201003170852-win32.zip … I used 7zip and made sure to put it into a subdirectory of the installation files directory.
3. It’s kind of pretty big, takes a cople of minutes.
4. Just like a regular version of Eclipse, once this is unzipped, it’s installed. However it’s not a regular version of Eclipse. It is a “special” Eclipse that went to “special” school.
5. Although this directory can probably live anywhere, it’s a good idea to copy this directory into the new Oracle Middleware Home that you created when you installed Weblogic. Look I really have no idea why this is the case, however, it’s not good to anger the Oracle by using you regular development directories. ORACLE_HOME sweet ORACLE_HOME it is then.

Install OSB and OSB Dev Tools

1. Go to the installation files directory.
2. Extract the file ofm_osb_generic_11.1.1.3.0_disk1_1of1.zip … again I used 7zip and made sure to put it into a directory underneath the installation files directory.
3. Enter this directory. Enter the directory “osb” that will be created underneath it. Note that even though the file said “disk1_1of1″ in the file name that underneath here there’s two directories, Disk1 and Disk2.
4. Go into the directory “Disk1″
5. Run the executable file “setup.exe”
6. A DOS window opens which asks you for the location of a JRE in order to use Oracle Universal Installer. Probably. Exactly why the Weblogic installer didn’t need to know where the JDK was, I do not know. Probably it used a sensible installer rather then the Oracle Universal Installer. I don’t ever think I’ve ever seen an machine with two Oracle installations on it that didn’t also have two or more installations of the Oracle Universal Installer also installed on it. Its name perhaps means that it installs itself universally, rather than it is a product which has a universal use for installing other software. Ponder the mystery of the Oracle.
7. A JRE will be located in the original Oracle Middleware Home that you created when you installed Weblogic. In fact there’s at least two (Sun JDK and JRockit). Use the Sun JDK. For example, my value for the JDK was “C:\Oracle\OSB_Middleware\jdk160_18″. Press Enter.
8. Now the Universal Installer will actually attempt to install something. It says “You are about to install the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) and may install the Oracle Service Bus IDE and Oracle Service Bus Examples (OSBE). Before proceeding, make sure that you have installed and configured Oracle WebLogic Server 11g. If you want to design OSB applications in Eclipse, make sure Oracle Enterprise Package for Eclipse (OEPE) is installed.” Which is all true if you’ve been following this guide.
9. Press “Next”. There’s no instructions in this program for the use of the “Next” button. Someone ought to file a change request for that.
10. Now you can choose whether you want a “Typical” installation or a “Custom” one. Typically, choose “Typical”.
11. Press “Next”. I tried looking for online help here about the use of the “Next” button but I did not find anything.
12. It does a prerequisite check. It should pass, and if it doesn’t, you are probably screwed. If it does, you will be able to Press “Next”
13. At this next screen DO NOT ACCEPT THE DEFAULTS.
14. Choose the Oracle Middleware Home that you installed the Weblogic into at the first part of this installation procedure. E.g. I chose “C:\Oracle\OSB_Middleware”.
15. Once you do the previous step, ff you followed the instructions for the Special Eclipse (OEPE), it will have found it automatically. If not, choose the location where you installed the Special Eclipse (OEPE Location). For example, my value was “C:\Oracle\OSB_Middleware\oepe-galileo-all-in-one-11.1.1.5.0.201003170852-win32″
16. Press “Next”. Did you know that the Oracle at Delphi was a priestess called the ‘Pythoness’ who answered your question using gibberish verse. A Male Attendant of the Pythoness interpreted her raving mad gibberings and told you what they meant. For a fee. Does this sound familiar?
17. Review the installation details. When you are sure they are correct, press “Install”.
18. OSB will now install. It takes a little time so run those errands, go to lunch, get a coffee, dream of the Holiday you just Booked. I’d tell you to install the new 8GB of memory that you ordered before which surely has arrived by now, but that would mean turning your computer off. Best to wait until it’s finished then.

This is used in conjunction with Endnote (my university supplies me a free licence) to manage my references and bibliography in the actual chapters I write (so far, one down, two to go!). Endnote must be used to manage the referencing and bibliography separately: most of the databases export the relevant reference import data for Endnote. You can also search the Library of Congress to get complete information for books that you need in your bibliography. Better than typing it all in by hand! Endnote will also handle reformatting the referencing method used (if you find the guidelines are different) and its creates a bibliography automatically out of everything you reference.

Back in Evernote, I drag all the PDFs of journal articles that I download from the various scholarly databases I search into Evernote, then I tag them with relevant information.  This gives me s searchable database of relevant articles. Then for each article, and for each book or other non-PDF source, I write up a set of notes into my word processor, and export that note as a PDF file. These finished notes are then imported into Evernote and I tag them with relevant information which helps me find related ideas among notes.

There are a few features that I think Evernote needs to have to be a fully successful scholarly research tool. I’d love to be able to directly cross-reference two notes directly, rather than indirectly via tags. Maybe even an ability to attach a note to the cross-reference, that would be super-cool, that way I could describe the nature of the linkage of ideas.  Fully notated cross-referencing is necessary for me because scholarly research doesn’t occur in a flat, one or two dimensional ‘tagged’ space. Tagging only gets you so far.

Speaking of tags, its tagging needs to be properly hierarchical. You can give tags sub-tags, true enough. However if you add the leaf tag to an article, the parent tag is not automatically also available. So you might have a tag Rome, which has a sub-tag, Republic, but if you add a note to the Republic tag, it doesn’t appear when you select the Rome tag. Which is a bit silly.

Another great feature would be an ability to do the tasks of Endnote. Failing that (it is pretty specialised), a way for it to co-operate with Endnote, e.g by linking notes in Evernote to bibliography entries in Endnote, would be totally awesome, but quite unexpected.

Also there is a small bug which means while reading a PDF in Evernote it doesn’t seem to obey the page up / page down or arrow keys which is a little annoying – you have to use the mouse, or double click to open the PDF in Apple Preview.

But overall a relatively satisfying experience so far.

UPDATE 28 June 2010: Via Google Buzz, my friend Shannon O’Neill put me onto the Mac program Papers – http://mekentosj.com/papers/ … I just had a quick look at it tonight. it certainly has some potential. With a bit of coaxing I had it authenticate against my university’s EZproxy and thence searching and downloading journal articles straight from JSTOR (online database).

There is no way to make synthetic notes that link different journal papers, though, which is a pity. Also the notes window is a little cramped, which is a pity.

I also imported my Endnote database and it could then retrieve at least some of the article PDFs so-referenced from JSTOR and other sources. However it did think that the couple of anthology articles I had in Endnote were in ‘journals’ but worse than that it also lists the anthology editor(s) as one of the paper’s editors. Oops. But all in all it turns out it might be useful tip. Anything to keep me from writing – I can now spend days if not weeks fiddling with bibliographic databases instead!

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

Recently I was learning ANTLR, trying to decide whether this was a right technology to pursue a particular project which involved parsing a preexisting message format. After a week of a spike, we decided that it was worth pursuing and started on earnest on the grammar for our project. However a week into this process, I had an epiphany … I was doing some things wrong with the ANTLR grammar which were now slowing progress in adding the new characteristics it needed to be complete. Many developers know this feeling; the features of my grammar that I had built over the first week were naive and now hampering it from expanding into the new requirements. I took it on myself to kill the entire grammar and start again. It took less than a day and half to replicate that week’s worth of work (i.e. pass the test suite which had built up around it).  I’ve done this before; scrap the first attempt at building a domain and try again. Here my domain was the same (it was after all defined in both a standards specification and in the many hundreds of thousands of sample messages we captured from an existing system), but its implementation needed refinement.

So I think that the rule about throwing away spikes can in fact be made a general axiom of programming:

When you are learning a new technology, make sure you throw away the first thing you build that works – to avoid accumulating your mistakes.

Thanks to Robert for the important qualifier “that works”.

N.B. my views about system rewrites have not changed regardless.

There is a web service inside a component, let’s call that component a ‘Node’, that receives something like (but not identical to!) an Event on its interface. Inside the Event is some data that the Node does not particularly care about (and actually has no access to – it’s just a byte[] as far as the Node can tell). However, the Node contains a Registry which enables components, lets call them Event Handlers, to register themselves with the Node, as available to process certain Events (i.e. decode that byte[] and do something with it) according to criteria which the EventHandler injects into the Node’s Registry.  EventHandler is an interface with a handful of simple methods related to handling the Event, and also registration with the Registry.

So, the process flow looks something like this: The Node first records the reception of the Event at the interface in a log. Then it tells the Registry about the Event, and the Registry produces the EventHandler(s) it needs to use.  The Registry gives the Node back the instances of the EventHandler interface. The Node then hands off the Event to the EventHandler, which does whatever it does unbeknownst to the Node, and returns a fairly simple EventResponse object. The Node records the EventResponse object in its log (i.e. a database) and returns it as the response to the web service call.

Consider the Node service method as looking something like this (you’ll have to excuse the Java 1.4-ness of this code, the WordPress code highlighting plugin apparently hates Java 5) :

  public List receive(Event event) {
    List responses = new ArrayList();
    for (EventHandler handler : this.registry.lookup(event.getMetadata())) {
      Response response = handler.handle(event);
      saveResponse(response, event, handler);
      responses.add(response);
    }
    return responses;
  }

To enable the wiring, the Registry has a method:

  void register(EventMetadata metadata, EventHandler handler)

and among other methods the EventHandler interface defines:

  void setRegistry(Registry registry)

Currently the WAR file imports the Node.JAR and a group of EventHandler.JAR files which are specific implementations for handling different kinds of Events. We configure it in Spring currently so that the specific EventHandler is injected with the Registry object (from the Node.JAR). The EventHandler implementation then registers itself with the Registry in a call-back operation, telling it what sort of Events it will handle.

This all works just fine at the moment. The problem with what we have is that it is all currently statically compiled into the WAR file.The WAR file specifies a Spring application context XML file which in turn loads the Spring configuration for the Node and Registry component, and every Spring application context for each Handler JAR included inside the WAR file’s WEB-INF/lib directory.

Now, we now don’t want every deployed instance of every Node to handle every possible Event. Currently we’ve got a small .properties file that actually tells another Spring component which EventHandlers are be to be instantiated or not. This is working fine when we only desire some Nodes to handle maybe one or two of a larger group of related Events. That is, where we currently don’t mind that the WAR file is identical in every respect on every Node — it’s just that each node contains a .properties file in its classpath that tells it which EventHandlers it is allowed to load and use (and therefore what Events it is capable of receiving, bearing in mind that when I say ‘Events’ there is really only one concrete type of Event, I mean the encrypted data which is held within the Event which is actually consumed by the Handler).

However, we are now in a situation where we want to use this same architecture for a completely different group of Events. We definitely don’t want to have to compile and assemble a new WAR file for different Nodes based on the Event cluster. We want to deploy a standardized Node.WAR which has available on its classpath a dynamic set of XxxEventHandler.JAR which can dynamically register themselves with the Node’s registry. There may be also a requirement for some related custom extension points in the future.

Initially we considered OSGi as the technology to enable this. After some discussion yesterday with people who know better about OSGi, this approach was rejected as impractical for the moment. Therefore last night I set out tooling about with the Spring 2.5.6 ApplicationContext and its related objects to see what could be done to enable dynamically-loaded JAR files within a parent Spring application context. Here is what I’ve discovered we can do, with only some small restrictions on developers writing the individual EventHandler implementations.

The first issue is, we need to locate a set of Spring application context XML file which should be on the classpath but not yet instantiated into any live Spring context.

Assuming we’re in a bean that’s ContextAware or otherwise has access to the Spring application context which is loading it, after the parent context has loaded and initialized (there are method hooks for this sort of thing) we can use the org.springframework.core.io.support.PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver class to search the classpath for a resource:

  PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver pmrl = new PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver(context.getClassLoader());
  Resource[] resources = pmrl.getResources(
    "classpath*:/net/crazymcphee/dynamiccontext/*/Crazy*DynamicContext.xml"
  );

Looking at the Spring 2.5.6 source code we found that the String passed to the getResources() method isn’t a proper regular expression, which is a pity. So you can’t do something like look for **/Crazy*DynamicContext.xml and expect to match a file Crazy*DynamicContext.xml in any package. Also we found that it had to prefixed with that classpath*: … yes, the asterix, literally … else it wouldn’t search the classpath, as opposed to the file path. So we’re restricted in the above example to a file called Crazy<something>DynamicContext.xml in a package exactly one deep from net.crazymcphee.dynamiccontext … e.g. net.crazymcphee.dynamiccontext.package.CrazyMcpheeDynamicPackage.xml matches but net.crazymcphee.dynamiccontext.package.sub.CrazySubDynamicPackage.xml and net.crazymcphee.dynamiccontext.CrazySuperDynamicPackage.xml do not. Therefore we will have a restriction on what package the dynamic context can be in and what it’s name will be. I don’t think that’s too onerous on our developers – we just have to pick a sensible standard.

The next part of the problem is that we have to load the ‘Resource’ thus found into a Spring context. This is pretty easy:

 for (Resource r : resources) {
   GenericApplicationContext createdContext = new GenericApplicationContext(context);
   XmlBeanDefinitionReader reader = new XmlBeanDefinitionReader(createdContext);
   int i = reader.loadBeanDefinitions(r);
 }

The int i will be set to the number of beans found in the createdContext. The createdContext will have the original context as its parent context, so it can gain access to any beans defined there (and also, although we are yet to test this (!), it should also be intercepted by the AOP-based transaction interceptors in the parent, and so forth).

The only other part of the puzzle may be to query the createdContext to see if it has any target beans within it, luckily for us an ApplicationContext has a method getBeansOfType(Class clazz) which will load all the beans of a particular type:

  for (Resource r : resources) {
    GenericApplicationContext createdContext = new GenericApplicationContext(context);
    XmlBeanDefinitionReader reader = new XmlBeanDefinitionReader(createdContext);
    int i = reader.loadBeanDefinitions(r);
    Map map = createdContext.getBeansOfType(EventHandler.class);
    for (Object o : map.keySet()) {
      EventHandler handler = (EventHandler) createdContext.getBean((String) o);
      // do some programmatic manipulation with the EventHandler that we found here
    }
  }

Using these three Spring features will enable us to be able to place a JAR file containing an interface implementation, and a Spring context XML file matching a particular pattern, into the classpath of our WAR, and on restart, we can dynamically pick up the newly inserted features into our application installation. I’ll report back when we get an actual production prototype together that can do this. Hopefully it will be OK to put the code in the blog too (if we make it generic enough).

If you have any further ideas or refinements to this idea, please leave them in the comments!

But the bigger headache was the Java libraries for handling WebDAV. There is the now-abandoned Apache Slide, the based-on-Slide webdavclient4j, and the way-more-complex-than-it-needs-to-be Jackrabbit. Slide and webdavclient4J have the appearance and feel of crusty, molten code from 2004. Jackrabbit is a full-featured server product … to quote, it is a “hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation” … and I’m sure that’s real nice if that’s what you want, but I just need to automate push a file onto an Apache HTTPD instance and tell another service what URL it now lives at. It’s not rocket science. Jackrabbit has too many features, and too little simple documentation, to be truly useful for what I need.

Enter the easy to use WebDAV client, Sardine. Here is the author’s post announcing it.  It’s very simple to use:

Sardine sardine = SardineFactory.begin();
List<DavResource> resources = sardine.getResources("http://yourdavserver.com/adirectory/");
for (DavResource res : resources)
{
     System.out.println(res);
}

Anyway, simplicity … just the sort of thing I was looking for. Recommended.

I don’t hold that software makes an existing business process “efficient” at all. Rather I think software makes possible a new process, which should be more “efficient” in terms of money gained less dollars spent – but its a new process, not the old one. In effect, new software creates new business opportunities. New software will only make an existing, unchanged process, less efficient, if a new business process is not designed along with the new software. If the business just wants new software without changing “what they do” they are wasting their money, IMHO.

Of course there is the possibility (probability?) the business doesn’t actually understand what it is they actually do anyway. This is not an uncommon position for many businesses that are happy to cruise along in neutral making some marginal profit on some marginal activity. Usually these businesses are also found to be beating their workers with sticks (usually only metaphorical ones unless they ‘offshore’ their operation to countries where killing your workers is just a part of ‘Business as Usual’. Typically they hold that marginal process can be made ‘better’ simply with just more exhortation (or threats) to greater and greater efforts at a totally demoralized (if not actively hostile) workforce, but I suspect that’s a story for another day!

The problem for Glassfish, as the second sentence of this ServerSide article states (see it straight from Oracle’s mouth here, and see also here) is that Oracle view it as being used for “non-mission critical department apps”. Glassfish’s superior technology (or otherwise) just doesn’t come into it. It’s not a factor (as it rarely every is).

Not so long ago Oracle spent a big wad of money acquiring an app server (Weblogic) and then a stack of more money porting all its other products into it and branding the resulting mess platform “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g”. Now not only do they have their third app server (OC4J/OAS, Weblogic and Glassfish), but the Sun product suite includes products that compete with various Fusion Middleware 11g products (portals, ESBs, and so on). So on one hand you’ve got a “departmental” application server, which you can either licence for free by downloading the open-source version, or buy support for the fancier ‘Enterprise’ version, and on the other, an expensive, full-stack-integrated (all the way to the IDE), fully-branded strategic platform that Oracle just invested a vast amount of money into, and have been pushing like crazy onto customers the past six months. And it is the same sales team that will sell both this licensed “departmental” Glassfish. Therefore if you say the magic words like “need a cluster” or maybe “we might build a portal”, or “we are considering adopting a service-orientated architecture”, lo and behold you’ll find the molto-dinero “Fusion Middleware” based solution installed all over your sorry arse quicker than you can say “can you please explain this per-core with special CPU-architecture-loading-factor licencing schema to me once again and why is it a different price if I upgrade my hardware without adding any additional cores???“.

Let’s dissect those “key points” of Oracle’s strategy announcement:

Key Point	What they meant to say
GlassFish continues as the Java EE reference implementation and as an open source project.	We see it as the way to dominate the direction of Java EE for at least two years, but for Larry’s sake don’t try to use it in production.
Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server, together with GlassFish, provide world class Java EE infrastructure.	Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server something something something provide world-class something something infrastructure.
GlassFish Enterprise Server and WebLogic Server expected to share core components.	We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Oracle plans to add GlassFish Enterprise Server all WebLogic offerings.	Hey, look at this cute free “reference implementation” thingy that comes free with Weblogic! You could use that to run your departmental Wiki instead of having to pay us another fortune for more Weblogic licences. Did you say “WIKI”? Did we tell you all about the great wiki-like Enterprise 2.0 features available in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g offering? How many test environments did you say you needed licences for?
GlassFish Web Stack maintained for existing customers.	Not available for sale.
GlassFish Message Queue remains as the GlassFish messaging infrastructure.	We’re not expecting to sell any licences of this. Just use Oracle Fusion Middleware’s SOA Suite 11g already. We’re fairly sure that’s got a message queue in it.
Oracle plans to license GlassFish Enterprise Server and Java System Web Server with all WebLogic Server offerings.	See above.
GlassFish also available as standalone offering.	Are you sure you didn’t mean to say “Weblogic”? No? Can you call back next Thursday at 2pm and ask for Fred? We’re reasonably certain he might know something about that Glassthingy.
GlassFish will continue to be supported and maintained for an extended time period for customers current on support.	Well, the lawyers said we had to. We know how to do this. Ask any 10g customer.
GlassFish open source projects thrive	As long as we will let them.

I know I’m a completely cynical bastard about these things, but I will wager within a few months that even if you deliberately ask for Glassfish Enterprise directly that you’ll have to fight off the Weblogic borg absolutely tooth and nail to the last man as they repeatedly try to board your IT department brandishing their integrated-wizard-driven Red Stack. I predict that, basically, after a year of not even trying to sell any Glassfish licences – because if you ask for any of the features that are in the licenced version and not the open-source one, you’ll be pushed to Weblogic (and anyway, at ten times the price they’ll prefer to sell you Weblogic as a default position, after all “Glassfish comes free with Weblogic”) – Oracle will announce, “there’s no sales in it”, then probably ditch the licenced Glassfish version completely, leaving only the open source version. Finally sometime after that they’ll cut the open source funding off and it will have to limp along without hardly any of the resources it formerly had. Maybe they’ll donate it to the ghetto of an Apache incubator project where it can die unnoticed a couple of years after that. It’s a pity because IMHO Glassfish is ten thousand times a better app server than anything Oracle ever produced, or even bought before this.