OFMW: 12.2.1.4 Released

Hi,

After a long time waiting for it, the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4 has been finally released.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4 Official Documentation

In this post, I will focus on my personal view over the Oracle Fusion Middleware products which I most commonly use over the last 8 years which are the SOA Suite (including BPM and OSB), WebCenter Suite (Portal, Content, Sites), Oracle ADF and Oracle WebLogic Application Server mainly.

Certification Matrix

As every release, I make a round around the Certification Matrix of every Oracle Fusion Middleware Release to check if the Java JDK accepted has been increased or not.

Oracle Certification Matrix for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4

Java

However, I found that we are still in the J2SE / J2EE 8 and the maximum certified JDK is Oracle JDK 1.8.0_211+ which means any 1.8.0_xxx if you are using Oracle JDK as the JDK vendor.

Database

The biggest new is the certification with 18.3+ and 19.3+ of the On-Premise version of Oracle Database. For the rest, nothing special.

Web Server

Nothing new, for someone like me who loves NGINX, I were not expecting anything rather than the classics Oracle HTTP Server, Apache Web Server, Oracle Traffic Director or IIS.

Release Notes and new interesting things


Oracle WebCenter Portal

Release Notes for WebCenter Portal 12.2.1.4

The most important changes:
  • Polls & Surveys was brough back to 12c by a patch available in 12.2.1.3. Now it is officialy again back into Oracle WebCenter Portal. For simple polls & surveys, this component does the job. However, I always recommend to integrate your own Survey soluton by IFraming it (for example Survey Monkey).
  • Elastic Search / Search Enhancements: 
    • They have improved and aligned some capabilities offered by Faceted Search in the past such as adding Custom Facets and Saving Faceted Searchs to repeat them in the future.
    • Now you can search for content within page components like Content Publisher Text. Component, Styled Text component, and HTML Component (not only page metadata). This is a big improvement and an aligment with the old Oracle SES solution (crawling).
  • Document Viewer (wccdoc Task Flow) now has been officially exposed within the Content Management Task Flows available in the Resource Catalog. In the past I helped some people to use it in clandestinity (enabling it), however, now is legal to use it standalone.
My comments: Oracle WebCenter Portal, like the rest of the Oracle Fusion Middleware, is entering into a maintanance / sooner than later into a legacy period. It is clear that is not a strategic product for Oracle anymore.
Lot of connectors and components have been deprecated or removed in order to use the most core functionalities of Oracle WebCenter Portal.
It is a very valid Enterprise Portal solution, however solutions like Liferay DXP have adopted better the changes to the nowadays and they adapted quicker to every emerging technology or architecture (containers, portlets supporting java, react, angular, vue or any kind of technology you want to use for developing).


Oracle WebCenter Sites

Release Notes for WebCenter Sites 12.2.1.4

Some good improvements arrived to the WCM solution of WebCenter such as:
  • Timeline: Improve the experience for the Asset Contributors by allowing them to travel to the past of the Assets so they can check easily historic changes of their Page Assets.
  • Publish content directly to Oracle Content and Experience and deliver it along Oracle Marketing Cloud and other solutions to expand your corporate assets.
  • Configure dedicated Google Analytics accoutns for your A/B Testing sites
  • Multiple instances of Eloqua are allowed now to be configured.
  • Improved performance for NIO environments.
  • Some API improvements for Vanity URLs.
  • Improved Password weakness security. Now passwords of the users needs to be stronger.
My Comments: I have been out of WebCenter Sites for the full 12cR2 release, so I do not have a strong opinion of it. Oracle Content and Experience Cloud has been promoted strongly as the replacement of Portal / Sites. This new mechanism of publishing Assets into Oracle Content and Experience is a first step of moving away and have everything in the Cloud brother of Oracle WebCenter Sites.


Oracle WebCenter Content

Release Notes for WebCenter Content 12.2.1.4

Maybe the most dissapointed release for me. Not major things have been added:
  • Small improvement to DIS to display previews (such as in the ADF UI of WebCenter Content). The new variable is DISDefaultDocInfoTab
My comments: There have been always rumors of replacing OracleTextSearch by ElasticSearch as content indexer. This was a dream that partners like Team Informatics created un an unofficially way.
It is clear that WebCenter Content, Sites and Portal are not more strategic products. But, considering them as PaaS in the Cloud can make them strong Cloud solutions. In terms of ECM capabilities I always loved Oracle WebCenter Content and I still consider it very strong with hard replacement

Oracle WebCenter Capture

Release Notes for WebCenter Capture 12.2.1.4

I am not entering into major details, but lof of improvements from the Client Application will make Business Users more happier.

In addition, some WLST Scripts will make Batch unblockers happy too :).

Oracle WebLogic Application Server

Release Notes WebLogic Application Server 12.2.1.4

There are many good news for Oracle WebLogic Application Server
  • Now you can run Oracle WebLogic in Kubernetes / Docker containers fully supported by Oracle. So it makes it cool to continue competing with the other Application Servers of the market.
  • Serious improvements on JMS for load-balancing and fail over configurations.
My comments: Oracle WebLogic is still slow in the process of adopting the new Java JDKs, Jakarta EE or even some old standards such as CDI 2.0. This makes our Application Server vulnerable against other seducing application servers such as Payara Application Server

Oracle SOA Suite

Added some new Guides into the Official Documentation for Developers and Administrators:
What's New in Developer's Guide
What's New in Administrators Guide

My comments: No surprises, another Bug Fixing release 

Oracle Service Bus

Release Notes of Service Bus 12.2.1.4

No surprises, another Bug Fixing release of Oracle Service Bus.

Added some new information to the Official Documentation:
What's New in the Guide

Oracle Business Process Management

Release Notes for Business Process Management 12.2.1.4

My comments: No surprises here. A full bug fixing release including all patches raised in previous releases.
The On-Premise solution can be considered dead against his brother in the cloud (Process Cloud).
The Dynamic Case Management module of Process Cloud could be an interesting option if they adapted in the On-Premise. However, this dream will never happen.

Oracle BPM can be considered the first "dead" of this list.

Oracle ADF & JDeveloper 

There is a very good summary of Shay Shmeltzer of the Release Notes for ADF 12.2.1.4
https://blogs.oracle.com/jdeveloperpm/oracle-jdeveloper-and-oracle-adf-12214-now-available

I see some positive changes in this release for Oracle ADF 12.2.1.4 regarding ADF Faces & ADF Business Components.

My comments: JDeveloper has been very slow and unstable since all Fusion Middleware joint the 12cR2. I always kept separate installations JDevelopers for SOA and ADF to avoid loading multiple plugins at the same time.
However, I had lot of headaches with JDeveloper 12.2.1.3 even doing the above trick.
Does 12.2.1.4 solve all the bugs which made our lifes difficult? Is it solve the slowness and problems found in its previous release? Do not know, but I will post once I check it.

Regarding Oracle ADF, I still dream about the upgrade to Java EE 8 / JSF 2.3 so we can use more capabilities of Java EE 8 within Oracle ADF. However, this is just a dream.

As a final comment of Oracle ADF I would like to say that it is still a very robust / mature framework for developing Enterprise Applications, specially internal transactional applications. Even if Oracle promotes Oralce JET, please still consider Oracle ADF as an option for UI + Backend or only Backend :).

Conclusion

As said before, Oracle Fusion Middleware is being slowly "dying" and its cloud replacements or strategic products are the way to go.

However, many many clients will take a while since they move away from our lovely Fusion Middleware.

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