Today, Microsoft announced AppFabric beta 2, which incorporates its Velocity caching technology and the Dublin management technology for Workflow and Communication Foundation applications. AppFabric targets composite applications, and is intended to make the development, management of those applications easier for .NET developers. Microsoft also offers a hosted edition, Windows Azure platform AppFabric, which provides connectivity services (service bus and access control) for .NET applications in the cloud.
 

We in the media have often been accused of making small issues much larger for the benefit of our drama organs. The press, you see, has a crying need for drama, and as such, has collectively developed a new set of internal organs that require drama to survive. But no matter what you think of the press, there is no denying the drama behind this year's Oracle OpenWorld: and it is not drama created by the media.

A friend of mine, Alex Peake, described drama as "lulz you are too close to." As such, much of the OpenWorld drama is full of lols, because no one but Larry Ellison and Safra Katz are anywhere near it.

Anyway, enough lead-in, allow me to enumerate the multiple points of drama at OpenWorld. Please note that almost none of these have anything to do with software development.

• Trauma Versus Oracle

This was a very big bit of drama with far-reaching tendrils. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom recently got married to an actress, Jennifer Siebel. Siebel recently landed a gig on the TV show "Trauma," a ham-fisted action/drama show based in San Francisco. I've watched one episode, and in ten minutes I saw an electrocution and a helicopter crash at the same site. Way overblown.

Anyway, Trauma is filmed in San Francisco, and Mayor Newsom is very happy with his wife's work. So much so that he's been handing the Trauma team permits to film wherever they like. That means they were allowed to block off 280 in downtown, so that a tanker truck could be detonated, and drama filmed around it.

So a few months back, Trauma booked a ginormous warehouse that belongs to the city. They probably wanted to film Godzilla attacking some portion of the city, or something. Come to find out, after the permits were signed, that Oracle had been waiting to rent said warehouse for its customer appreciation party. 

Uh-oh! Newsom backpeddled, and had Oracle move its party to Treasure Island. In exchange for creating all this drama, Newsom had the city pay for the $200,000 tent in which Three Dog Night would play. So, the city of San Francisco's tax payers footed the bill for some of Ellison's party. Drama!

• Aerosmith Versus Each Other

The headliner for that customer appreciation party was Aerosmith. In case you hadn't been keeping up, there are more rumors floating around about this band than any other I can think of. Earlier this year, lead singer Steven Tyler was forced to cancel some show dates due to pneumonia. Then, in August, he fell off the stage at a concert and hurt himself. He is 61, after all. The Oracle concert last night was the first time the band has played together since that accident, and before the show there were copious rumors that Tyler wouldn't even show. The band was fueding, it was said.

Then, when Tyler did show, he was a bit out of sorts. He was out of tempo a lot, and couldn't hit the high notes. But hey, he's 61 and he still danced like a demon.

But he did have a few things to say to the crowd. First, Tyler said "We almost didn't make it here tonight, but not because of B***S*** you've heard in the media. Apple wanted us to play tonight, but when we compared Apples to Oracles, we knew which was the right choice. Thanks Larry!" said Tyler.

Next, Tyler stopped between songs to ask the audience: "What's the difference between Windows and viruses? Viruses keep getting better."

But the best zinger was not intended as such. Tyler stopped again, and asked the audience, "What's it like to be the Oracle?"

Well, Steven, nobody here really knows that answer, because Oracle employees were not invited to the customer appreciation dinner. In fact, only the board members and C-levels were there, along with a smattering of salespeople who were told to close anything they could, even if the customer had a beer and was on the ferris wheel.

• The Governator

The Governator himself was scheduled to appear with Ellison during his final keynote. Unfortunately, he got stuck behind semi that jack-knifed on the bridge and was severely delayed. That meant Ellison had to stretch out his presentation, which was basically no different than his Sunday night keynote. The gist? Allow me to paraphrase Ellison: "IBM has poopy pants."

And that leads us to a bit of drama that has been brewing for years:

• Larry Ellison is incapable of not being a smug jerk

Look I don't want to kick mud at Ellison. He's a smart guy who really wants to win. But his behavior in keynotes is getting worse every year. First of all, he started his talk with a five minute video of the Oracle BMW sailboat. It's a multimillion dollar ship, and it's one of the fastest in the world. After the video, Ellison comes on stage with this massively smug look on his face, grinning like he's just bought the last candy bar in front of a herd of little kids at the candy store. His first words? "It's a great boat, you should get one."

Nice Larry. Classy. Anyway, it didn't end there. Ellison's constant taunting of IBM was certainly fun to watch, but it wasn't exactly mature. He sounded like a school yard bully. "IBM ran back to the benchmark council to complain," he said in a mocking tone. 

Now, I am not one to say that being competitive isn't a virtue, especially in business. But Ellison takes it to a new level. I half expected him to drop his pants on stage, moon the audience and shout "Neaner neaner neaner," to everyone there after the boat comment. Also, he's the only CEO who can fill a room with 10,000 people, and then say "Next slide, please," for every slide in his super slick, $100,000 PowerPoint deck. Steve Jobs was never this unprofessional.

• The Set List

I simply had to give this one its own dot. It's a small point, but very relevant. The rumor at the concert was that Aerosmith was there primarily because Oracle outbid their other gigs. Perhaps that makes it even funnier to know that the first song Aerosmith played, after saying "Thanks Larry!" That song? Eat The Rich.

At first, there's the mystique that it will solve every problem known to IT. Then you get to know it and learn its limitations. Once it's determined to be difficult to implement, or to trace down to the bottom line, it's given up on. Like many technological efforts that have come and gone over the years (see CORBA, e-Commerce, B-to-B), this is the fate of SOA -- at least according to pundits such as those at Burton Group, who announced the death of SOA back in January.

But John Michelsen of ITKO Software sees SOA as "the Marconi of software." Marconi, of course, said you can take a signal, put it in the air and receive it somewhere else. He was derided as a lunatic, but his ideas led to a little thing I like to call "radio." RIAs, SaaS and anything that moves away from point-to-point EDI is fundamentally a service-oriented architecture, Michelsen noted. He went on to say that banks, at a time when their stock prices are at all-time lows, are signing big contracts to implement SOA.

"If you're Wells Fargo and Wachova, you need to merge quickly and integrate in months. That's a pressure-cooker to make of lot of things work so customers see a single integrated experience. You used to have three years in IT after a merger like that; now you have months. And I'd be stunned to see an enterprise architect today say he'll build one monolithic n-tiered fat-client application with a direction connection back to [a database]."