Did you know that non-fungible tokens can represent enterprise assets?

May 2022

Plus: GraalVM, Micronaut, APEX, Kubernetes, multicluster computing, and user intent recognition

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“The main types of non-fungible tokens are art, collectibles, gaming, metaverses, sport, utilities, and others. Paintings, sculptures, and other pictures of things that are made for people to enjoy or think deeply about are referred to as art. Artists value non-fungible tokens because they ensure the validity and uniqueness of the blockchain representation of their work.”

—ResearchAndMarkets.com

Although the name always reminds me of mushrooms, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don’t have spores. Instead, NFTs are a way of having digital ownership of a physical real-world asset. See the quote above from the researchers at ResearchAndMarkets.com.

To help organizations that wish to offer their own NFTs or otherwise work with those tokens, Oracle has announced native NFT support on Oracle Blockchain Platform.

Senior Director of Blockchain Product Management Mark Rakhmilevich asks, in his article “Announcing NFT support for Oracle Blockchain Platform,” if there is a future for NFTs in representing enterprise assets to streamline asset tracking; certification management; supply chain operations; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing; and other business operations.

The answer is yes. Read Mark’s article to see how it all works.
Send your feedback on this newsletter to me at alan.zeichick@oracle.com.

Take care,
Alan Zeichick
Editor at Large
@zeichick

Technical articles

At the very heart of GraalVM is the Graal compiler—a modern, highly optimizing ahead-of-time compiler, created from scratch. Thanks to many advanced optimizations, in many scenarios it generates better code than the C2 compiler. One such optimization is partial escape analysis, which removes unnecessary object allocations on the heap through scalar replacement in branches where an object does not escape the compilation unit, and the Graal compiler ensures that an object exists in the heap in branches where it does escape. Read how GraalVM Native Image revolutionizes Java.

Do your applications sometimes suffer from slow API responses? The time APIs take plays a role in user experience, especially when you’re creating a highly interactive digital assistant. If there’s no way to improve API response times, you need to think about how you’re going about user experience and user acceptance. This article shows how to provide periodic feedback to users so that time no longer matters.

Developers disassemble! The HotSpot JVM does more than run your Java program’s bytecode. HotSpot also profiles the application in real time to determine which areas would most benefit from translating bytecode into your CPU’s native code via just-in-time (JIT) compilers. In this deep-dive article, use hsdis and the JITWatch utility to see exactly how the JIT compilers optimize your code.

The Micronaut framework provides a compilation-time approach and feature set that make it a great candidate for building modern cloud native Java applications. Close integration with GraalVM Native Image and a working relationship with the GraalVM team at Oracle Labs mean significant innovations have continued to appear with projects such as Micronaut AOT and Micronaut Serialization. This article shows how to deploy cloud native Java with Micronaut.

Oracle Visual Builder has many built-in REST features that let you fetch data from a variety of sources and consume that data in their applications. What if you want to build an application that interacts with blockchain smart contracts? This technical article shows how this is done using the MetaMask wallet as the coding example.

Many organizations are choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) due to its performance and pricing. What if you’re already using another cloud? No worries: With Oracle and partner RackWare, you can seamlessly move your applications from any container cloud platform to the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) platform. This blog looks at how to migrate your applications from any container platform to OKE.

A multicluster strategy can improve availability, isolation, and scalability. OCI itself can provide everything that you need to achieve availability, isolation, and scalability—but Verrazzano, on the other hand, allows you to achieve a multicluster environment even if you are not using OCI. Read how to set up multiclustering between OCI and Microsoft Azure with Verrazzano.

You can recognize the intent of natural language inputs in Java. Intent recognition is the natural language processing task of discovering a user’s objective based on what the user typed or said. Intent recognition (also known as intent extraction or intent detection) has a wide range of practical applications such as automating the process of fulfilling the user’s needs for sales, booking, and customer service tasks. This article shows how to code intent recognition in Java using the Stanford CoreNLP library.

Product announcements

Oracle APEX 22.1 is now generally available. This release of the enterprise low-code platform introduces the Approvals component and Unified Task List; simplified create page wizards; readable application exports in JSON or YAML formats; service worker customization for progressive web applications (PWAs) and persistent authentication; new and updated components; a built-in data generator; numerous enhancements to the developer experience; and a whole lot more.

AlmaLinux is now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. The AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-driven Linux operating system intended to pick up where the CentOS Linux stable release left off. AlmaLinux OS is a 1:1 binary compatible clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). With this addition to the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, cloud users can now deploy AlmaLinux OS virtual machines on a virtual cloud network (VCN) with the click of a button. Making this marketplace image available enables everyone to have an easy way to build and deploy applications using AlmaLinux on OCI.

Helidon 2.5.0 has been released. This version has improved OCI Java SDK support: For Helidon MP applications you can now inject any OCI Java SDK client into your application. This will pick up the OCI client configuration from your environment—so if your environment works for the OCI SDK command-line interface, it will work for your Helidon application. Also, version 2.5.0 improves the JAX-RS implementation to support @Path annotations on base classes and interfaces. This improves interoperability with code generators that use this approach for creating JAX-RS applications.

The GraalVM team has released GraalVM 22.1, which includes builds based on both JDK 11 and JDK 17. With GraalVM 22.1, the executable build process is now 26% faster than in version 21.1 in the default mode and 54% faster in the quick build mode. This new release also supports Apple silicon as a preview. One of the major changes in this release is the introduction of Truffle Strings, which is an efficient implementation of a String type that can be shared between Truffle languages. There are many other changes besides; check out the launch blog post.

Oracle Visual Builder Studio added a key new capability to its continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) service: You can now add your own software to a build executor. This enables automation of CI/CD for a much wider set of artifacts. In addition, it allows you to use a single VM to run multiple builds with different technology sets. Until now, CI/CD pipelines executed on VMs running in OCI Compute with software that you configured on them from a selection of software components offered by Oracle. With the new Docker-based architecture, you have more flexibility in configuring the operating system and software available on the build executor.

How Oracle’s developers use Oracle dev tools

“Autonomous Database integrates with OCI Streaming and other open-source tools we use to process millions of events per minute. Best of all, we don’t have to worry about administration, including backups, high availability, and performance tuning. This has saved us an estimated six full-time positions for database operations,” says Raju Uppalapati, senior director of Cloud Security Posture Management and Intelligence Platform at Oracle.