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I’ll be speaking at the Oracle User Group Norway Spring Conference, April 14 to 16. This great conference takes place on a cruise ship sailing from Oslo to Kiel and back. My topics will be

• What’s Hot and What’s Not - An Overview of Oracle Development Tools
• Forms to ADF - Live!

They’ve lined up an impressively international speaker list, including Dan Morgan, Debra Lilley and Sue Harper - and me, of course …

See you in Oslo!

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The third thing I wish for from Oracle in 2010 is a free ADF runtime license. I believe that the current licensing is limiting ADF to existing Oracle enterprise customers, and that’s too bad.

I am not looking for Oracle to make ADF Open Source - but just to get the option to legally run ADF applications on Glassfish (and possibly JBoss and others). Support should be forum-based (like for Oracle XE).

This has several benefits:

• Universities could teach ADF (it’s full of brilliant code and design patterns) in the knowledge that students could use it outside the closed Oracle world.
• The thousands of capable developers in China, India, Phillipines and elsewhere, who are currently using Open Source solely for cost reasons, could pick up this brilliant tool.

It would not cannibalize existing revenue, as enterprise customers would still want to buy a support contract. But it would translate into both a wider ADF developer skills base and additional license revenue for Oracle as these customers eventually buy a support contract or upgrade to WebLogic.

Oracle is sitting on an unrecognized jewel while Java developers all over the world are wasting time with a plethora of much less capable frameworks. Help the world build better apps faster - set ADF Free!

Please vote for this idea on Oracle Mix.

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The second thing I wish for from Oracle in 2010 is that Larry calls off the license sharks.

It seems that Oracle is currently working agressively to maximize the license fee from existing customers, and customers are unhappy.

Here in Denmark, the last month has seen the media reporting:

• Oracle taking Scandinavian Airlines to court over license claims

• The Danish and Swedish postal service deciding not to base future development on Oracle, due to a license dispute
• A case where an intelligent road sign used an Oracle database, and Oracle claimed every passing motorist as a user

I don’t know the details, and each and every of these claims might be completely correct from a legal and contractual standpoint. But the fact that these cases appear in the media show that the customers are unhappy and feel strong-armed by Oracle.

Having dedicated my professional life to becoming an expert on Oracle tools, I find this trend very worrying. A salesman can always leave Oracle and go sell IBM or Microsoft - but my skills are not as easily transferred.

I wish Oracle would spend more time explaining their position so that an agreement can be reached that does not jeopardize Oracle’s long-term market share.

If you agree, please vote for this idea on Oracle Mix - and feel free to comment below, to sten@vesterli.com or on Oracle Mix.

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The first thing I wish for in 2010 is a WebCenter standard edition product at a reasonable price.

Currently, WebCenter is available as WebCenter Suite - which is a massive bundle with everything, and a corresponding massive price tag ($125,000 per CPU). There is also a WebCenter Services license, but at $80,000 per CPU for just content management, secure search and a couple of Oracle-branded open source products, this is even more overpriced.

What I wish for is “standard edition” product containing the core WebCenter product, the JSF Portlet bridge, OmniPortlet/WebClipping and the open source parts (Wiki/Blog and Discussions). This product does not need to include WebCenter Spaces, WebCenter Composer, Universal Content Management, Secure Enterprise Search, Presence etc.

This product should provide a way forward for the many existing Oracle Portal customers who are currently defecting to SharePoint in droves, as well as promoting ADF Faces at the way to write portlets.

If you agree, please vote for this idea on Oracle Mix - and feel free to comment below or to sten@vesterli.com.

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At the UKOUG conference in Birmingham, I gave a presentation entitled “Life After Forms” for people wondering what to do about their Forms applications. The reason that people consider this is of course that the talk in the Oracle community tend to concentrate on the two new options: ADF Faces and Application Express.However, whenever I talk to Oracle customers at conferences and on-site, most are still running Oracle Forms.In order to get some hard numbers, I gathered some statistics from the OTN Forms forum. Interestingly, the number of posts on this forum show almost a completely straight line since the forums started in 1998 (see figure below). This means that the interest in Forms (as measured by OTN Forum threads) has remained constant over more than 10 years - and shows no sign of tapering off.So if you are still running Oracle Forms, you are not alone. And with Oracle promising support until at least 2017, there are no technical reasons why you should rush out and re-develop existing Forms applications.

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Oracle has for a long time offered “Statements of Direction” outlining their strategy in various areas. One the statements I have been following with interest is the one that applies to Oracle Forms and Reports.

The latest version of this reassuringly says about Forms and Reports: “Oracle has no plan to desupport these products. Furthermore, new version of Oracle Forms,Oracle Reports will continue to be released as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Forms 11g and Oracle Reports 11g are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.”

However, the document now starts by saying that “It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.”

With this sleight of hand, Oracle has effectively retracted their commitment to the old tools. If a Statement of Direction cannot not be relied upon, what is the purpose?

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While Oracle continues to officially support Forms, the installation procedure for Forms 11g makes you wonder if they are not secretly wishing that all us old Forms programmers would just go away.

If your are a developer trying to take Oracle Forms 11g for a quick spin, you know you are not going to be reading the documentation, right? You’ll just download the software and start it up, right? Not so.

This is what will happen:

• You find the Fusion Middleware 11g download page and download the “Portal, Forms, Reports and Discoverer” installation (2.1GB)
• When you start the installer, you are told that you need to both create a repository according to one document, and that you need to perform a WebLogic Server installation according to another document
• The documentation-averse developer might try to download the Repository Creation Utility, but it comes without any obvious setup.exe or documentation

Now at this point the developer has two choices:

1. Read the Oracle documentation
2. Move to Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM WebSphere or another developer-friendly environment

I wonder what will be the most common response from a developer…

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In Europe, many people love Open Source with its connotations of sharing and village co-operatives. On the other hand, many Europeans don’t like the big, successful American companies (witness the ritual McDonalds-bashing).

This emotional preference for Open Source to big American companies is why the EU competition authorities have decided to protest against Oracle acquiring MySQL.

So what will happen? In my opinion, Larry will huff and puff, but in the end he will set up a semi-independent foundation and give it MySQL.

What will this mean? To Oracle, nothing (except perhaps a very small dent in Larry’s ego ;-). Oracle are not big on free databases anyway - they have their own free Oracle XE, but they are letting it lag five years behind the paid version. To MySQL, this represents a squandered opportunity. Larry could spend twice what Sun did and it would still be less than what he spends on a new carbon-fibre mast. Instead, MySQL will end up starved of investment and will be overtaken by various forks like Amazons RDS.

Comments welcome.

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One victim of Oracle’s increased focus on their applications business is the free Oracle Express Edition (XE) database. Still shipping in version 10g release 2 from 2005, Oracle has said that a new XE version will not be out for a year or two.

I originally believed that Oracle released this version in order to achieve increased developer mindshare (”if it’s free, I might as well use an Oracle database for my application”). But while Microsoft has released MS SQL Server Express Edition in version 2005, 2005 SP1, 2005 SP2, 2005 SP3, 2008, 2008 SP1, Oracle has doggedly kept Oracle XE at 2005 level. This makes it clear that for Oracle, this product serves mainly to check a box (”Free version: Check”).

The treatment of XE does make you wonder what would happen to MySQL under Oracle’s stewardship, should the Sun aquisition go through…

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Did you see the SOA Manifesto? It seems that software vendors and SOA luminaries feel the need to fire up some enthusiasm for SOA, so they are trying to replicate the success that the Agile Manifesto had in defining and focusing Agile development.

Unfortunately, the manifesto is a bit of a muddle, maybe reflecting different opinions among the authors. Half of the three principles are top-down, build-it-right, architecture-focused (”Strategic goals over project-specific benefits”, “Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration”, “Shared services over specific-purpose implementations”). Two are bottom-up, build-it-now (”Flexibility over optimization”, “Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection”). And one is a platitude (”Business value over technical strategy”) - did anybody ever say they placed technical strategy over business value?

It is interesting to compare these six principles with the clarity and inspiration of the Agile Manifesto. Perhaps the difference stems from the fact that the authors of the SOA Manifesto are almost all vendor representatives and SOA authors, while the authors of the Agile Manifesto were mainly people working as consultants on real projects.

The SOA manifesto fails to inspire me…

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