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One of the advantages to using commercial, fully supported framework like Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is that the vendor supplies a list of supported browsers. If something doesn’t work or doesn’t look right, it’s the vendor’s problem.

When we started a recent project, we initially made sure that our ADF 11.1.x pages looked OK in Internet Explorer and Firefox. As expected, no problems. So we started building our application, and the developers used Firefox and Chrome because of the superior tooling these browsers offer for web developers.

However, as has happened in other applications, one screen mutated into the dreaded “one-screen-to-rule-them-all” page allowing a power user to see and change almost every data item in the entire system. And while Firefox and Chrome were able to render our panels inside tabs inside panels inside accordions inside panels, Internet Explorer had to give up at some point.

Lesson learned:

ADF allows the developer to write cheques that Internet Explorer can’t cash. [tweet this]

Have your developers run their pages in IE every day in order to see where you meet the limitations of Internet Explorer. It’s much easier to fix the issues during development than during QA…

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Oracle recently came out with JDeveloper 11gR2 (11.1.2.x), and not everyone was impressed. See for example the discussion “Performance and stability of JDeveloper 11gR2 vs. 11gR1” in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group.

If you look up JDeveloper 11gR2 in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy document, on page 9 you will find that 11gR2 does not get the normal 5 years of premier support and 3 years of extended support. Instead, you have only 3 years of premier support, ending June 2014. In effect, Oracle does not consider JDeveloper 11gR2 a real release and will only support it as long as they support 11gR1.

Finally, if you look at the section “Bugs Fixed in 11.1.2.1.0” in “Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF 11g Release 2 (11.1.2.x) New Features”, you see a lot of bugs where the subject start with “backport”. Backporting means to take a bug fix from a newer release and apply it to an older one. So the fact that the very latest JDeveloper release comes with backports right from the start indicates that Oracle is considering 11gR2 the “old” release.

JDeveloper 11gR2 looks like a dead end in ADF development [tweet this]

Would you consider using it? Please comment below.

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More than 6 months after Oracle announced the Java Cloud and Database Cloud services at Oracle OpenWorld, we’re still waiting for these services to materialize. There might be technical reasons for this delay, but it is also obvious that Oracle hasn’t figured out a business plan for these services either.

At the announcement, Oracle was cagey about the pricing, which was to be expected for a service Larry reputedly invented a few months before OpenWorld. However, I recently had the opportunity to ask Oracle again if they had worked out - and they still refuse to quote a price. You’ll have to talk to your friendly Oracle salesperson to get a quote (that will undoubtedly be wrapped in legalese saying you can’t share it).

This lack of transparency is a clever move by Oracle: They can offer reasonable pricing in order to acquire a few token customers and then quote everybody else a yearly price equal to, say, one third of the cost of a perpetual license. In this way, they can claim to have a cloud service without cannibalizing revenue from their existing business model of selling full licenses up front.

By failing to embrace the cloud model, however, Oracle will eventually start loosing market share to true cloud players. It’ll be interesting to see if they figure out how to transform themselves into a real cloud company.

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Even though this question has been asked and answered a million times, it still pops up on various forums regularly. It’s not that difficult:

If you end up on the right-hand side of this flowchart, you start at the JDeveloper ADF Getting Started Guide to learn ADF.

If you end up on the left-hand side of this flowchart:

1. Don’t buy a tool to automagically “convert” your Forms application to ADF or other new technologies.
2. Think about whether a modern Look and Feel for your Forms applications is what you need - see “Ten Years Younger - The Oracle Forms Makeover” by Grant Ronald
3. If you need your Oracle Forms application to participate in a modern IT architecture, read “The Future of Forms is - Forms (and some friends)” by Lucas Jellema and Grant Ronald.

See? I told you it wasn’t hard.

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When asked about public-facing, real-life examples of Oracle WebCenter in action, Oracle has for the last couple of years presented universities (Université Laval, Texas A&M University). But it is now rumored that BAE Systems‘ site is running Oracle WebCenter.

As it should be, you can’t tell from looking at the site (which looks cool, by the way) - it has been stripped of the typical URL parts that give off WebCenter/ADF applications. But the curious reader can examine the page source and find hints like AdfLogger.DEFAULT_LEVEL=AdfLogger.OFF and Created by Oracle ADF (ADF Faces API - 11.1.1.5.0 …)

Another interesting development that shows ADF and WebCenter moving from internal sites and onto the wider web is the improved web crawler support. In 11.1.1.6, you can programmatically detect a visit from a web crawler and generate special, spider-friendly content for it (Google, Bing and Yahoo supported). See the JDev 11.1.1.6 New Features document for more.

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Over the last years, the Oracle ACE Program has offered generous travel support to Oracle ACE Directors like me. This has allowed even small and poor user groups in far-off places to invite world-class speakers to their events, with Oracle covering travel and accommodation costs.

This policy has now been tightened significantly - maybe because Oracle’s net income for second quarter of their 2011 fiscal year was only 2 billion dollars.

The new rules supports a maximum of two ACE Directors per event and requires each to give at least two presentations. This means that star-studded events like the Nordic ACE Director Tour to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland we were planning this fall will be very difficult to arrange in the future. You might also see fewer ACE Directors at ODTUG, UKOUG, Collaborate and RMOUG in the future, as the ACE Programme has rescinded travel support for these events.

However, Oracle is still generous enough to fund ACE Director travel, subject to the limitations above. So if you would like me to speak at your user group event, just make sure you don’t invite more than one other ACE Director. As they say in the westerns: “This conference ain’t big enough for the three of us”

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To an IT professional, it’s obvious that not every system belongs in a cloud (whether public or private). However, with all the hype surrounding Cloud Computing these days, these voices of reason tend to be drowned out.

After receiving a deafening roar of “CLOUD” from the Oracle marketing machine at OpenWorld last year, it was a pleasant surprise to hear the technology side of Oracle weigh in with some sensible opinions. If you are considering cloud computing, I’d encourage you to take a look at the whitepaper Cloud Candidate Selection Tool: Guiding Cloud Adoption, which contains some good guidance for considering if and where to use cloud computing.

Oracle is not giving away the actual spreadsheet they are talking about - for that, you’ll have to call your friendly Oracle account representative.

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I just completed another great training session held by the Oracle User Experience (UX) team. I am privileged to be part of the Oracle Fusion User Experience Advocates team, so Oracle is putting a lot of effort into teaching us about Fusion UX.

One of the topics was the new Financials demo that we learned to give. So now, I can play the part of accounting manager at Vision Operations…

While the General Accounting Dashboard is nice, the really mind-blowing part of the Financials part of Fusion apps is the way it uses the ADF desktop integration features. This means that you can seamlessly download your journal into Excel on your desktop, work with the data and then upload it back into your ERP system. As I know business people, they’re gonna love this!

If you want to see what the financials part of Fusion Applications look like, feel free to send me a mail.

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Oracle lists more than 200 new features in WebLogic 12c - unfortunately, I don’t get to use them.

The improvements fall in two main categories:

• Management, Performance and High Availability (HA)
• Java EE 6

As a developer, management and high availability is “somebody else’s problem” - I appreciate the work my app server admin does, but it doesn’t affect the code I write to meet business needs. I welcome performance improvements as much as the next guy - but I want them to be transparent and not force me to code for a specific performance feature of a specific app server.

I would really like to be able to utilize the new features in JEE6, but for the time being, this is restricted to “pure” Java programming. As an Oracle Fusion Middleware developer using various parts of the FMW stack, I will have to wait for my beloved Application Development Framework to be supported on WebLogic 12c. I hope the wait will be short!

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As an Oracle Partner, you cannot escape the relentless push from Oracle to become “specialized” in one or more Oracle products.

If the purpose of this program had been to ensure that partners actually know what they’re talking about, I would have been all in favor. But unfortunately, the main purpose of the program seems to be to push Oracle partners to sell more Oracle software. The specialization requirements include demonstrating some knowledge (a good thing), but also selling a specific number of licenses each year (not necessarily a good thing).

A systems integrator like Scott/Tiger doesn’t sell very much software. Instead, we integrate and ensure that the customer is successful with the Oracle software he or she has. We’re just as much a part of the Oracle ecosystem as companies selling licenses - but Oracle’s “specialization” message effectively tells us to peddle some software or go away.

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