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I’m at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, and the level of the presentations here is awesome. With so many great sessions, I don’t really have time to blog a daily update - but you can get a feel for what is happening by setting up a twitter search for #odtug. You can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/stenvesterli and ODTUG on twitter.com/odtug.

My own presentation “What’s Hot and What’s Not - An Overview of Oracle Development Tools” is tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. 

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I’m off to Monterey for the annual ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference June 21 to 25. 

I’ll be presenting on “Simple SOA - A Real-Life Case Study” during the Web Architecture Symposium Sunday. If you want to twitter about this presentation (or even ask me a question during the session) please use tag #odtug S458. 

My other presentation is the latest overview of the Oracle tool stack: “What’s Hot and What’s Not” on Thursday. Here, I’ll be discussing Oracle Forms, Application Express, ADF and many other tools. The twitter tag for this presentation is #odtug S392 - questions are welcome. If you can’t make it to the conference, the conclusion from this presentation can be found on the Oracle Tools page.

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Since Oracle killed off client/server application development with Forms 6i, their position has been that new applications should be built building web technology. Oracle has invested heavily in JavaServer Faces together with ADF, which is what they are using for Oracle Fusion Applications. This approach (ADF Faces) is well supported with UI components, documentation, tutorials,and global developer events. 

It is possible to build applications with ADF and Java Swing, but this approach is barely documented and not at all pushed by Oracle. So Swing is likely to slowly wither away in the “continue and converge” category.

Oracle has occasionally seen the need to build rich, attractive user interfaces (look at the CRM applications). But when they need to do so, they use Adobe Flash to do it. This means that Oracle does not see JavaFX, which is another rich client technology competing with Flash, as a viable proposition. JavaFX goes into the “continue and converge” bin as well. 

The one rich client technology that is impossible to ignore is .NET, and Oracle is indeed supporting .NET very well. Look at the latest issue of Oracle Magazine - .NET development is one of the major themes. 

With Sun acquired by Oracle, Java (Swing and JavaFX) is out of the running for future desktop applications - leaving the entire field to Microsoft .NET.

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I’ll be presenting on Oracle development tools tomorrow afternoon here at the Oracle User Group Norway conference. As always, this is an opportunity for me to reflect on my own experience with the tools and the discussions I am participating in, and update my Oracle Tools list.

In this latest update, I have downgraded ADF and ADF Faces from “strong positive” to “positive” - even though Oracle 11g has been out for a while, I am still not seing any significant take-up outside of Oracle Corporation. We probably need both a free Application Server XE and a reasonably priced version of Oracle WebCenter for ADF to take off.

On the other hand, I have upgraded APEX from “positive” to “strong positive” - with the Forms conversion wizard in version 3.2, the already enthusiastic developer community is likely to gain even more momentum.

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I am running Oracle BPEL 10.1.3.3 and had a mysterious problem: Some workflows would fail without leaving any trace. They did not show up in the BPEL Control as Faulted - indeed they did not show at all. My process had a CatchAll branch, but this was not triggered. It was like my BPEL instances never existed. The only way I could see that anything happened at all was because the flow was triggered by a Database Adapter monitoring a table and using a sequence table. And the BPEL process did update the sequence table.

I created a test case initiated from the Initiate tab in BPEL Control and saw the same thing: The curious case of the disappearing BPEL instances. After commenting out almost everything, I finally found the culprit: I referred directly to output variable from a Database Adapter call in a switch case.

Fails:
<case condition="xp20:lower-case(bpws:getVariableData('QueryCapNordicOutput','QueryCapNordicOutputCollection','/ns2:QueryCapNordicOutputCollection/ns2:QueryCapNordicOutput/ns2:capnordic_type')) = 'none'">
</case>

Works:
<variable name="ExistingCapNordicAccess" type="xsd:string"/>
...
<assign name="AssignFromQueryCapNordic">
<copy>
<from variable="QueryCapNordicOutput"
part="QueryCapNordicOutputCollection" query="/ns2:QueryCapNordicOutputCollection/ns2:QueryCapNordicOutput/ns2:capnordic_type"/>
<to variable="ExistingCapNordicAccess"/>
</copy>
</assign>
...
<case condition="xp20:lower-case(bpws:getVariableData('ExistingCapNordicAccess')) = 'none'">


The same thing happens when you try to use the input variables for an asynchronous BPEL process in a switch case - the process disappears into the BPELmuda triangle.

Morale: There seems to be an undocumented limitation in Oracle BPEL, where you cannot refer to variables set by partner links. You need to immediately assign your partner link values to another variable and refer to this variable later in your flow.

Being way behind my project schedule, I don’t have time to create a test case and convince Oracle Support this is a bug - I hope someone else does…

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I’ll be speaking at the Oracle User Group Norway conference March 10-12 in their English-language track. It’s held aboard the M/S Color Magic sailing from Oslo to Kiel and back. There’s more info on the OUGN website.

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Lured by the ads that the new Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display was “made for the Macbook Air”, I brought one home. But it is not made for my 4-month old MacBook Air - only for MacBook Air from November 2008 and later. Even though Apple needed another display connector like a moose needs a hatrack, they decided to give the 24″ LED Cinema Display only their own Mini DisplayPort. By publishing the spec, this Apple-only interface has magically been turned into a “standard” - used by exactly three notebooks in the universe. And my 1st generation MacBook air has a Micro-DVI port, not a Mini DisplayPort.

So is there an adapter? No. Can I have the old 23″ Apple monitor to go with my “old” Macbook? Sorry, Apple has discontinued those.

Pleased with my MacBook Air (awesome, even the 1st gen), I was ready to set up an iMac at home. But now it’s abundantly clear that the time when everything “just worked” with Mac was before Steve Jobs went on sick leave…

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I’ve started to twitter. In case you don’t know Twitter, it’s a communication service that can be used as a micro-blog - each post is 140 characters or less. Read more on the Wikipedia article on Twitter. You can sign up at http://twitter.com/ and follow me at http://twitter.com/stenvesterli.

Oracle is of course also on twitter, but only with their normal marketing messages - the Oracle Technology Network Twitter by Justin Kestelyn is much more interesting. I’ll also recommend following the Oracle Development Tools User Group Twitter (where I also twitter).

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The January edition of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Information InDepth newsletter has an article “Modern Portals Create Advantage in Uncertain Times“. Oracle quote two customer success stories (both banks) - interestingly, one of them is using Oracle WebCenter Interaction (which used to be BEA AquaLogic Interaction) and the other one is using Oracle WebLogic Portal (which used to be BEA WebLogic Portal).

With all these successes, it was clearly a good idea for Oracle to buy BEA. Now we are just waiting to hear a success story from someone actually using Oracle’s strategic WebCenter product…

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In one of my presentations at this year’s UKOUG Conference, I made a comparison of the five Oracle portal products:

• WebCenter Services
• WebCenter Suite
• Oracle Portal
• WebCenter/AquaLogic Interaction
• Weblogic Portal

The comparison included framework capabilities, content management and built-in functionality, and I came to the following conclusion:

The evaluation applies to the currently shipping 10g products. The WebCenter Suite license includes WebLogic Portal as a separate product - for clarity, the line for WebCenter Suite evaluates only the core WebCenter functionality and WebLogic Portal is evaluated on it’s own.

Oracle Portal is licensed with Oracle Application Server SE1, SE and EE. AquaLogic Interaction cannot be licensed separately except by existing BEA customers that need more licenses. WebLogic Portal can be licensed separately or as part of the WebCenter Suite.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment here (registration required) or by e-mail to sten@vesterli.com.

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