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Oracle announced a number of cloud offerings at Oracle Openworld. However, as is often the case with OpenWorld announcements, we are still waiting for actual products to materialize.

The first cloud offering likely to appear as a real product is the Oracle Database Cloud Service. This is because Oracle has already been running this service for free at apex.oracle.com. The only difference I expect is that it will now have a monthly fee and the wording about not using it for production purposes will be removed.

The Oracle Java Cloud Service is still pending and we probably won’t see it until 2012.

For both of these cloud services, Oracle has apparently not worked out the pricing yet. This supports the hypothesis that Oracle felt they had to rush something with a “cloud” moniker to market at OpenWorld, but they don’t really know what their value proposition is yet. Oracle has a history of building great software products, but tends to attach “enterprise” (= very high) price tags to them, pricing them out of reach of 90% of the market. Since the technical cloud offerings should appeal to the wider market, it will be interesting to see if Oracle gets it right this time.

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The important discussion where to use APEX and where to use ADF tends to get bogged down in an unproductive argument about the relative merits of PL/SQL or Java. However, this is not really the most important factor that should drive your decision.

Instead, you must first determine if your application is

• Data-driven, or
• User interface driven

A data-driven application is one where the data structure determines the user interface. Existing Oracle Forms applications tend to fall into this category, and if you only want to do a one-to-one replacement of a Forms application, the wizard-driven, browser-based approach of APEX works well.

A user interface driven application is one that starts from a set of requirements to support a work process. This is typically the case for new application development, or where an existing Oracle Forms application is being redesigned. User interface driven applications are typically specified with detailed screen designs that are easier to implement with the flexible architecture of ADF.

If you are in Norway for the OUGN spring conference, you can hear me talk on this topic in the presentation called “APEX or ADF? From Requirements to Tool Choice”.

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I’m honored and proud to have received the ODTUG Best Speaker Award (Presentation and Delivery) at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 conference for my presentation “What’s Hot and What’s Not - an overview of Oracle Development Tools”. Because this award is based on audience feedback, the award is actually awarded for my 2009 presentation.I gave the presentation again this year, and the slides are now available for download (What’s Hot and What’s Not). I have also uploaded the slides for my presentations “Forms to ADF - Live!” and “Forms to APEX - Live!“. There are only a few slides for these, as they were mainly given in the form of live demo.

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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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Leaving the details of the individual sessions aside, the impression from this year’s OpenWorld is that of a shift in Oracle’s perception of themselves.

Oracle used to present itself as a technology company that happened to use its technology to build applications. Now, Oracle is an applications company that happens to build some technology (software and hardware) as needed for its applications.

This was evident from the main keynotes that focused almost exclusively on Oracle applications present and future. There was no mention of any news in either database or middleware - this was relegated to the smaller Oracle Develop sub-conference. Looking at the tag cloud in the official Schedule Builder, you search in vain for any mention of PL/SQL or Application Express - even Fusion Development (ADF) get only a small mention.

For a developer this means:

1. The core products used for Oracle applications (Fusion/ADF/BPEL) will be around for a very long time.
2. The non-core products (ODP.NET, Application Express, etc.) will live only as long as there is a significant community using them.

This does not mean that either ODP.NET or APEX is going away (both have strong communities), but it means that it is up to the developer community to keep Oracle interested in these products.

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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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The UKOUG conference in Birmingham is over, and I have placed PDF files of my two presentations on the papers page.

I was only there for two days this year, but did pick up a few interesting things:

• Oracle is now promising App Server 11g (including WebCenter) first half of calendar year 2009. On past form, that probably means a July to September timeframe
• Oracle will be moving to a new Access Management solution for App Server 11g. The existing Oracle SSO solution will not  be part of 11g, which means that you will have to keep a 10g infrastructure around if you use Oracle Portal, mod_osso or Oracle Forms with Single Sign-on. Migration path? Nope, you’re on your own.
• It seems Oracle is backing away from an earlier commitment to use JCR-170 content in Portal 11g. If you want to use UCM with Oracle Portal, you’ll have to make do with the standard UCM portlets. Migrating Oracle Portal content to UCM? Once again, you’re on your own.
• Forms 11g: It’s ready on the shelf waiting for the App Server 11g release.
• Application Express: On it’s own release cycle - expect APEX 4.0 in second half of 2009. The WebSheet feature is really cool - you have Edit-in-place of table values without everything having to be in a text entry field, you can create LOVs from existing column values, and an end user can add columns to an existing table from the WebSheet.

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On the last day of the ODTUG conference, I went to the APEX vs. ADF session. Lucas Jellema of AMIS presented the ADF Faces approach and Dimitri Gielis presented the APEX approach. Though Lucas tried to play down the “shootout” aspect, the tone did become rather confrontational, helped by an audience overwhelmingly cheering for APEX.

They had each built a survey application with their respective tools in 6 just hours. Both Lucas and Dimitri demonstrated their applications and the strong points of their chosen tool. The presentation was concluded with a comparison along nine dimensions. Since Lucas and Dimitri each scored their preferred tool and obviously had different ideas of what deserved a top score, this wasn’t really helpful.

The APEX people were clearly in the majority at the conference, but still seem to have a chip on their shoulder. I’m not sure this confrontational attitude is helpful to the wider Oracle development community - personally, I’d hold that an Oracle shop of more than a few people needs to master both ADF Faces for strategic solutions and APEX for tactical applications.

What do you think? Can you get by with just one tool? If so, which one would you choose?

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I started the day with my own presentation “Like Open Source Forms”, which is one long live demo how to build an ADF Swing application. I then saw a detailed presentation on ADF Taskflow by Edwin Biemond. Some BPEL-infatuated developers tend to use BPEL even for page flows; but with ADF Taskflows, we can now point these people to the right solution.

Paul Dorsey gave his presentation on why all code (including page navigation) ought to be in the database. He told some interesting stories about pure OO projects that failed horribly and concluded that his preferred “thick database” approach resulted in half the development time, half the code, half the database load, ten times the performance and one percent of the network roundtrips compared with the OO approach.

After lunch, I saw John Flack present his project that allows people to locate the nearest substance abuse treatment location and see it on a map. He innovatively combines Google Maps (used for geocoding through a PL/SQL API), Oracle Locator (the SDO_GEOMETRY object type to allow geographical “find nearest” queries) and an ADF Faces user interface with Google Maps embedded.

The last presentation of the day was Carl Backstrom from Oracle who presented some sophisticated AJAX features used in APEX that a Javascript-savvy developer can also use to extend the functionality of APEX applications. And then it was off to the ODTUG party…

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Preparing for my own presentation, I missed Grant Ronalds presentation on declarative development with JDeveloper. But he showed that it’s possible to build a complete ADF Faces application without writing a single line of code.

I saw Scott Spendolini give a very good presentation on some relatively cheap 3rd party components that you could integrate into you APEX application. At the PL/SQL expert panel they gave out a quiz to all developers. Steven Feuerstein had found a lot of interesting corners - it seems I don’t know PL/SQL as well as I thought…

At the Oracle ACE Directors briefing, Duncan Mills and Clemens Utschig told us about Oracles strategy, new releases etc., Unfortunately, we are not allowed to talk about much of it until July 1st… The focus was on the BEA aquisition, which seems to be progressing nicely with some interesting parts being integrated into the Oracle product palette. After the Oracle presentations, Oracle ACE Directors Eric Marcoux, Andrejus Baranovskis and Lucas Jellema presented some of the things whey are working on, including a big WebCenter-based application and a Forms to ADF Faces migration.

After the briefing, I gave my own presentation “What’s Hot and What’s Not”, trying to explain all the choices available to Oracle developers today. I’ve been talking to a lot of people at this conference and have had to conclude that ADF Swing is simply not being used much. So ADF Swing has been downgraded from dark green green to a yellow (see my Oracle Tools page).

Then it was off to first the Oracle ACE panel moderated by Justin Kestelyn of OTN for an interesting discussion about the role of the ACEs, followed by the Meet the ACEs reception. After reception, I headed to Arnaud’s for the Oracle ACE dinner. Amazingly, among the eight people at our table, we had Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America and Australia represented - only Antarctica was missing. The Oracle ACE program is truly global!

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