ODTUG Conference, Monday
Jun 17th 2008vesterliApplication Express & Conferences & Oracle ADF
After the general session, I saw “Building Next Generation of Composite Application” presented by Oracle. I was disappointed that this was a standard ADF application building presentation that did not really use WebCenter at all.
After lunch, I went first to the Oracle Tools Expert Panel session, where there were several good discussions. I then saw the PITSS vendor presentation - they are using their Forms tool to help you extract business logic from existing Forms applications. And I heard Peter Koletzke present a case study about migrating/redeveloping an old Forms application in ADF - good presentation.
In the last session of the day, an Oracle Product Manager clowned his way through a couple of ill-prepared APEX demos and went 30 minutes over his allotted time of 60 minutes. But while the presentation was unimpressive, the tool surely is. The Forms-to-APEX migrator seems to be real (while still alpha) - we did see a Forms XML file read and converted into a basic APEX app.
It does seem that the Oracle Development community is splitting into two camps:
- On one side, out of the eight people on the Oracle Tools Expert Panel, nobody knew about APEX. So the Fusion Middleware people seem to be ignoring APEX.
- On the other side, the APEX presentation had a lot of attitude of the “we’re-cool-RAD-developers” and “enterprise-developers-are-uncool” type. So the APEX people clearly see themselves as a breed apart from the Fusion Middleware people.