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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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Now that Oracle has announced the BEA strategy, it’s time to make sure that the Oracle WebLogic server becomes a huge success. And for this to happen, Oracle needs to announce an application server “Express Edition” - like they have for the database.

This should be free and include ADF. That would lead many more developers to use ADF, which has excellent productivity and gives the highest probability of success for a Java database web application. Like the Database XE, the app server XE version would of course be limited to one CPU, forum-only support etc.

Wouldn’t that be great? If you think so, please head over to Oracle Mix and vote for the idea “Please create a free App Server XE product“.

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It’s official: Oracle’s new JEE server is WebLogic. The strategic product will be called Oracle WebLogic, while OC4J has dropped into the “Continue & Converge” category. The reason for not dropping OC4J completely seems to be the need to let Oracle Applications customers continue running on their existing infrastructure.

While I have not made a solid technical comparison, the enthusiasm of the BEA community for WebLogic seems to indicate that it’s technologically superior to OC4J - I’ve never felt really enthusiastic about OC4J…

On the downside, this means the entire humongous Fusion Middleware stack now has to be tested with a new core component, making it very unlikely that we’ll see Oracle Application Server 11g this year.

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