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Wednesday morning I spent the morning in the ADF Methodology Group unconference session. Fellow Oracle ACE Director Chris Muir had convened the meeting and explained the rationale for the ADF Methodology group. We discussed several aspects of ADF methodology: Eric Marcoux spoke on ADF testing, Steve Muench discussed how to advocate ADF, I spoke on the role of the database in ADF, Robert Nocera presented some ADF standards, John Flack spoke on reporting options and Avrom Roy-Faderman made some interesting points about reusability. You can find our work on assorted blogs and gathered on the ADF Methodology page on the Oracle Wiki. If you are interested in ADF and want to join the discussion, you are encouraged to join the ADF Methodology Google Group.

In the afternoon, I went to Larrys keynote. The big announcement was Oracle  hardware products: The Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine. It was billed as Oracle’s first hardware products, which is wrong on two counts: Oracle tried hardware before (”Raw Iron” about 6 years ago), and the hardware is actually by HP. But the Exadata server looks interesting - by adding CPUs and including Oracle Parallel Query software right next to the disks, the storage server can return data instead of just blocks. Oracle claims a speed-up of between 10 and 30 times in large, real-life data warehouse applications.

He did not announce that there will be an Oracle XE 11g, but that is persistently rumoured here.

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Sunday at OracleWorld was filled by the Oracle ACE Director briefing. Unfortunately most of the information given out is embargoed until the relevant Oracle VIP makes the official announcement during the week. Stay tuned…But we did have some of the usual interesting discussions about Oracle pricing, especially in the light of Oracle having just posted record profits.

On one hand, we heard Mark Townsend, VP of Product Management for the Database say that Oracle will increasingly be placing the most useful (”differentiating”) new features of the database in extra-price options. And Vince Casarez, another VP of Product Management, stoutly defended the extravagant pricing of Oracle WebCenter.

On the other hand, Senior Director of Product Management for Application Development Tools Duncan Mills mused about the possibility of making Oracle ADF license-free for deployment on non-oracle application servers. I sure hope this comes to pass - it would be an important step forward for the general adoption of Oracle ADF, which is an under-utilized gem in the Oracle product stack. If more Java projects used good frameworks like Oracle ADF instead of building their own, we would see fewer spectacular project failures.

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If you’re in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld next week, be sure to check out the OpenWorld Unconference session on ADF. Some of the luminaries from the ADF Methodology Group are presenting and discussing best practice on Overlook 1, 3rd Floor, Moscone West on Wednesday September 24th 9am-11am. I’ll be there!

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I’m part of the ADF Methodology Group that’s discussing how to best use ADF in real-life work. We’ll be discussing best practices and development methodologies in order to make it easier to build systems with ADF. ADF has great potential - with rock-solid technological foundation and support from a major vendor who’s really using it themselves. So if we can develop a “blueprint” and a set of best practices, this will become the low-risk way to build JEE applications.

Have a look at the Oracle Wiki Page, join the Google Group, and sign up for the Oracle OpenWorld Unconference session.

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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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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.

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I’ve uploaded a simple ADF demo showing how to create a Java Swing application and ADF business components.

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