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I’m spending the weekend writing abstracts for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference 2010, which will be held in Washington, D.C. June 27 through July 1.If you have solved an interesting challenge, have a real-life project experience to share or have tried out some of the latest technology, I strongly encourage you to submit an abstract.If your abstract is accepted, you’ll get the honor of speaking at the premier Oracle development conference in the world and you are sure to learn a lot yourself as you prepare your paper and presentation…See you in Washington D.C. in June!

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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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It’s time for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco again - I’ll be speaking on Sunday Oct. 11 at the User Group symposium on “Simple SOA - A Real-Life Case Study”. It’s session S312178 in Moscone West L3 room 3000 at 11:15 a.m.

I will also be participating in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group sessions, both on Sunday Oct 11 in Moscone West L3 room 3014 at 10:30 a.m. and in the Unconference on Wednesday Oct 14 at 1:00 p.m. If you are interested in Oracle ADF, look up the ADF EMG sessions and join the group.

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One of the three presentations I’ll be giving at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Suite conference 2009 in Birmingham Nov 30 - Dec 2 is “Forms to ADF - Live!”. For this presentation, I am going to convert an existing Oracle Forms application to an ADF Faces (web) application.

Now, instead of just converting the same old Forms demo application again, I would like to use a couple of real-life Forms. So if you would like to see what your existing Forms application might look like in ADF, please send me an e-mail (sten@vesterli.com).

What I am looking for:

• a couple of Forms of medium complexity
• all necessary support files (PLL etc)
• a database create script (tables, PL/SQL etc)
• an export or a script for creating realistic test data
• a bit of your time answering my questions on the app
• your permission to show your app during my conference presentations

What I’ll give back:

• a running ADF web application with the same functionality
• a JDeveloper Workspace with all the code

There’ll be no cost to you, of course. I look forward to hearing from you!

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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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