After 4 days of recovering from a case of food poisoning, with little else to do but consider my naval, I thought I'd rehash Brian Duff's post idea sometime back with my own little spin.
If I had 5 little Oracle wishes I'd like to come true, they would be:
5. Fix the email .zip issue - I don't know how many times I've emailed an Oracle employee with an attached .zip file, and had to change the .zip extension to .zippy or something else silly, to get through their email firewall. And the Oracle employees have to do the same thing too.
4. Allow more OTN forum markups - The OTN Forums are based on Jive Forum software. The Jive Forums allow a considerable amount of markup to enhance your posts (like BBCodes), yet it appears Oracle has disabled most of these. The Jive markup would allow me to include a mugshot of my smiling face in every post.... or maybe a screen shot or 2 of problems I've encountered best expressed in a picture.
3. Regular Oracle XE updates - the Oracle core database gets regular updates, including essential security fixes. Why not Oracle Express Edition (XE)? Surely they're mostly the same code base, and a new build of Oracle XE is only a couple good Ant scripts away?
2. Free ADF - JDeveloper is free, or kinda. There's this nagging little caveat that the JDeveloper IDE is free, but the ADF libraries are only free if you happen to own an OAS license. In the world marketing it's a false positive. Yes JDeveloper is free so it competes with other Java IDEs. But you wouldn't bother with JDeveloper without ADF, so essentially it's not free, because you have to buy an OAS license or similar. Confused? See now the messed up marketing message? Maybe JDeveloper and ADF should have the same unrestricted license of Oracle Apex?
1. Open Metalink to the web .... or Google I guess - to solve an Oracle problem I first search with Google, then I search Metalink. While I suspect Oracle will always want to protect the Support revenue base in Metalink, it would be nice if it wasn't so. Imagine the pure joy when school children around the world could spend their lunch times productively reading 11g bug reports rather than surfing for pictures of the Smurfs.
So what would your 5 Oracle wishes be?
8 comments:
Chris,
Not that this solves your problem entirely, but it might ease the pain a bit.
http://oracleappslab.com/2007/07/10/metalink-and-more-in-your-browser-search-bar/
Jake, AppLab
http://blog.gueck.com/2007/05/my-five-oracle-wishes.html
Ah... yes #5 is super-annoying.
I agree with you in 100% :)
There's no reason adf should be free. ADF Faces is already free, ADF Toplink is also free, just not the bindings and data controls.
But oracle is working on jsr-227 to standardize the bindings and datacontrols, and every jsr needs a free reference implementation. So what is orcle going to do, create another implementation of the datacontrols en bindings that can be used as the reference implementation, or free the current implementation?
My guess, when (if) jsr-227 is finished, adf will become free.
Nah, I'm afraid you're just proving my point more. ADF is sold as an "end-to-end" development tool, and while Oracle has made parts of that end-to-end framework free, because they've missed out parts like the binding layer and ADF Business Components, it's like selling a house with no wiring, no plumbing, no stairs and no doorbell. The house might look good, but it's all show.
As for JSR-227, I've been watching JSR-227 for a long time now and it seems stalled. It looks like Oracle was well ahead on getting the concept of a binding layer together and seeking community approval, but there doesn't seem to be much else happening with it. Maybe Oracle can make a comment?
CM.
I went to a talk by ted farell recently. He said that the bonus of the person leading the jsr-227 spec was depending on him finishing the spec. So it seems it still has some priority for oracle.
Adf has 2 parts, the development tools, and the runtime libraries. The development tool, jdeveloper, is already free to use, the runtime libraries are partially free.
The stack i mostly use, jpa, jsr-227, adf faces, has only one part that currently isn't free: jsr-227. If you want to run this stack on an application server you either need to use oracle's application server, or pay for adf data controls and bindings.
Once a free jsr-227 reference implementation is available, you can create adf applications for free, and run them for free.
A good reason not to use the business components, but instead use jpa/ejb3.
Well the problem with your point is you're discounting ADF Business Components and focusing on the Java stack within ADF. Where as I'm not. I think ADF BC has a very important part to play as it's better suited to Forms and other 4GL programmers such as myself, while the JPA/EJB3 stack is better suited to traditional Java programmers.
So in my "Free the JDev" campaign, I guess I'm meaning free the binding layer and ADF BC..... and that's currently 2/3 of the stack for myself (and we'll ignore ADF Faces RC for the time being in this discussion as it is not yet an open source project).
CM.
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