After than a less than amusing 3 hours sleep last night, day 3 of OOW08 was on the agenda. Today was some impressive presentations by the JDev PMs. Even though I've been searching the JDev 11g stack carefully for new features, Steve Muench revealed a massive (no over exaggeration) set of new features in ADF BC I hadn't yet found, Frank Nimphius a range of new security features to fit into WLS, and Juan Ruiz demonstrated the new ADF desktop integration (ADFdi) for Excel, a feature that potentially is going to make BI Publisher redundant as a reporting solution for ADF if the JDev team can in combination squeeze out a MS-Word equivalent.
It's so obvious there's a massive Fusion Apps development hiding somewhere behind the scenes at Oracle. The JDev team are pumping a huge amount of new and improved features into the ADF stack, and it's not because of the Enhancement Requests logged on the JDev OTN forum ;-)
I had a chance to sit in on Robert Nocera's Forms to JDev Unconference session, and in fact I bumped into Grant Ronald from Oracle UK who said all his Forms conversion presentations have been full. It seems Forms conversion is on the tip of everyones' tongues at Oracle Develop, given there are a number of solutions at OOW this year. What a shame the Apex crew are overselling theirs. Have you thought about telling people you can't convert the PL/SQL guys?
Tonight was the Oracle ACE Dinner, a relaxing event to talk to a diverse set of "really" qualified and interesting people. It's such a rare chance to meet so many dedicated people from around the world. Once again thanks to Oracle for organising this, it makes for a great OOW experience.
Like yesterday, Oracle Australia cornered more Australians at OOW today, and you can see Marcel Kratochvil interviewed on YouTube.
Today I did hear a rumour that Oracle has committed to Oracle 11g XE in the future, I'll need to confirm the fact though. Could this be Larry's big X announcement on Wednesday? (teehee) The 11g XE release will be a relief for all us presenters who use it to present. I suspect we'll need to wait till OOW09 though.
Wednesday sees the ADF Methodology kick off at the Unconference. We've 30 odd people registered which is great. Afterwards I'll be in the OTN Lounge for the Oracle ACE Office Hours between 12-1pm, and then squeezing in some more JDev sessions, followed by the Appreciation event.
No rest for the wicked (as much as you can call an Oracle "programmer" wicked).
3 comments:
"Juan Ruiz demonstrated the new ADF desktop integration (ADFdi) for Excel, a feature that potentially is going to make BI Publisher redundant as a reporting solution for ADF if the JDev team can in combination squeeze out a MS-Word equivalent"
That could be very handy indeed. As I've posted on the ADF methodology group, for smaller apps you often just need to print out what's in a View Object on a page - Excel or Word could do that. Plus if you could run a Word mail merge to produce letters from data supplied by an ADF app that too would cover off some smaller app requirements. You could even combine it with a utility to produce PDF output (though the latest version of Word does that too). Not exactly "enterprise reporting," but rather cheaper than BIP :)
Hi Chris,
why do you think that the APEX crew is overselling the Forms migration?
It was clearly stated in David Peakes session that the Forms Migration/Conversion will not convert the PL/SQL trigger but will provide tools to help to identify this code and probably move it into database packages or APEX processes, ...
I haven't had the impression that they are making wrong promises or overselling it.
Patrick
Hi Patrick
I wasn't talking about David's presentation directly, but rather the collective Apex crowd's online selling of this tool (present company excluded of course).
If you check out posts from David and Dimitri, both barely hint at the PL/SQL conversion limitations. Dimitri had to be prompted to reveal this limitation. The "ra-ra-ra" Apex corner is getting tiring, I'd like to see more reflective posts coming out of the Apex crowd, not everything Apex does is fantastic, and this particular feature is a dangerous one to oversell because it will burn a lot of people if not done well, to the detriment of all Oracle adopters out there, evangelists or not.
I'd like to see the "not 100% conversion" message clearly stated in all forums to ensure those picking up the message, be it online on blogs, through OTN, or attending presentations at OOW, realize this is not a holy grail feature from Oracle, or a recommended migration path away from Forms. At the moment without the PL/SQL conversion it's a *very* limited feature, suitable for converting reference forms, but nothing of much complexity.
(and I don't expect it will ever convert the PL/SQL properly, it's too hard a task)
Regards,
CM.
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