OraTransplant

Day 2, 3, and 4 at OpenWorld

I thought the first day of OpenWorld with my own two presentations (here and here) was a busy one. How wrong could I have been… I’ve been to a couple of Oracle conventions by now and each time you get to now a few new people. That really adds up and by now you just walk around a convention like this and meet people you know every time. This means you spend a lot of time talking to a lot of people. That’s absolutely great and one of the most important reasons why I love attending these things. The only downside is that is leaves you little or no time to blog about what’s happening.

Between all the social activities (drinks, dinners, and even a sailing trip on the bay - thanks Hylke) I even managed to find some time for attending a couple of sessions. The first one was moving beyond project level SOA. The presentation talked about the difference between “Project-Level SOA”, “Infrastructure SOA” and “Enterprise SOA”. Many organizations, including ours, start with project oriented SOA. The presentation talked about “upgrading” this approach to Enterprise level SOA. They made a number of valid points, but I guess (hope) that things will be much easier for us. Many organizations are much bigger than ours and realizing Enterprise SOA can involve many business units and multiple system architects who think they know better. Our organization is much smaller and only has a single IT department and a single system architect. Hopefully this means we don’t have some of the common pitfalls when introducing SOA into an organization.

Another presentation I attended was on DICOM Medical Imaging with Database 11g. This was a very interesting one for me. We tried image manipulation in Database 10gR2 and found it to be very very slow. The Oracle people at this presentation assured me that many (if not all) of these problems should have been gone in 11gR1. So, it looks like I really need to give the database another change and give 11gR1 a test run. The session demonstrated that the database has support for DICOM images, and you can do some neat stuff with it (extract DICOM meta data, anonymize patient information, and many more)

I also attended a presentation by Shaun O’Brian, one of (the many) JDeveloper product managers at Oracle. He had some interesting things on SOA and BPEL. He went over some troubled scenarios and asked as what could be wrong with it. It’s hard to come up with the answer in a split second, but when he explained what went wrong I sure recognized some of them. We had the exact same problem where the new “auto-load-balance” feature of AppServer 10.1.3 caused requests to the beta-test environment to end up on the production environment and vice versa.

The final presentation I attended was on Oracle Coherence. One of the many products they acquired by acquisition. This is a very intriguing product. It’s true grid computing. To put it simply, it’s sort of a RAID cluster of memory shared over many machines. There’s one “cloud” of memory shared (and duplicated) over multiple servers. The servers could even be spread out over multiple locations using a WAN for redundancy. A program, whether it is .Net, Java, or something else, can read and write information in this cloud. It’s all optimized for extreme speed and throughput. This is the underlying technology for some of the busiest web sites out there. What to think about a game betting bookmaker that receives huge volume betting on the same game, or amazon.com and the likes. The Coherence cache also features delayed write back cache. So, your application can write something to the (in-memory = fast) cache very quickly. Your program can continue and rest assured the data is safe, since it is replicated over multiple machines. Coherence will write the information to a back end data store like a database at a later time when resources allow this.

If you’re into this high-volume stuff you should really have a look at Oracle Coherence. There was even talk that this would be the internal workings of the next release of Oracle’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and BPEL. This is a very fast approach to multi-server computing of ESB and BPEL. Currently, these products rely on synchronization through the database. This is inherently slow. Why not have a grid of BPEL servers that all share the same state in real time. There are nice things to come…

Two years ago I was a bit disappointed after visiting OpenWorld 2005. There was a lot of marketing hype and sales presentations. For me, it was difficult to find real interesting technical presentations. This year, I did manage to get some real interesting presentations. Also, since then I know I a lot more people from the Oracel community and this is what makes these conventions worth while. It’s the combination of technically interesting presentations and socializing and meeting up with people you already know (and get to know some new).

That’s it for now. I’m still recovering from my jet lag. Hopefully I feel much better on Monday as I’m starting driving lessons for my motorcycle then.

XQLPlus is like SQLPlus for XQuery

Andrej Koelewijn just posted a very interesting article on Oracle XQLPlus, a command line tool to execute XQuery statements. This is something I didn’t know about yet. People familiar with SQLPlus will feel right at home. Read Andrej’s article for full details.

Presenting on integrating Forms and JSF

Besides my first session on Forms to SOA yesterday, I also had my other presentation on integrating Forms and JSF. In the end I was very pleased with the session. I finished right on time and go some very positive feedback from the audience. In fact I had some follow up meetings yesterday and will have some more today with people interested in the technology. If you missed the session you can still take a look at the slides. Perry Pakull from Germany attended both of my session and blogged about it (in German).

In the presentation I demonstrated how it is possible to seamlessly integrate Oracle Forms into a JSF web application. In fact, you can use the same technologies to integrate Forms in any other web technology. I started of with some introduction about Eurotransplant and myself, just to get a feeling of where our need to integrate Forms and JSF came from.

Eurotransplant decided to move from Forms to web development a number of years ago. The main reason being that the majority of our users are remote and infrequent users. Oracle Forms doesn’t fit these users very well. Forms is not as intuitive as users nowadays expect. They’ve gotten used to intuitive web applications.

So, we wanted to move to web development but we also had a large Forms application. We didn’t want to rewrite the entire Forms application in new web technology. That’s when my quest began for integrating both worlds. We wanted to be able to use web technology for all new developments while protecting our investment in Forms. From an end user perspective this would mean the end user can navigate between newly built web pages and traditional Oracle Forms in an easy manner. It must be possible to pass context/data and events from the web application into Oracle Forms and the other way around. It should be possible to pass the ID of the selected customer, order, etc. into Oracle Forms.

I demoed the end result of this integration in my presentation and will upload a movie of the same demo later this week or next week. Then I moved on explaining the underlying techniques used for this integration:

• Inbound JavaScript API which gives the ability to call into Forms from JavaScript, raising a Forms PL/SQL trigger and passing a payload
• Outbound JavaScript API which gives Forms the ability to execute a snippet of JavaScript
• A technology to eliminate the tradition 5-10 seconds startup time of the Forms applet. By using the legacy lifecycle cache only the very first web page in a session that embeds an Oracle Form gets the startup penalty of starting the applet. All subsequent pages that embed an Oracle Forms applet will reuse the (suspended) applet from the initial page.
• The OPTIONAL visual integration to remove a lot of the chrome from Oracle Forms: the menu, toolbar, statusbar, etc. With this approach the end user doesn’t notice she is using Oracle Forms. This can be a strategic advantage. It allows you to replace a web page that embeds an Oracle Forms with a true web page at a later stage without impact on the end users. This can be a major benefit to your and the way to a smooth and slow transition from Oracle Forms to JSF. You can just as easily skip this step and confront the end user with the full Oracle Forms applet with all bells and whistles. It’s whatever suits your needs better.
• Finally I had a slide on actually including the HTML in your web page to start the Forms applet. You should really use some sort of template for this as the legacy lifecycle cache demands that the applet declaration is 100% identical on each web page. Each web technology has its own way for using templates.

I finished of with a demo of the JSF Component Library I’ve created. This JSF Component Library hides all the required technology and complexity from the web page developer and the Forms developer. It’s as simple as adding a single JAR file to your JDeveloper project. Then you can drag-and-drop a Forms component onto your web page. Set some simple properties (name of the Form module file and dimensions of the applet area) and you’re done. Run your page and you have a web pages that embeds an Oracle Forms. You can just as easily drag-and-drop data control items onto the Form to pass the as parameter or drag-and-drop methods or actions onto the Form to enable the Form to initiate these JSF actions/navigation from PL/SQL. There’s a movie showing a similar demo.

I ended of with a small summary with some key points:

• You can use this technology as a smooth transition from Oracle Forms to a web technology. It allows to you replace Forms with true web pages one-form-at-a-time
• If you’re happy with Forms and have no need to migrate to web technology, you can just as easily use this technology to integrate Forms and your web applications. For example, you can have a web based portal that’s used by your call center agents and a link that leads to a page that embeds your existing Forms application to drill down to the details of the overview of the initial portal page.
• The JavaScript API is the key technology to get this integration working. This is a native Forms 11 feature, but I demonstrated this can also be added to existing versions of Oracle Forms by subclassing the Forms applet class and using a Pluggable Java Component in your Forms
• You can either build this integration yourself if you’ve got enough knowledge on HTML. Java, JavaScript, CSS and PL/SQL. For this look at previously published papers and guides.
• If you’re not comfortable building and maintaining all of this yourself, you could just as easily use our JSF Component Library and get started right away. I’ll be publishing more details on the library, including demos, as soon as possible. This week is fully packed with OpenWorld activities, so be sure to check back regularly.

My first presentation at OpenWorld

Yesterday I presented both of my sessions at Oracle OpenWorld. In the morning I had a joined session with Jan Carlin, Forms product manager from Oracle. The session was titled “Oracle Forms: Strategy and the Road to SOA”. Jan started the session with some Forms strategy and an overview of what SOA is and how Forms can play a role in a Service Oriented Architecture.
Jan took questions during the sessions and there were quite a few. I’m still surprised how many people are not aware of Oracle’s Tools Statement of Direction. People are still hearing rumors and are thinking that Forms will be desupported very soon. Some were quite surprised that a version 11 of Forms is forthcoming. In fact version 11 will have some critical new features to integrate Forms with other technologies. For me the two most important ones are the ability to react to Advanced Queuing events from Forms and the new JavaScript API to Forms 11. In fact, these plans were already announced by Oracle in Jun 2006. Read that article for a more detailed description of new Forms 11 features.

Jan’s talk and the associated questions took a bit longer than expected. This left me only 20 minutes for my part of the presentation. I still think I got most of the points across to the audience. I talked about Eurotransplant’s path from Forms to a Service Oriented Architecture. This started with the move of most business logic out of Forms and into the database. The next critical step was the upgrade form client server Forms to web based Oracle Forms a number of years ago. At the end of our path to SOA was the introduction of Java web based development and lately the introduction of BPEL.

There were quite a few questions at the end of my session. For me, that’s a good thing as it indicated people were truly interested and they didn’t run of as soon as they could. Quite a few people approached me after the session for specific questions. In the end this took so long we had to be kicked out of the room since the next session was about to start. For me, this was a very successful session and hopefully the audience has the same opinion.

Session on integrating Forms and JSF moved to a bigger room

My session in integrating Oracle Forms and JSF has been moved to a bigger room. It was overbooked by 50%, so Oracle decided to move it to a room twice its size. So, if you are interested in attending this session and couldn’t register before, please try again.

The session will show the concepts used by Eurotransplant to integrate Oracle Forms and JSF. This enables you to embed Oracle Forms in any web application with full passing of context and events between the two technologies. It also eliminates the normal Forms applet startup time which would prevent a user quickly switching from Forms to JSF in a normal application. The session even shows a fully functional JSF Component Library to hide all the necessary technology from both the Forms developer and the JSF page developer. It’s a matter of drag-and-drop a Form and its parameters from the Component Palette to your JSF page in JDeveloper.