OraTransplant

Monday at ODTUG

18 June 2008 at 17:06 CEST | In ODTUG 2008, Oracle |

Wow, it’s hard to find some time for blogging here at ODTUG. The conference is fully packed with presentation and when I’m not in a presentation you constantly bump in to interesting people to have a chat or do a demo. But let’s try and recap the first two days.

Monday started with a great presentation by Steven Davelaar on JHeadstart. He really has a compelling story. JHeadstart has been around for a number of years and over time it has grown to an amazing toolkit for ADF developers, especially the ones with a Forms (orDesigner) background. The core of JHeadstart is a metadata file called the Application Definition File. It comes with a very neat editor to edit this XML file and define how your applications should work. JHeadstart has a generator that takes this application definition file and creates your ADF Faces application for you. This is all Velocity template driven, so if there is any part of your generated application that’s not to your liking, just update the Velocity templates and your fine. This means you can generate whatever application you like. This really is the best of both worlds: you get a big productivity boost but without a loss in flexibility!

Steven also demonstrated a new addition to the JHeadstart toolkit; the JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator. That’s really another great tool from these guys. It reads your Oracle Forms FMB files and creates the JHeadstart Application Definition File. Then your back on track with the JHeadstart editor to refine this file and the JHeadstart generator to generate your ADF Faces application. I think he had a stunning demo showing a Forms to ADF Faces migration in a couple of minutes.

The JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator does not convert the custom PL/SQL logic from Oracle Forms to your ADF application. This is simply impossible. There’s a lot of stuff you did in Forms PL/SQL that can and should be solved completely differently in ADF. For example, lot’s of the Oracle Forms PL/SQL stuff can be done declaratively in ADF. So, you still have to do some work to get all functionality back in ADF Faces, but there’s no easy way to do that. This is why Steven showed why their JHeadstart and my OraFormsFaces are a match made in heaven. You can use my OraFormsFaces to just keep your Forms and embed them as a JSF component in your ADF Faces application. Steven showed how you can mix and match true ADF pages created by JHeadstart and pages that just embed existing Forms using OraFormsFaces. If you want, you can migrate over time making more and more pages in JHeadstart and slowly minimize the use of OraFormsFaces.

After lunch I sticked too long talking to a lot of people, so I missed most of the Oracle Tools Expert Panel in the next slot. Next up was a vendor presentation about Forms to JSF/ADF migration. I have a big personal interest in these solutions, and to be honest I just don’t believe in 100% migration. As explained before, there is no way PL/SQL from Forms can be converted to a JSF/ADF application and still end up with an application with a sound architecture. The two worlds are just too different. You need a human being to go over the Forms PL/SQL and decide where and how this should be implemented in a ADF application. It depends on so many things and requires knowledge of ADF so that it cannot be automated (at least that’s what I think). The vendor I attended is trying to achieve 100% migration and after hearing there story I was still convinced that 100% PL/SQL conversion is not the right track for me. Perhaps other organizations will make a different call, but personally I want a sound ADF architecture. The downside to that is that you do need knowledge about the ADF architecture you’re aiming for. Perhaps that’s the biggest challenge for the Forms shops out there.

Next up was a presentation by Peter Koletzke on a case study of one of their clients making the transition from Oracle Forms to Java EE on the web. There story was strikingly similar to what we’ve been doing at Eurotransplant. They started of with JDeveloper 9i, then moved to 10.1.2 and now they are at 10.1.3. With this came all the technology changes from Oracle MVC framework to Struts to JSF Controller and the move from JSP to UIX to ADF Faces. Luckily they used JHeadstart so they were able to generate the application from the same Application Definition File to each new technology when it came along. A very good case for the metadata driven approach of JHeadstart. You can just take the same application metadata and generate it to the new version of whatever technology comes alone as soon as the JHeadstart team has upgraded the generator for this new technology. They have a great track record doing this and I know they already have an (internal) build doing the generation to ADF 11g.

The last session of the day was about Oracle Business Rules. I was hoping to meet up with a Oracle Rules Product Manager since we are evaluating the tool to use it for matching donor organs to patients on the waiting list. We’ve got the feeling that this would be a novel way of using Oracle Rules and is perhaps pushing the limits. I was hoping to meet up with a product manager to get some feeling on the possibilities and perhaps even get some support from Oracle HQ on our challenge of using Oracle Rules 11g for this matching. I didn’t read the bio carefully in the ODTUG conference guide, so I could have known that the presenter was from Oracle Consulting and was talking about his past experience with Rules 10g. That’s not really relevant to our case, since we rely heavily on decision tables which is a Rules 11g feature that’s not available in Rules 10g. That reminded me to look more closely to the session abstract and speaker bio before going to a session.

Well that concluded day one. Hopefully I can find the time to write up on Tuesday as soon as possible.