OraTransplant

My two presentations on Tuesday at ODTUG

19 June 2008 at 14:25 CEST | In ODTUG 2008, Oracle |

Boy is it hard to find the time to do the blogging. You just keep meeting interesting people, having conversations, and checking things out. It’s now 6:30 AM, just woke up and I decided to do the blogging thing before going downstairs. I still need to recap Tuesday, the day before yesterday.

Tuesday was my big day where I had to give my two presentations. I didn’t attend any presentations in the first two slots, but continued working on the demos for my afternoon presentation. At 10:30 AM I was on for the first time with my presentation entitled “Integrating Oracle Forms with Other Web Technologies” (slides available and short demo movie available). The presentation was quite well attended. I did my talk on OraFormsFaces, the technology we developed to reuse Oracle Forms as JSF components. This has been getting quite some attention at ODTUG 2008. It’s a great way of building hybrid applications consisting of both Oracle Forms and JSF. OraFormsFaces not only allows you to embed Forms in a JSF page, but also opens up Oracle Forms. It allows you to pass context and raise events from Forms to JSF and vice verse. This cna be used to just integrate the two technologies, but can also be used as a great way of gradually migrating from Oracle Forms to JSF/ADF. Why not embed all your existing forms in a JSF/ADF application to begin with. Then over time you can take individual Forms or a group of Forms and migrate them to JSF/ADF.

This is where JHeadstart steps in. JHeadstart is known as a productivity booster for building new ADF applications. But at ODTUG 2008 Steven Davelaar has shown that JHeadstart will also include a new JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator in the next version. The JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator will take the FMB files and create the entire ADF Model (Business Components) for you. It also creates a JHeadstart application definition file based on the Forms structure. This application definition file can be used to generate the ADF Faces View and Controller layer. Both Steven and I feel that OraFormsFaces and JHeadstart make a great combination. Once you get started, you can use OraFormsFaces to integrate your existing Forms. Then over time you can migrate your application to ADF using JHeadstart. Steven is so convinced by this concept that he integrated OraFormsFaces in the upcoming version of JHeadstart. This next version can generate ADF pages that use OraFormsFaces to embed an Oracle Form. So I invited Steven up to the stage to show JHeadstart in the final 10 minutes of my talk.

After lunch I skipped another two sessions preparing for my afternoon presentation entitled “The Beauty of JSF Component Based Development” (slides available). This was the longer version of the presentation I did on the Sunday Fusion Middleware Symposium. I explained (or at least I tried to) the components and concept that make up the JSF standard. That’s not only the UI Components themselves, but also things like Managed Beans, Events and Listeners, Converters, Validators, and Navigation Control. I also discussed the six stages in a JSF page request, the so called JSF Page Lifecycle which consists of “Restore View”, “Apply Request Value”, “Process Validations”, “Update Model Values”, “Invoke Applications”, and finally “Render Reponse”. You can come quite a long way in ADF programming without being aware of all these concepts, but there is a time when you need to understand these concepts to be able to understand why ADF doing is doing the things it is and where and how you need to change things.

Throughout the presentation I demonstrated the concepts in JDeveloper by building a very simple application that used most of these concepts. At the end I also demonstrated how to build your own JSF component. For simplicity I only create a custom Converter but included the JSP tag handler and necessary Java classes. Hopefully that also explained some concepts to the audience, mainly the stuff that’s a bit awkward because JSF components have to exposed as JSP tags. There are some things you’ll have to do twice because of this decision in the standard specifications. You’ll have to define some things both for the JSP tag handler and then again for the JSF component within JSF.

During the day I also got the feedback on my presentation during the Sunday Fusion Middleware Symposium. I was ranked as the second best speaker for the day, so that’s something to be proud of. The funniest comment on the evaluation forms was about my pronunciation of “Oracle” which apparently sounded like “Morocco”.

After my final presentation I dropped into the “Oracle ACE Directors Panel” session. I expected a “shoot the questions at the ACEs session” but it turned out that about 50% of the people in the room were ACEs or ACE directors themselves. Justin Kestelyn kicked of explaining about the ACE program. It ended up in a whole lot of questions about the ACE program itself on not so much questions targeted at the ACEs. To me it was interesting and I learned some new things about the ACE program. I’m only a “member” since last week so there is a lot to learn

We finished the day with an Oracle ACEs Reception which was sponsored by OTN. After the reception, there was an ACEs diner in a very nice restaurant just next to Bourboun street. It’s great to meet up with other Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors. This is really the kind of events where you hear all the interesting stuff. There’s some great stuff that I would love sharing with everybody out there. But I expect being an ACE also comes with some responsibilities. One is that you’re not supposed to communicate the stuff that’s clearly not (yet) for everybody’s ears. So, let me quickly finish this one off, before I’m doing things I’ll regret later.