OraTransplant

Wednesday (and the rest) at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008

23 June 2008 at 11:11 CEST | In ODTUG 2008, Oracle |

I’m back home and at the office. I finally managed to find some time to write about the last few days at ODTUG. The last real conference day was Wednesday and that was fully packed for me (just as all the other days). I somehow must have reset my alarm clock when it went off in the morning, so I slept about an hour more than was planned. This means I missed the first slot which I had reserved for a presentation about team development in JDeveloper by Lynn Munsinger and Susan Duncan. I was looking forward to that session after spending an evening with Lynn and Susan at the Oracle ACEs dinner. Unfortunately I missed the session and afterward I heard it was really amusing.

So, the first session I attended was at 9:15 AM. I went to see Edwin Biemand, a fellow Dutchman, presenting about ADF Taskflows in JDeveloper 11g. I haven’t found the time to do a whole lot of testing with JDeveloper 11g, so it’s always nice to attend sessions by people who have. They can tell you in an hour what would have taken me a day or so to figure out myself. But it did remind me that I really do need to find the time to play around with JDeveloper 11g before it hits the streets (no date known yet…)

My next session was about Reusability features in JDeveloper 11g by Shaun O’Brien. The session wasn’t very well attended, but that made it a lot more attractive. There where quite some Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors in the audience, so this was our change to ask all the detailed technical questions. Sorry for the people in the room that were new to JDeveloper, they probably couldn’t follow what was going on in the Q&A part of the session. Duncan Mills also attended the session which was great. He was able to answer some of our pesky questions and even corrected Shaun about a feature. Even speakers learn one or two things from every session (including their own).

Lunch ran a little bit late as I again hooked up with a number of people and had some very interesting discussions. I managed to drop in for the second part of Alex Nuijten’s presentation on Oracle Database 11g features for Developers. It was a nice session, but perhaps that was because Alex had an extra practice run. He was in the room an hour early and started his presentation for the (very) few people in the room. So, at the end of his presentation the real attendants began to enter the room. By the time I got there, Alex was midway in his second run of the same presentation

The final presentation of the day I attended was by Duncan Mills and Peter Koletzke. They had three presentation slots in a row demonstrating Fusion Development with JDeveloper 11g. I didn’t attend the first two with a general introduction and building the Model layer. I was interested in this third part on building the View layer. It’s always nice to see some of the new JDeveloper 11g features explained by Duncan Mills himself. I guess the presentation was targeted at people with little or no experience in JDeveloper 11g. For them it was a great introduction in JDeveloper, but for me there wasn’t that much news in the session. But as said, it’s always nice to see Duncan Mills and Peter Koletzke doing a presentation. They’re working on an JDeveloper 11g book, so I guess the liked writing “Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers” together.

Wednesday evening we had the official ODTUG Kaleidoscope party which was nice. I got my caricature drawing created by one of the artists at the party. I can’t post it here since it is in my suitcase which got lost between New Orleans and Amsterdam. I just got a call that they will be bringing it to my home later today.

Thursday had a head-to-head session by Dimitri Gielis and Lucas Jellema on “APEX vs ADF”. I had already seen that presentation in the Netherlands so I decided to skip that one and do some shopping and meet up with some of the other ODTUG attendants.

That finished a very interesting ODTUG Kaleidoscope. The more times I visit the conference the busier it gets. You get to know new people every time so each time you return there’s more people to talk to. I’ve said this before; the conference itself is already interesting but the real value (at least for me) is in meeting up with people and the overall networking possibilities. Hopefully I will be there in 2009 as well. Already looking forward to it.