OraTransplant

My first day at ODTUG 2006

I won’t bother you all with my sightseeing adventures of Washington D.C. I walked around for about 10 miles (16 kilometers) and my feet are aching I also cannot include any pictures of my sightseeing and the presentations, since I forgot the USB cable to connect my camera to my laptop

I already met up with a lot of people. That’s one of the interesting things of these conferences. You get to meet up with a lot of people that you otherwise wouldn’t meet. This is where you hear all the really interesting stuff!

I attended my first session on Sunday afternoon, but that didn’t really teach me anything new. That’s the risk you run when choosing for a certain presentation based on a very short abstract in the conference schedule.

The end of the Sunday afternoon was the kickoff for the Business Intelligence Summit. It was supposed to shed light on Oracle’s Business Intelligence strategy. But to be honest, it’s still not clear to me. It was well over an hour of marketing bla-bla about Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, the re-branded Siebel Analytics product. The session ended with a 15 minute demo by Mark Rittman, which was very insightful. He has a short demo of two new features of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2. It all looked very promising although we not a user (yet) of Warehouse builder.

Monday morning we had a keynote by Marco Tilli from Oracle presenting about they Fusion Middleware strategy. There were two interesting things I picked up in this session. The first is a (non official) release road map:
version 10.1.2 is production (Q1-2006)
version 10.1.3 is production (Q3-2006)
version 10.1.3.1 is the addition of the SOA Suite available before the end of 2006
version 10.1.3.2 is the addition of the Workspace Suite (not really sure what that is yet). No date was given for that release
and finally we will have version 11, for which Marco didn’t give a release date. But from the Forms version 11 webcast I had I expect this to be summer 2007.

They also did two demos during Marco’s presentation. The first one was on BPEL and Oracle Business Rules. For people following all the Oracle news, this was nothing new. The other presentation featured some of the new JSF components. This has been called RIA (Rich Internet Application) components or ADF Faces.Next. Basically, it’s AJAX enabled ADF Faces components. I already saw some of them at Oracle OpenWorld last year.

Oracle doesn’t have a release date for these new components, but they hope to have some sort of early adopter release out by the end of this year. These components look very very promising and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. Frank Nimphius will also cover these components in a presentation on Wednesday, so I’ll certainly will attend that one. I’ll see if I can get some more information there.

Oracle XML Publisher - What’s it all about? by Mark Rittman

The next session I had on Monday was by Mark Rittman on XML Publisher. This was by far the most useful session I went to so far. Mark explained what XML Publisher is and did a 45 minute demo. It all looked very interesting. He basically demoed the step-by-step he published on OTN. Take a look to get a good feeling of what XML Publisher can do.

For us. XML Publisher could be a great replacement for Oracle Reports. XML Publisher brings a clear separation between data and layout/presentation. The data can come from a SQL query over JDBC, a HTTP request feeding XML data or a call to a web service. You then apply a template to this data to build the presentation. The great thing is that you can build multiple templates for the same data-set and let the user decide which template to use. This enables things like summary reports and detail reports from the same data. The user can also select their own publishing format (HTML, PDF, XLS, etc).

The template design is done in Microsoft Word (or Adobe Acrobat). This is really great, since it is much more user friendly then the Oracle Reports builder. A small macro plug in is installed in Microsoft Word. This gives you a wizard to create a first-cut report based on the previously defined data-set. This basically gives you a simple table in Word. In each table cell a Field that represents a data item from your data set. You can then use all the layout features in MS Word you like. Mark even told us you can do some (simple) scripting in the Field items. This can make you do things like conditional formatting or displaying, although it is not as powerful as the PL/SQL triggers in Oracle Reports.

The template is then uploaded to the XML Publisher server and is available for the users. As a XML Publisher admin you can set things like security making certain reports available to only specific user(groups).

You also have two ways to deliver the data in a MS Excel (XLS) file. The most advanced one installs a .Net based plug-in to MS Excel and this allows for some fancy stuff. You can do all sorts of analysis in Excel, which goes back to the XML Publisher server to retrieve the data if necessary. You can also export to a “dumb” XLS file without any active components which might be more suitable for some users.

There’s even an online Analyzer in your browser. You can do things like cross-tabs, wit summaries and filters right in your browser. Users can take this and analyze their data without even going to Excel. This is all right from your browser, with active AJAX style components.

XML Publisher comes in a number of flavours, targeted at the different Application suites within Oracle. There’s also a standalone version of XML Publisher. This is the one you should have if you’re not running Oracle Applications. You cannot get it (yet) from OTN, so you have to go to Oracle e-delivery to get your hands on it. Mark explained that the previous 5.5 version was still a bit complex to install and get running. It required quite some handwork, whereas the latest 5.6.2 version installs and runs out-of-the-box.

By-the-way: XML Publisher will be re-branded to BI Publisher later this year and will be included in the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Suite priced for a whopping 225,000 dollar per processor. XML Publisher is (and will remain) available as a standalone product. This is still priced at 40,000 per processor or 30,000 as a Application Server add-on. It’s my personal opinion that this is way overpriced. Let’s hope Oracle will one day just include it in the Application Server Enterprise Edition. Perhaps I’ll do some asking around if they have any plans in that direction.

Oracle BI Roadmap by Christina Kolotouros

The next session I visited was advertised as explaining the roadmap for the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite. This one didn’t really give me the information I was hoping for. We’re not a heavy BI user, we just use some of the traditional tools within Oracle to do some reporting. This means mainly Oracle Reports and I’m trying to figure out where Oracle is heading with it and what we should be doing. This session didn’t really help me answer these questions.

It just gave me the impression that Oracle is really focusing on integrating their BI people with the former Siebel BI people and all the attention seems to go to the high end market with their BI Enterprise Edition products. This is way out of our league.

Web Application Security Part 2 by Duncan Mills

The last session for yesterday I visited was by Duncan Mills on locking down your ADF applications. This was another really interesting session. Duncan emphasised that although your using an (advanced) framework like AFD, security is your responsibility. He went on explaining about container managed security and some of the differences between JSP/Struts and JSF regarding this. Struts has some more built-in features for securing certain actions and flows. JSF does not, so you have to group your pages in directories in your web application. These directories can then easily be secured by container managed security specified in your web.xml.

He showed a very nice open source framework he’s working on, named JSF-Security. You can find it on sourceforge and it extends the JSF Expression language with securityScope. This enables you to check if security is enabled, the username of the logged on user, the authentication type or if the logged on user is in a role. This is all done by simple EL expressions that you can use anywhere in JSF. You can typically use this with the rendered property to hide items or you can make items read-only.

But do remember that this is only security by obscurity. You shouldn’t rely on this. It is just making things hidden or read-only in the user web browser as it should. There’s nothing stopping a user (or hacker) still sending this data changed in the next HTML form post. So be sure to really check for security elsewhere also. For example in your ADF Business Components, which is the second demo he showed.

Duncan also showed the use of SYS_CONTEXT to store addition metadata in your database session. Since most web applications use features like session pooling, they all use the same database user to connect to the database. This means you cannot use the USER pseudo-column to determine which user is logged in things like triggers. The same goes for things like role grants. Duncan showed how to override the prepareSession() method in your application module. You can use this method to pass the “real” end user to the database and store it in a SYS_CONTEXT.

We already do something very similar so this wasn’t really new to me. But I sat next to a guy who’s also on the customer advisory board of Development Tools whom I met at OpenWorld last year. He told me they’re also doing the same thing, but they also use role grants in the whole setup. Their big application user has all the necessary roles granted but they’re initially all disabled. During the prepareSession() stage only the roles appropriate for the current user are enabled. We didn’t think of that yet, but that’s adding an extra layer of security. I must make sure to put this in a RFC when I’m back in the office.

This completed my session for Monday. In the evening I went for dinner with the guys from Amis, who’re also here and run a couple of presentations. I’ve also agreed to meet up with Mark Rittman tomorrow for a couple of beers, and I’m looking forward to that. Socializing is one of the perks of attending these conferences and is where you get all the in-depth information. I’ll blog again with a summary of the sessions on Tuesday.

Free Oracle Java Days in the Benelux?

I just noticed that Grant Ronald blogged about a couple of forthcoming FREE workshops in 2006 in several countries. They have also been running these workshops last year in a couple of countries. They run two different workshops. One is to introduce J2EE application development to Forms/Designer developers and the other one is on more advanced Java topics covering EJB 3.0 and JSF.

I’m just dying to attend these workshops. Unfortunately there are no scheduled dates for the Benelux/Netherlands. If you feel you would benefit from this training as well, please comment to this blog entry. If there is enough interest we can see if we can get Oracle to run something in the Benelux.

Last September I attended a free evening session at AMIS about JSF and the turnout was quite large. So, I’m guessing there must be a lot of interest in these subjects from the Benelux region. The Netherlands always had a large number of Forms/Designer users, so come on guys and girls and show you’re interest.

Update 6-jan-2006: Hans Bos from Oracle Tech Marketing Benelux has commented to this blog entry. I’ve also been in contact with him by email. It really looks like they’re going to run the Developer Days in the Benelux. Oracle Netherlands is currently talking to the guys from Oracle UK who give the workshops in other countries.
This is great news and I would like to thank Oracle Netherlands for taking this initiative. Let’s hope the turnout is as large as what I expect it to be. As soon as dates are announced I will write another blog entry about it.
Until then you can keep showing you’re interest by commenting to this entry. Also, keep your suggestions for the content coming in.

Here are the two descriptions from the Oracle UK site:

Mobile applications? Web services? Rich web clients? How can Oracle Forms and Designer users take advantage of these new technologies? This presentation gives Oracle Forms and Designer users a practical introduction to Oracle’s complete J2EE application infrastructure and Java development environment.

Taught by the Oracle product managers who brought their Forms expertise to design Oracle Application Development Framework–a product that abstracts much of the complexity of J2EE and enables rapid application development for J2EE–this presentation will introduce concepts familiar in Forms that also exist in ADF, including data blocks, canvases, triggers and record groups.

This Developer Day will show how 4GL RAD developers can quickly become productive with the use of a visual, declarative, framework-based approach to J2EE application development

This Java Day covers building applications the new set Java Enterprise technologies (EJB 3.0 and JSF).

The event consists of short talks, demonstrations and practical labs that will give the attendees a taste of Oracle’s state of the art Java development Tooling.
As Co Spec lead and provider of the reference implementation for EJB 3.0 Oracle is uniquely qualified to teach this significant new persistence technology.
JSF is set to become the face of server based Java applications in the future. As an active participant in the JSF specification (and contributor to MyFaces project) Oracle is the ideal source of JSF tooling.

By attending this event you will be at the leading edge of Java technology and will gain insight into how Oracle is contributing to the Java community

Working experience or good understanding of Java & J2EE is required for this Advanced Java Day event.

First workshop on ADF for Forms developers

Grant Ronald just released the first of a series of five workshops to show ADF development to Forms/Designer developers. There is a viewlet quickly showing the (basic) application you will be building through the five workshops. The first workshop is already available and shows you how to setup a database connection from JDeveloper and draw a Database Diagram. It also shows you how to setup the initial page flow diagram without building any webpages yet. Grant is planning on releasing the other four workshops in the coming 10 days.

I know Grant Ronald and Sue Harper are working hard to familiarize the Forms/Designer developers with the new J2EE way of doing things. The have a great subsite on OTN specifically targeted at this group. There are a lot of great articles on J2EE/ADF development at this site. If you’re a (former) Forms/Designer developer getting started with J2EE/ADF development you should really keep your eyes on this site and follow these workshops. You can find the first workshop under the News section and I guess that’s also where you will find the other four once they are released.

The material from the workshop supports the successful Oracle Developer Day program they have been running globally over the past months. I’ve been in contact with Grant Ronald about running the same program in the Netherlands. Let’s hope Oracle is willing to do so…

ODTUG sessions on Sunday

Yesterday I had my first tasting of Oracle OpenWorld by attending two sessions by the ODTUG. The first one was from the J2EE SIG and was co-presented by both Shay Schmeltzer from Oracle and Paul Dorsey from Dulcian. Several alternatives for the different layers of a J2EE stack were discussed. Everybody seemed to agree on a choice for ADF Business Components for the persistence. The only real alternative for the controller is Struts (at the moment). The opinions on the view layer however differ. Paul still is a fan of JSP’s and doesn’t see JSF pick up at the rate Oracle would like. His advice was to stick with JSP for a while and get on the JSF bandwagon later. Shay was a bit more enthusiastic about JSF although he also advised to stick to JSP on existing JSP projects. However, if you’re going to start a new project it might be worthwhile to see if you can postpone the UI until later in the project so you can go for JSF straightaway.

Paul Dorsey had a comment about not liking the JHeadstart architecture. This caught my attention since we just went live with our first two JHeadstart projects. I asked Paul after the session what it is about JHeadstart that he doesn’t like. It was his opinion that the JHeadstart team was working backwards. They started out with the product they want generated (Struts and JSP/UIX) and worked backwards to create a tool to generate these. In his opinion you should start with a repository holding all your “business rules” and take it from there. It happens to be that he (and others) has been working on such a product, called BRIM. I will have a closer look at it next week.

The other ODTUG session I went to was the HTML-DB SIG. To me it was a good way to get to know HTML-DB. I hadn’t really seen the product before. I might have a look at it as an alternative for our more light-weight applications that we tend to build in PHP at the moment. It might also be a great alternative for simple reporting and graphing. Definitely something to look into.

ADF-JHeadstart workshop last week

As mentioned earlier, I attended the ADF-JHeadstart workshop last week at Oracle in the Netherlands. Sandra Muller, one of the developers of JHeadstart at Oracle Consulting was giving the workshop and I must say she did a great job.

I attended the Oracle University class training on ADF a couple of weeks ago and was a bit disappointed. I think that was my own fault. Before attending the course, I already worked through the Oracle JDeveloper 10g Handbook from Oracle Press. The book got me started with most concepts related to ADF programming (J2EE basics, MVC, BC4J, etc). I then played around with JDeveloper for a couple of weeks before attending the ADF course. I guess the course targets students without any J2EE/ADF knowledge. This did mean a lot of it was already known to me and the course was not as effective as I hoped it to be.

But the ADF-JHeadstart workshop came to the rescue! First of all, it is targeted as an advanced course to people with the basic knowledge about ADF/J2EE programming. The other great thing is that it revolves around UIX programming, something (almost) not covered in the JDeveloper 10g handbook and the ADF course.

The ADF-JHeadstart workshop started of with setting up your environment (JDeveloper v10.1.2 and JHeadstart v10.1.2) and getting to know the business case. We then continued creating a UIX prototype mockup wizard without any data bindings. This was a great way to quickly build a (non-functioning) prototype to show to a customer. Day one ended with finishing the prepared database design and creating the database schema.

The morning of day 2 was spent creating the Business Components and some business rules. The afternoon of day 2 was used to use actual data in the wizard created at day 1. A good part of day 3 was used to build several UIX pages for the application. The last part of day 3 was used to start of with JHeadstart generation of some other (UIX) pages.

Day 4 was used to complete the JHeadstart generation and to cover some advanced JHeadstart topics, including customization of the JHeadstart templates. The last day was used for J2EE security and the use of DataSources.

The workshop was very useful and much more realistic then the exercises used in any course. The exercises in traditional courses seem to be created to fit the tool being used for 100%. It’s when you’re back at your own desk with a real-world application when you find it is not all that easy as it was in the course. The workshop is much more realistic and also opens your eyes to things that do not work as easy as they appear in JDeveloper. You find a lot of small things that might have cost you a day or two to figure out on your own.

If you have the basic knowledge about ADF/J2EE programming and want to learn more about UIX and/or JHeadstart, this workshop is definitely for you! The good news is Oracle will be running the same workshop again in September in the Netherlands or at any other location/date on request.

ADF-JHeadstart workshop next week

I will be attending the ADF-JHeadstart workshop next week at Oracle in the Netherlands. It’s the same workshop that Oracle ran internally for their own EMEA employees. Steve Muench was very enthousiastic about the workshop in four postings on his own blog: day one, day two, day three and day four.

I’m hoping this workshop has some more real-world (more challenging) examples on BC4J and Struts than the normal instructor led classes from Oracle University. They tend to be a bit basic. Also, the workshop should cover UIX and JHeadstart. Two topics that are almost completely ignored in the normal classes from Oracle University.

As former Forms/Designer users, we’re planning on using JHeadstart/UIX/Struts/BC4J as our technology stack. This should make this workshop be spot on!

There is more info on the workshop at http://www.oracle.com/global/nl/education/specials/sp278.htm

New J2EE for Forms/Designer site on OTN

Just saw on Grant Ronald’s Blog that they’ve launched a new subsite on OTN targeted at Forms/Designer developers making the switch to J2EE.

We’re in the middle of such a transition, so this is perfect timing. Could it be they launched this site especially for us? Or would they large number of Oracle customers in the same situation have anything to do with it?