OraTransplant

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.

Why is JHeadstart not at OOW2005?

This year, I’m lucky enough to be able to attend Oracle OpenWorld 2005 in San Francisco. As I was using the Schedule Builder to decide which sessions to attend, one of the first things I noticed is that there are no sessions about JHeadstart.

There are no sessions about Designer either. I can understand that, since Oracle has basically ended development on the Designer product.

What I don’t understand is why JHeadstart is not promoted at Oracle OpenWorld. It’s a great tool to increase your J2EE development productivity and it’s a great way for Forms/Designer developers to get to know the J2EE/ADF world. I really don’t understand this decision by Oracle.

I know JHeadstart is developed by Oracle Consulting from the Netherlands, but surely Oracle HQ is not suffering from the NIH syndrome. Steve Muench attended a four day seminar about JHeadstart in January 2005. Ever since, he’s been very enthusiastic about JHeadstart and even wrote a couple of postings on his blog and a very helpful JHeadstart Tutorial on OTN. I was hoping that Steve’s attention for JHeadstart would also make Oracle HQ interested. Apparently this didn’t help enough.

If any of you is worried about productivity when making the switch from Forms development to J2EE development, please have a look at JHeadstart. Even if you’re not making the switch from Forms but are just a J2EE/ADF developer, you should also have a look as it is a real productivity booster.

Let’s hope the JHeadstart team will be at OpenWorld next year.

Eurotransplant Customer Snapshot online

Oracle Netherlands has published a (Dutch) Customer Snapshot about Eurotransplant on their site. It’s a short story explaining what Eurotransplant is and how we used Oracle products/techniques to tackle some challenges. It’s primarily about our move from client-server Forms 6i to web-deployed Forms 10g and our adoption of JDeveloper, ADF, JHeadstart and Swing. We’ve created some JHeadstart/UIX based web applications and we’ve build a Swing client that can run disconnected on a users laptop. It will synch its data with the central database through some web services running on Application Server 10g once a (UMTS) connection is available.

Ever since I have this weblog, I’ve been in touch with a number of people within Oracle. I think that’s one of the perks of having this weblog. Our close relation to Oracle has given me more insights in what’s happening within Oracle and what to expect in the coming period. The weblog also gave me the contacts that approached me for this Customer Profile. I think this close cooperation with Oracle can prove to be beneficial to both of us.

Update: Oracle Global has also released a Customer Snapshot on Eurotransplant. It’s even mentioned in the News sections on the Forms site of OTN and the J2EE for Forms/Designer Developers site on OTN.

Attended AMIS Query about ADF and JHeadstart

Last night I attended the AMIS Query (workshop) about ADF and JHeadstart. About 20 people showed up, which I think is quite good for a meeting that was only published on the Activities section of their site.

Fortunately most of the attendants already worked with JHeadstart and/or ADF. This meant we keep most of the overview stuff quite short and get down to the gritty (nice) details.

Lucas Jellema, who used to be part of the JHeadstart team at Oracle but now works for AMIS, started of with his view on ADF. I already knew most of it, but you always get new details from such talks.

Sandra Muller, part of the JHeadstart team at Oracle, continued with a presentation and demonstration of creating and consuming web services in ADF.

Peter Ebell, also part of the JHeadstart team, showed some of the new features of JHeadstart that will be released next month. They also described these on their blog. There are some great features/enhancements. They’ve implemented fine grained role/function based authorization for Struts actions, tab pages and even individual items. The nice thing is that all authorization questions are tunneled through one proxy class that you can override. By default it just resorts to JAZN/JAAS authorization but you can implement any authorization scheme you like.

Another very welcome feature is to make items read-only based on an EL expression. You can use this for the aforementioned authorization, but it is also very welcome to make items read-only based on the value of other items (e.g. Description can no longer be edited when the Status is Closed).

And yes they did it! A feature that repeatedly didn’t make a release was the generation of radio groups. It’s also something our users have requested a couple of times, and now it is there.

There were also a lot of other tweaks and changes, but you can read all about it on the JHeadstart blog. The new release will only be available for customers with the Supplementary Option and will not be released on OTN. This does reward paying customers (like us) and I can only encourage this. The next major version will most likely again be available as evaluation version on OTN.

It’s always nice to keep in touch with other people with the same interests. Looking forward to the next AMIS Query.

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