OraTransplant

Positive evaluation for ODTUG 2007 presentation

I just got the evaluations for my presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 on integrating Oracle Forms into Oracle ADF Faces. I must say that I’m pleasantly surprised. Two thirds of the audience rated the session 5 out of 5, and one third 4 out of 5. Not a bad score. I especially appreciate the comments people fill in on the evaluation form. Sometimes this gives a much better indication of how people felt. For me, all the comments are positive although one attendant noted it might bee too technical for some developers. This was also my fear, but as it turns out 100% indicated the technical level was spot on.

Again, I’m very happy and proud of this positive evaluation for my first ever presentation at an international conference. This makes ODTUG 2007 a memorable moment for me: my first ever paper won the Editor’s Choice Award and I got a very positive evaluation for my presentation.

The detailed results are below:

Overall Session Rating

Evaluations

Technical Level

Comments

• What were the strengths of this presentation?
• Documentation
• Innovative and ver applicatble to current development.
• Possible alternative for keeping forms around.
• Tech level and code snippets
• Amazing!
• Great technical how-to content
• Very detailed, clear, held together well
• Great job!
• Very practical for my needs.
• Useful, novel material
• What were the weaknesses of this presentation?
• Probably too tehnical for some developers
• What recommendations do you have for improvement of this presentation?
• Thank you! Great stuff

Update 11 july 2007: I asked ODTUG if they were planning on publishing the average of all sessions combined. This could give an idea of how a session scored compared to the other sessions. ODTUG is not publishing these results, but the could tell me that scores below 4.0 need work, between 4.0 and 4.3 are very good, and above 4.3 are excellent. So, with an overall score of 4.67, I can be satisfied.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 - Thursday

Here’s the report of the last day at ODTUG. I didn’t manage to find the time to write this from Daytona. So, I ended up writing it in the plane back home.

ADF Binding Internals - Duncan Mills

For me, the day started of with a presentation by Duncan Mills on the internals of ADF Binding. He did a very good job of explaining all the files and concepts used in the ADF binding layer. Since this layer can be seen as the core of ADF, it’s important to have a good understanding.

Oracle is doing such a good job with enabling drag-and-drop development, that a lot of new developers stay away from the internals of the ADF bindings. Most of the time they are fine with the default generated stuff. In the end, they’ll have to learn ADF bindings. There’s just some stuff for which you have to go in and dig deep. Duncan’s presentation was a nice way to get to know the ADF bindings a lot better and make them less scary.

I think Duncan could have easily filled a whole morning or day on the subject, but unfortunately ODTUG only offers one hour slots. Perhaps they should consider having different slots during the conference. Some 2 or 3 hour slots would be very welcome.

Build, test, and deploy ADF apps with Maven 2 - Aino Andriessen, AMIS

Next stop was a presentation by Aino on build, test and deploy automation with Maven 2. A very interesting concept and I would say continuous build, etc. is a necessity for any serious development shop. Aino did a good job on explaining the concepts and benefits behind it and showing how to do this with Maven.

Continuous integration for Database Builds - Ken Atkins

Next I attended a presentation by Ken Atkins on continuous integration for database builds. This basically is the same concept as Aino presented in the previous slot. But, where Aino targeted Java development, Ken talked about doing the same for database development.

This is still something on my wish list. I think we at Eurotransplant would be much better of with an automated build system for the database as well (we already do Java). I was hoping to get Ken’s view of some of the problems with database continuous builds, especially with larger deployments. As it turned out, Ken’s situation is a bit different and they have a much smaller system. They can rebuild the complete database from scratch in a reasonable amount of time. I haven’t really tested yet, but I think rebuilding from scratch would be just too time consuming in our situation. We have about 650 database tables, a whole bunch of indexes and approx. 1000 database packages. That’s a whole lot of objects to create and install during a build.

Ken’s talk did inspire me to go ahead and just block some time in my agenda to get this done. This is one of the things, that isn’t rocket science to set up once you understand the concepts. But it is something that is time consuming and can have a large ripple effect. It involves getting the developers to change their way of work, and for us it basically also means the phase-out of Designer as a tool. Designer with it’s single truth repository just doesn’t fit well with a version control system allowing for branching. We’re still on Designer 6.0 without support for version control. That’s the only “old” component left in our architecture.

JavaServer Faces on Mobile Devices - Wendy Tromp

The last presentation of the day, and the conference, for me was the one by Wendy Tromp from Transfer Solutions. Se did a rather nice presentation about ADF Faces on Mobile devices and on Telnet devices. I was wondering if she would be able to fill an whole hour on this, but she did marvelously. She did a quick intro on ADF Faces and then continues with the ADF Faces Mobile solution and threw in ADF on Telnet as an added bonus.

At the beginning she appeared to be a bit nervous, but that seemed to disappear after a couple of minutes. Having Duncan Mills, as the director of Oracle product management and ADF evangelist in the room is probably not helping your nerves either

The evening ended with a lovely dinner at the water with some interesting people; Sue Harper from Oracle (product manager SQL Developer), Duncan Mills from Oracle (director of product management at Oracle), Peter Koletzke (well known Oracle specialist and co-author of the JDeveloper 10g handbook) and Steven Davelaar (consultant for Oracle Netherlands, and chief architect of JHeadstart). All in all a very entertaining evening in which we discussed a whole lot of different and very interesting topics. Always nice to here the stories from the trenches of Oracle Corporation

That about wrapped up a very interesting ODTUG conference. The presentations itself are interesting, but the biggest value of the conference for me is in meeting a whole lot of (well known and less well known) people. It is in these discussions that you learn most of the stuff. Back home, you’re sort of in your own little world and after a while it’s hard to see that there are other solutions and approaches then the ones your using. Having discussions with a whole lot of different people at ODTUG can really open your eyes and look beyond your own solutions and the Oracle marketing story.

I would like to thank all the ODTUG attendees and hope to see you next year!

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 - Wednesday

I’m a little late blogging about the past days at ODTUG. It’s just that you run of after a day of ODTUG and have diner and drinks with some very interesting people. The downside to that is that it leaves no time to update the blog. Let’s start with a report of Wednesday.

Oracle SQL and PL/SQL Quiz - Alex Nuijten and Lucas Jellema from AMIS

The day started of with the SQL and PL/SQL quit by the AMIS guys. Unfortunately the turnout wasn’t that big; about 15 people. That should have been much more. The quiz was really fun and entertaining. I think ODTUG should schedule it for some sort of keynote or other session where everybody will attend. This is one of the things people might skip if they look at the schedule, opting for more “serious” presentations. But once people are there, they’re bound to love it. It’s not only very entertaining but you really do learn new stuff as well. The questions really do cover some of the more unknown trickery SQL and PL/SQL stuff.

Talking to VGO

Next stop was the booth of VGO software. VGO already approached me before the conference about my concept of integration Oracle Forms and Oracle ADF Faces. They’re into the business of migrating Oracle Forms to Java web applications. We had a long talk about their product and it certainly seemed interesting. They can migrate to a number of target architectures, ADF being one of them. They’re on the right path, but they’re not quite there yet. From the generated application you can see they do not have a full understanding of the ADF framework, particularly the binding layer. But they seemed very eager to learn and improve the product so this might change (quickly) over time.
I did a quick demonstration of my concept of not migrating Forms at all, but just reuse individual Forms as a ADF Faces component in newly build ADF Faces pages. They were very interested and thought it might be good solution for certain types of clients.

Getting XML data into and out of Oracle with PL/SQL - Ken Atkins

Next stop was a session by Ken Atkins on generating and parsing XML with SQL and PL/SQL. This was a very good presentation for me; exactly spot on. We’re doing more and more with XML and I (as many others) was a bit confused with the whole array of XML techniques Oracle is offering in the database. Ken did a good job explaining how these technologies evolved over time. This really gives some great background information. He then went on demoing the different technologies. If you’ve never done anything with XML in the database, the session might have been to much for you. There were a very large number of slides and code examples. I myself have been trying some stuff with XML in the database, which made it much easier to understand and follow.

In the end it was a very interesting presentation. Ken kept the full 139 (I think) slides in the handouts, although he skipped a lot of them in the presentation due to the one hour restriction. He did this intentionally to leave us with some great reference material. And so he did! If you download only one of the presentations from the ODTUG site after the conference, this should be the one.

dbms_scheduler: not just a revamp of dbms_job - Rune Mork

My next presentation was by Rune Mork from Denmark (if I remember correctly). He did a presentation on dbms_scheduler. It was a very interesting presentation, but since we’re in the middle of migrating to dbms_scheduler there wasn’t much news for me. Because of the migration, I just recently read up about dbms_scheduler and all its features. But I think this was a very interesting presentation for the rest of the audience. Dbms_scheduler is a relatively unknown and undervalues feature of the database. We’re going to use it to replace our existing installation of Redwood Cronacle (aka JCS).

Managing successful SOA projects: A view beyond agile science - Clemens Utschig

The final presentation of the day was with Clemens Utschig from Oracle. The turnout was quite low (about 10 people), which made it a nice sort of round table discussion at the end. Clemens had an interesting presentation on managing SOA projects, being agile, etc. But since most of the visitors of the conference seem not to be quite there yet, I guess they preferred other sessions over Clemens’

We wrapped up the Wednesday with a night out at Daytona USA.

Just won the ODTUG Editor’s Choice Award

I was thrilled to just receive the ODTUG 2007 Editor’s Choice Award for my paper for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference. I’ll post a picture later on, because I forgot the cable to connect my camera to my laptop.

Anyhow, I’m quite thrilled with this award. It’s the first paper I ever submitted to an international conference and it’s great to receive the Editor’s Choice Award right away. The only downside is things can only go downhill from now on

It’s a nice engraved award to hang on your wall. Here’s what it says:

Editor’s Choice Award

In Recognition of Exceptional
Technical Content and Visual Presentation
in Your ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 Paper

Protecting Your Forms Investment
While Moving to the Web

Wilfred van der Deijl
Eurotransplant

ODTUG 2007
Datona Beach, Florida

Update 20-jun-2007: I just noticed that my employer, Eurotransplant, released a news item on me winning this award. I only wished they would have another picture on file for me. Now, how do you stay humble with all of this attention…

Update 21-jun-2007: The Automatisering Gids, a dutch IT magazine, also picked up on the news. They’ve included a news item on their site and in their feed. You can say what you want, but this does make you feel proud of yourself.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 - Monday

Yesterday (Monday) was the first day of the ODTUG conference this year. There was no choosing of sessions yet, since day 1 was the Oracle Fusion Symposium. This means there’s just one track of presentations in a larger room for all to attend.

It was a series of 11 presentations of half an hour. Most presentations are also scheduled for a full hour session later this week. Although I like the concept of a Symposium, I’m not too sure what it will do to the number of attendees to the presentations later this week. You get the feeling that most of the things a speaker wants to say have been covered in this half hour. So you might be tempted to skip their full hour presentation later this week. Such a shame if the subject, since the presenter will probably have some interesting additional details but you might very well end up missing this.

You can read about most of the presentations on any of the other Oracle blogs; so I’ll just limit it to my nomination for speaker of the day. I might be biased, but for me that would be fellow Dutchman Peter Ebell from AMIS. He’s just great to listen to. Not a moment you get distracted or bored. Very interesting presentation and he’s really taking you by the hand to discuss some of the BPEL features, mainly involving Human Workflow. For us, this is also relevant at the time since we’ve just started our first BPEL implementation which uses Human Workflow quite heavily.

Today, we’re up for the first day of parallel sessions. So now I really have to look at the schedule and pick the ones to visit. This is always the hard part. Sometimes there’s a slot with nothing that sound truly interesting but at other slots you have 3 or 4 presentations you would like to attend. You’re always afraid to pick the (afterwards) disappointing one and hear from others how great the presentation was you missed out on.

At least I don’t have to doubt which presentation to attend after lunch (slot 3). That’s when I’m up. I’ll have my presentation from 2:45-3:45 PM. Let’s hope some people show up. I would hate for (almost) nobody to show up. Franky that would disappoint me a bit. I think the subject (integrating Oracle Forms and ADF Faces) is very interesting to a large part of the attendees of this conference. Also, Lucas Jellema plugged my session yesterday in the experts panel at the end of the day. Let’s hope that has helped. Finally, I’ve also been nominated for the Editor’s Choice Award. The final results will be presented during lunch today just before my presentation. That extra little bit of attention might also help.

Enough for now. I’m heading off to breakfast and will blog later today about my own and other presentations.

ODTUG paper nominated for Editor’s Choice Award

I am honored that my paper on integrating Oracle Forms and Oracle ADF Faces has been nominated for the Editor’s choice award for the ODTUG 2007 Kaleidoscope conference. I’m especially thrilled since this is my first ever officially submitted paper for a conference and to get a nomination right away is wonderful. I would also like to congratulate the guys from AMIS for getting not one but two nominations.

I arrived at Daytona Beach yesterday (Friday). My transfer at Atlanta took 3 hours, but I guess that’s not as bad as Dimitri’s. After arrival I checked into the Daytona Beach Hilton and you’ve got to love the view from my hotel room: