OraTransplant

Wednesday (and the rest) at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008

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.

My two presentations on Tuesday at ODTUG

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.

Monday at ODTUG

Wow, it’s hard to find some time for blogging here at ODTUG. The conference is fully packed with presentation and when I’m not in a presentation you constantly bump in to interesting people to have a chat or do a demo. But let’s try and recap the first two days.

Monday started with a great presentation by Steven Davelaar on JHeadstart. He really has a compelling story. JHeadstart has been around for a number of years and over time it has grown to an amazing toolkit for ADF developers, especially the ones with a Forms (orDesigner) background. The core of JHeadstart is a metadata file called the Application Definition File. It comes with a very neat editor to edit this XML file and define how your applications should work. JHeadstart has a generator that takes this application definition file and creates your ADF Faces application for you. This is all Velocity template driven, so if there is any part of your generated application that’s not to your liking, just update the Velocity templates and your fine. This means you can generate whatever application you like. This really is the best of both worlds: you get a big productivity boost but without a loss in flexibility!

Steven also demonstrated a new addition to the JHeadstart toolkit; the JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator. That’s really another great tool from these guys. It reads your Oracle Forms FMB files and creates the JHeadstart Application Definition File. Then your back on track with the JHeadstart editor to refine this file and the JHeadstart generator to generate your ADF Faces application. I think he had a stunning demo showing a Forms to ADF Faces migration in a couple of minutes.

The JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator does not convert the custom PL/SQL logic from Oracle Forms to your ADF application. This is simply impossible. There’s a lot of stuff you did in Forms PL/SQL that can and should be solved completely differently in ADF. For example, lot’s of the Oracle Forms PL/SQL stuff can be done declaratively in ADF. So, you still have to do some work to get all functionality back in ADF Faces, but there’s no easy way to do that. This is why Steven showed why their JHeadstart and my OraFormsFaces are a match made in heaven. You can use my OraFormsFaces to just keep your Forms and embed them as a JSF component in your ADF Faces application. Steven showed how you can mix and match true ADF pages created by JHeadstart and pages that just embed existing Forms using OraFormsFaces. If you want, you can migrate over time making more and more pages in JHeadstart and slowly minimize the use of OraFormsFaces.

After lunch I sticked too long talking to a lot of people, so I missed most of the Oracle Tools Expert Panel in the next slot. Next up was a vendor presentation about Forms to JSF/ADF migration. I have a big personal interest in these solutions, and to be honest I just don’t believe in 100% migration. As explained before, there is no way PL/SQL from Forms can be converted to a JSF/ADF application and still end up with an application with a sound architecture. The two worlds are just too different. You need a human being to go over the Forms PL/SQL and decide where and how this should be implemented in a ADF application. It depends on so many things and requires knowledge of ADF so that it cannot be automated (at least that’s what I think). The vendor I attended is trying to achieve 100% migration and after hearing there story I was still convinced that 100% PL/SQL conversion is not the right track for me. Perhaps other organizations will make a different call, but personally I want a sound ADF architecture. The downside to that is that you do need knowledge about the ADF architecture you’re aiming for. Perhaps that’s the biggest challenge for the Forms shops out there.

Next up was a presentation by Peter Koletzke on a case study of one of their clients making the transition from Oracle Forms to Java EE on the web. There story was strikingly similar to what we’ve been doing at Eurotransplant. They started of with JDeveloper 9i, then moved to 10.1.2 and now they are at 10.1.3. With this came all the technology changes from Oracle MVC framework to Struts to JSF Controller and the move from JSP to UIX to ADF Faces. Luckily they used JHeadstart so they were able to generate the application from the same Application Definition File to each new technology when it came along. A very good case for the metadata driven approach of JHeadstart. You can just take the same application metadata and generate it to the new version of whatever technology comes alone as soon as the JHeadstart team has upgraded the generator for this new technology. They have a great track record doing this and I know they already have an (internal) build doing the generation to ADF 11g.

The last session of the day was about Oracle Business Rules. I was hoping to meet up with a Oracle Rules Product Manager since we are evaluating the tool to use it for matching donor organs to patients on the waiting list. We’ve got the feeling that this would be a novel way of using Oracle Rules and is perhaps pushing the limits. I was hoping to meet up with a product manager to get some feeling on the possibilities and perhaps even get some support from Oracle HQ on our challenge of using Oracle Rules 11g for this matching. I didn’t read the bio carefully in the ODTUG conference guide, so I could have known that the presenter was from Oracle Consulting and was talking about his past experience with Rules 10g. That’s not really relevant to our case, since we rely heavily on decision tables which is a Rules 11g feature that’s not available in Rules 10g. That reminded me to look more closely to the session abstract and speaker bio before going to a session.

Well that concluded day one. Hopefully I can find the time to write up on Tuesday as soon as possible.

Nominated for ODTUG 2008 Editor’s Choice Award

Just noticed that the nominations for the ODTUG 2008 Editor’s Choice Award were posted on the board. To my surprise I was listed again. Last year I actually won the award, which was great. Let’s keep my fingers crossed, but it would surprise me to win the award two years in a row.

Here’s the full list of nominees:

• John Flack - Google Maps, ADF Faces, and Oracle Locator: A Backstage Tour of the New Treatment Locator
• Wilfred van der Deijl - Integrating Oracle Forms with Other Web Technologies
• Paul Dorsey - Using Periodic Audits to Prevent Catastrophic Project Failure
• Peter de Vaal - Robust Application Server Technologies for Deploying Critical Applications
• Paul Dorsey - Thick Database Techniques

Update: Unfortunately I didn’t won the award this year. But hey, being nominated is enough honor. (that’s what all the losers say )

Update 2: Sorry for not mentioning that the award was one by Paul Dorsey this year. Congratulations!

My contribution to the ODTUG Fusion Middleware Best Practices Symposium

This morning I had my first (short) presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008. I was approached to be one of the presenters at the ODTUG Fusion Middleware Best Practices Symposium. I was honored to be invited in a line up with some very renowned speakers such as Paul Dorsey, Peter Koletzke, Duncan Mills, and others. A tough challenge, but I thought it went quite well. I did a 30 minute abbreviated version of my presentation later this week titled “The Beauty of JSF Component Based Development”. Because of the abbreviated version I only did a brief introduction of what JSF is and why it is so important that is based on components and uses a declarative way of developing applications.

I finished the talk with a demonstration viewlet of a simple drag-and-drop of a JSF component from the component palette onto the visual editor. This demonstrates the basis of JSF development in JDeveloper. The unique thing about this demo is that I was using the JSF components we’ve developed to reuse Oracle Forms as a JSF component. That really attracted some attention. I got a couple of questions after the session, and later in the hallway and other places. To me it was a good beginning of the conference. It was a unique experience to be part of a high profile event as the opening seminar.