OraTransplant

Two proposed OpenWorld sessions

23 May 2008 at 22:13 CEST | In JDeveloper, Oracle, SOA | Leave the first comment

I’ve proposed two sessions at Oracle Mix. The first one is titled “Oracle Forms as JSF components, enabling gradual migration” and the second one “Donor Organ matching with Oracle Business Rules 11g“. If you think these sessions could be of added value to the OpenWorld conference, please read the abstracts and cast your vote.

The Oracle Forms/JSF session is all about the OraFormsFaces JSF component library I developed. It allows you to re-use existing Oracle Forms as full featured JSF components in a JSF or ADF Faces page. This can be a great solution to a gradual migration from Oracle Forms to JSF/ADF. It allows you to embed all of your existing forms in JSF/ADF and then migrate/rewrite them to the new technology at your own pace and one-at-a-time.

The other session is about a proof of concept at Eurotransplant to use Oracle Business Rules 11g to implement all the rules that go into matching an available donor organ to all the patients on the waiting list. These rules are determined by democratic committees and tend to grow quite complex over the years. Using Business Rules the rules can be unambiguously specified. The specified rules can be verified by non-IT personal and allow for some great innovations. One of the best parts is that the rules can be understood, verified, and audited by other people. That’s not so easy if all the rules are embedded in complex PL/SQL, Java, or other 3GL programming language.

Oracle white paper features Eurotransplant

3 July 2007 at 16:04 CEST | In Forms, Oracle, Other, SOA | 4 Comments

Grant Ronald just published an Oracle white paper titled “Oracle Forms and SOA: The Whys and Hows for your business”. It describes the (business) benefits of an Service Oriented Architecture targeted at current or past Oracle Forms customers.

I feel this paper certainly fills a gap. There’s a whole lot of information about SOA and its benefits. This paper addresses the fundamental difference between typical Forms applications (data centric) and SOA applications (process centric).

The paper includes three customer cases which demonstrate that it is possible to move from a traditional Forms/data centric system to a SOA architecture. Eurotransplant happens to be one of these three customers. To a lot of typical Oracle Forms customers a typical SOA paper might feel like a bridge too far and something too radically different to what they are accustomed to. Hopefully this paper will demonstrate that it is possible (and beneficial) for traditional Oracle Forms customers to embrace the SOA paradigm.

4 Comments

BPEL4People Final Spec published

27 June 2007 at 19:22 CEST | In BPEL, Oracle, SOA | 1 Comment

I just noticed that the final specification of BPEL4People (WS-BPEL extension for people) is released. The authors of the specification plan to submit the specifications to OASIS in the near future and will propose a Technical Committee to produce an OASIS standard based on it.

The BPEL4People specification is supported by a group of leading technology vendors, including Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and SAP AG. It defines how to integrate human interactions in WS-BPEL 2.0. Since the official WS-BPEL standard currently does not define human interaction, Oracle (and other vendors) currently has its own implementation of incorporating people in a BPEL process using the Human Workflow component.

It looks like this new BPEL4People standard will finally bring some standardization in the industry on incorporating people in a BPEL process. This sounds like a good thing for customers like us.

1 Comment