Grants Blog
News from the SOA, JEE, ADF, JDeveloper and Oracle Forms World

A great initiative from the Oracle ACEs is an ADF Methodology session at Oracle World 2008.
Some of the leading users of ADF will be discussing how to build best practices into building ADF Applications and the pros and cons of the decisions you will have to make. This session will also be attended by members of the JDeveloper team and should be a great opportunity to discuss the best way to build an ADF application.

Sign up and contrinute to the wiki here.

Well after about 18 hours door-to-door, I arrived in New Orleans for the 2008 ODTUG conference. After a quick meet up and registration, it was off to the welcome evening. Now, being in New Orleans, home of Jazz, someone came up with the bright idea of having a jam night. Now, I've no idea when people were going to start jamming but by about 8 o'clock no one had gone up so fellow PM Susan Duncan and I decided to kick things off. I suppose the good thing about going first was there was no one to compare us with, which was probably good! But we went through a couple of songs ("Get Here" and "Take a Little Piece of My Heart" just incase you couldnt work out what the hell we were playing) and then were joined on stage for "What a Wonderful World", "Mustang Sally" before we found a singer/guitarts to bash out the Beatles "8 days a week".

All good fun and we raised some money for charity (its amazing how much people will pay to stop you playing).

So, even though I made it through the "awake for 24 hours" pain barrier, I still managed to wake up in the middle of night - hey, at least I got to run my demos a few times.

This morning, I'm going to the Web 2.0 Keynote and then doing a Tools Panel and finishing up with some time on the JDeveloper demo booth. If you are here, come by and say hello.

Well Sunday I fly out to New Orleans for ODTUG USer Group 2008. This is my fifth or sixth ODTUG and I personally think its one of the best user groups. Probably by its nature of focusing on developers means most of the sessions are really relevant to anyone developing with Oracle technology.

Personally I think the best sessions out of the whole conference is on Monday at 1:15. The "Tools Panel". This is an open session with Oracle experts (eh, me included!) where you get to ask all those burning questions you've been storing up all year. Personally, I get concerned (and this is a general reflection of life) of the amount of people who are small on facts but big on opinion. So, if you really want to get hard facts directly from Oracle and Oracle experts then ask here - a much better source of information that "some guys I met at the coffee machine knows someone who thinks that Oracle are doing this...". ;o)

Tuesday morning at 8am I will be ditching the slides and just giving you an hour of all the best declarative features in JDeveloper 11g. No code, just masses of drag, drop and bang!. I'll be showing task flows, templates, declarative components, Rich UI components, drag and drop, popup. If you come to this presentation and DON'T think this stuff is easier than Forms for more functionality, I'll buy you a drink.

2pm I will be presenting a "Case Study of Redeveloping a Forms Application in ADF" The focus of this presentation is to show how many of the features you use to develop Forms applications, exist in ADF. And I will redevelop a Forms application in ADF just to prove it!

Then at 5pm I will be openning up the presentation for Oracle partner PITSS on "How to turn Older Forms Applications into SOA Applications" My part of this presenation will be outlining Oracle's roadmap and some of the success stories of people who have modernized their Oracle Forms applications.

I'll also be spending sometime on the Tools Booth and in the usability labs.

Some notable other presentations I would recommend checking out.

Anything by Duncan Mills ;o)
Wilfred van der Deijl's presentations are really good if you are looking for ideas on bridging the gap between Forms and Java.
Mastering Web Layout by Lynn Munsinger would be a good way to spend an hour as well.
Finally, Steven Davalaar's "Beyond Drag and Drop" is a great presentation for those who are really looking to get under the covers of ADF. Steven knows ADF inside out.

Enjoy the conference, and come up and say hi!

After a couple of hours train journey from Beligium I arrived in Utrecht to deliver the Forms Modernization Roadshow in the Netherlands.
As with Belgium, the organizers were a little nervous as more people had registered than there were seats!. Luckily, the numbers was just about right and approximately 100 people attended the event.

I presented Oracle's strategy, demos of Forms/BPEL and web services, and then did a demo of JDeveloper and ADF.
I was then followed (again) by Wilfred van der Deijl from Eurotransplant, Sandra Muller from the JHeadstart team and finally Malcolm Smith from Atos Origin who all gave their own contribution on modernizing Oracle Forms applications.

For me, it was good to bump into some people who I have only really met through my blog (nice to meet you!) and of course, spend some time with customers and understand more about their concerns/issues and feedback.

If you were at the event, I hope it met your expectations and proved to be a useful afternoon.

A superb event at Belgium saw a full room for a "Forms Modernization" day in Belgium. It was great to be told by the local Oracle people that this was the best attended event they have had at the Oracle office in Belgium - now that has got to say something!

I delivered 90 minutes on Forms modernization through SOA then we had a number of partners who really gave an added dimension.

Wilfred van der Deijl gave a great demo of his OraFormsFaces solution used at Eurotransplant. We also had iAdvise presenting their experience of using web services from Oracle Forms. Another three partners gave other great insights into their use of Oracle Forms.

After an hour or so on the train, I am now in Utrecht to deliver the same event to our Dutch friends. Another event whcih is over subscribed!