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Oracle in Egypt and Jordan are running two partner technology days (Jordan 18th Nov, Egypt 18th Nov) at which I will be talking about Oracle Forms strategy, Forms and SOA and will also give an introduction to our Fusion development platform: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF.

For any Oracle technologists in the area, this might be a good opportunity to see how to modernize your current investment, and what the future holds for Oracle technology.

If you are an Oracle developer, or have a history with Oracle's classic tools set like Oracle Forms, you may want to check out the event we are running in Riga on the 28th October.

I will be kicking off the event with a presentation on Oracle's strategy with Oracle Forms and will be introducing SOA and web services and how they can be called from Oracle Forms. I will then do an overview of Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Oracle ADF before handing over to Andrejus Baranovskis (Oracle ACE Director) who will be doing a masterclass on JDeveloper.

This will be a great opportunity to get the low down on how to modernize your investment in Oracle Forms, as well as learning from a customer in the field (Andrejus) who is using this technology. If you are in the area and can make it, the registration link is on this page.

In Oracle Forms, the object library was a container for creating reusable UI components. So for example, if you wanted to created a standard button for all your applications, or a standard text field, or even something more complicated like a standard canvas for address information, the object library was the place to do it.

Now, JDeveloper and Oracle ADF 11g have something which goes WAY beyond the object library. Declarative Components allows you to create reusable composite components that you can package up make available to your development teams.

To show you the functionality, I've put together a demo of building a reusable panel for displaying customer information. This is then packaged up as a library and made available in a different project. The nice thing is you can set placeholders (called facets) in which the user of the component can add their own content. So you can make it pretty clear where they can and can't add or customise the component. You can also pass parameters to the component so that you can use the same component but, for example, have it bound to different data in different cases.

Check out the demo here and click on "Declarative Components" under ADF Development.

To coincide with the production release of JDeveloper 11g, I've produced a new and updated paper, based on my Oracle World presentation, on how you can redevelop a typical Forms application using Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Oracle ADF.

I've posted the paper and the sample application on the dedicated webpage for Forms developers coming to the JDeveloper world.

The goal is not to force you to redevelop applications (I state that right at the beginning) but instead, I want to show that typical Forms and Forms functionality can be mapped to the Java world if you use JDeveloper and Oracle ADF.

There is also a completed sample app as well.

As always, feel free to post any feedback.

Regards
Grant

I've posted my data-bindings presentation here. Enjoy!