The GroundBlog By Duncan Mills
Duncan Mills's WebLog from GroundSide

We've been hacking away at release 11 of Fusion Middlewarer for some time now and this week sees the second of our on-site beta events where we have a few customers come in to Oracle HQ and play (in a constructive way of course) with the new versions of the product. The event covers the entire application server - not just JDeveloper - so I even have a group of dedicated Forms customers working on release 11.
One of the testers Gerd Volberg is I know hoping to blog as he goes along so worth keeping an eye on for the inside scoop.
More Beta events will follow so if you're interested and can travel to California let me know and we'll see if you fit.

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I've had a couple of questions recently which related to Pluggable Java Components. In both cases the bean that folks needed was available on the site that Francois Degrelle runs - the Oracle Forms Community - Pluggable Java Component and JavaBeans Store. This is a great resource and worth watching if you're a Forms Developer.

Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms and PL/SQL Developers is with the printers right now, all that's left to do is a few updates to the accompanying website and we're done.
For reference I've published the Table Of Contents up on TUHRA as well so you can peruse the scope of the material.

When Forms developers start to look at ADF they can (hopefully) see many similarities in the approach to coding. Business Components for example supports a similar set of APIs or "Trigger points" to many of the core Forms triggers that deal with managing transactions. So if you need to hang code off of the validation or commit processes there is no problem in finding an analogue to how you would do it in Forms.
The one area that has no clear match though is the POST-QUERY and POST-CHANGE triggers. For example, we see folks attempting to call methods for each row in a table as it is displayed. Something that, in Forms, you'd use a POST-QUERY for. I'm not saying it's impossible in ADF but it becomes very tricky. A better approach instead is to change your thinking. Any kind of per-row lookup needs to be encapsulated in the data service itself. If you use ADF BC then you can build view objects specifically for a screen that manage the calculated or lookup columns for you. Then you have to do no work in the UI generation phase (so in fact it's all more efficient as well). One of the problems with the use of wizards for generating ADF BC components is that these encourage a one-to-one view-to-entity approach to the world, and developers fail to appreciate that a view object can be just that - a "view" joining information from multiple entities. If you need to do key lookup - this is the place...