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

I've just uploaded a new case study from Oracle partner iAdvise on their work with a Dutch insurance company. This is another great "real world" story of someone whose business needs are changing and are working on a path of modernization that maximizes their current investment while exploiting new opportunities and technologies.
In this case study, the are mixing a Forms and web application, which are sharing web services orchestrated through rules in an Enterprise Service Bus - ESB

A couple of quotes that stood out for me:

"Oracle technology provides a no-pain-all-gain innovation path to its customers, letting them profit from new technology while leveraging and extending the life of their existing IT investments"

"We have also seen how Oracle supports this new technological trend through its comprehensive SOA suite, and through ensuring that existing technologies such as Oracle Forms are kept up to speed with technological evolution by allowing them to integrate easily and seamlessly in a service oriented architecture"

Not surprisingly, this is right in line with our vision for Forms customers and we are hearing more and more of these case studies coming through each month. I see these customer stories as the validation of out modernization message and hope its a path you feel you can follow.

One of our JDeveloper customers has posted screenshots from their new JDeveloper application.

Its great to see the look and feel of the applications being built and, of course, to hear customer success stories. Thanks for posting Wes.

Wednesday this week I was part of the UKOUG committee group responsible for paper selection for this years UKOUG conference.

Its not an easy job. In the development tools group we had about 70 abstracts and only about 40 slots which meant a number of good papers had to go on the "reserve" pile.

Our approach was to split the papers into their general tools groupings (Forms, JDev, PL/SQL, APEX, Database and Modelings tools and then an "others" group). We then ordered them by the rankings they were given by the paper reviewers and tried to either combine or remove obvious candidates. That took about 4 hours. It was then onto the massive conference wallchart to try and arrange the sessions in a way that gave a good flow to the conference, and also to avoid obvious clashes.
Here you can see me, Susan Duncan and Jeremy Duggan doing our best to get neck ache but to ensure that we got the right mix for the conference agenda.

It was also actually very amicable, which make you feel that between the three of us, we were of a common thinking on the accepted abstracts.

If you do get an email saying your paper was not selected, believe me, its not through the effort of all the reviewers and our own efforts. Your contribution is valuable and I hope you can make one of the SIGs or future conferences. Sometimes there are just too many high quality papers and presenters.

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.