Java Hair

Today was a short day, for manning the booth anyway. We didn’t have anything to give away this year so it made the close of the booth somewhat less exciting. I didn’t actually get to see any sessions today, but I did manage to talk to many people that are trying to decide what to do with their old Oracle Forms applications.

I told them what I always tell ‘em. Upgrade your forms for the most part, unless you have a compelling reason not to do so. Converting to ADF or Java is going to be time consuming and expensive, even when you use a tool like Evo.

I got to find out what the JHeadstart gang have been up to. I even managed to catch up with Wilfred and Grant today, so it hasn’t been a total loss.

I should have taken some pictures of our booth with my phone but I did not. Stacey, the marketing associate with us got some good pictures of it on her camera. I’m sure she’ll have those pictures up on the site sometime soon.

Tonight is the big Fat Tuesday on Wednesday bash, so that should be a fun end to trip for us. For Andrej, being an Oracle Ace Director, he gets to spend a few extra days exploring New Orleans, not a bad deal.

Hopefully our presentations will be up on the ODTUG site soon so that you can download them and take a look.

Now that I’m coming back from the conference, the next blog posts should have a little more meat to them. I think I’m about overdue for something technical.

One last thing before I forget, a picture of Andrejus during his presentation!

So Day 2 came and went. I spent a lot of time in the booth on Day 2. I managed to see a couple presentations. One was by Peter Koletzke, a presentation about migrating a Forms 3 character-based application to a Java EE application. I had thought it was going to be about other Java frameworks, but as it turned out it was actually about using JDeveloper and ADF. Pretty high-level, but it was interesting to see their approach which really wasn’t too different from ours.

More important, to me, was Andrejus Baranovski’s presentation, “Development with Oracle JDeveloper/ADF 11g Reusing 10g Best Practices”. It was well attended and well received and that was a good thing.

I did manage to see the Welcome and Conference Awards.  I was happy to see Lynn Munsinger win the Oracle Contributor of the Year award, she deserves it.

Today, I’ve spent most of my time in our booth again, attending no other presentations besides my own.  I am happy to say that it was attended fairly well and it seemed to go over pretty well.  I can’t wait to see the feedback as I’m sure I could improve.

As compared to last year’s conference there seem to be many more talks on using Java (mostly in the context of ADF, but not always), so I like to see that.  Unfortunately, I need to spend a lot of time manning the booth and don’t necessarily get the chance to see those presentations.

We have a little more time to spend in the booth today before we find a nice New Orlean’s restaurant to go to and get some good local food.  I think if we can find Emeril’s restaurant, we’ll be there.

Tomorrow is essentially the last day of the conference, ending with a “Fat Tuesday on Wednesday” party.  I’ll let you know how that turned out on Thursday.

This is officially the first day of ODTUG, the opening keynote by Tom Kyte took place at 7.  Right now the Welcome Reception is just about ending.  In a nice addition to the conference they had an open “Jam Session” with a small stage set up and some instruments available.  The talent here is actually quite good and I just got done listening to a great version of “Johnny B Good”.

I wasn’t going to post too many details about the conference but I thought the fact that just like this blog the conference was blending technology and music was too much of a coincidence to let it pass by.

So far we’re off to good start.

I haven’t posted much in the last couple weeks, too much traveling, most of it business unfortunately.  Anyway, this is a quick update to be followed up with a more interesting how to article involved JDeveloper and ADF.  I hope to get that posted by the end of the week.

ODTUG is coming up in just one week.  It is being held in New Orleans this year, and if you get there early on Saturday you can be one of the many volunteers to help with reconstruction by, I believe, building a home.

I will be there from Saturday until Thursday.  My presentation is on Tuesday, June 17th, from 12:45 to 1:45 and is titled “Using ADF 11g as  Platform for Oracle Client/Server Forms Conversions.”

I hope to see you there!

On another note, Andrejus Baranovskis, an Oracle ACE director who works for Vgo Software and will also be presenting at ODTUG this year, has created a place to discuss all things regarding Oracle Form’s Modernization. You can find it here.  It is part of the Oracle Mix site, so you will need an account there.

Ernst and I spoke at the Northeast Oracle User’s Group Training Day last Thursday.  We were really expecting more of a turnout, as it happened, there were about 75 attendees and about 10 attended our session.  They were expecting 200 attendees and blamed the weather on the poor turnout.  I suppose the weather was pretty bad in the morning, it was raining so hard that a few roads were actually shut down due to flooding.  However, this is New England we are talking about, it should be no less than a Nor ‘Easter to slow things down.

Tomorrow we speak at the New York Oracle User’s Group general meeting.  Hopefully the turnout there will be a little better.

Ernst needed some more technical “meat” in his presentation so I agreed to extract some of the technical overview in my presentation for ODTUG and present it as the second portion in his presentation.  It turned out to be a decent presentation with a nice overview of where Oracle Forms is headed and what customers options are combined with an overview of where ADF is now and why it is a good choice for customers looking to move their applications.

I will be doing a very similar presentation to the one I will be presenting at ODTUG in Georgia on the 24th of March for the Georgia Oracle User’s Group.  This one is actually a conference so it should be a little more lively than the other two.  Also, since Ernst isn’t presenting, I’m doing more of a straight technical talk to try it out for ODTUG in June.

If any of you are able to make the trip, I encourage you to check out the talks.  If you show up and let me know you heard about it on this blog then I’ll make sure you get a very cool Vgo Software t-shirt.

I have been chosen as a speaker at Oracle’s ODTUG Kaleidoscope Conference which will be going on in June of this year in New Orleans. My presentation is entitled “Using ADF 11g as a Platform for Oracle Client/Server Forms Conversions”.

With the introduction of ADF 11g, including both the back-end Business Components and the front-end ADF Faces Rich Components, Client/Server applications can now viably be converted to Web applications. This presentation explores some of the difficulties in recreating such applications in a Web environment and shows how ADF 11g can be used to alleviate some of those difficulties. The presentation will explore a real-life proof-of-concept project that uses ADF 11g as the target platform for a client/server migration project. Real-life problems, their solutions, and code examples will be reviewed.

If you are in town, be sure to stop by and say hi!

As you probably saw in Ernt’s earlier post, we exhibited at ODTUG Kaleidoscope this year. It was our first year at the show, but I don’t think it will be our last. To me the show was more valuable than Oracle Open World which we’ve exhibited at for the past 3 years. It may be that as a vendor, exhibiting at OOW is a necessity, but as a developer, exhibiting at the ODTUG show was much better.

What was most encouraging was being able to demo our products to a wide range of people who understood what we were talking about and what our products are trying to achieve. I believe that anyone who believes in code generation as a viable “enhancement’ to custom development should take a look at Rev and see what it can do. I was encouraged to speak to one person who said that he believed we are getting to the point where everything can be done by code generation. I certainly believe that any software project that persists data to a database can benefit from code generation.

Enough about Rev. We had the chance to demo Evo to a number of folks who had some great insight and advice. To me, that was what made the conference such a success. The ability to be able to network with such a great community of people who really want to see a product that can do things right was encouraging.

I had long wanted to speak with Wilfred van der Deijl about his solution to the ADF/Forms integration problem and get his impression on Forms to ADF conversions. At this conference I had the chance to do that. Even though I missed his presentation (the time had changed and I didn’t check the board), he was kind enough to stop by the booth and show it to us personally. It’s a great solution for a problem that we have been asked about many times. If you are into Forms or ADF developement, you should definitely check out his blog. It was nice to see from his blog that he believes we are on the right path.

Peter Ebell over at AMIS in the Netherlands stopped by. If you are into hardcore ADF development, checkout the AMIS blog where Peter is a contributor. Anyway, he stopped by to get a demo of our Forms conversions and hopefully will post his thoughts about it. We talked a lot about Forms Conversions, JHeadstart, and even Whirlyball.

I, unfortunately, did not have the time to attend any of the sessions I wanted to. In each case, when the time for one of those sessions rolled around I was engaged in a product demo or an interesting discussion with one of the attendees. I suppose it’s better to network at these things than sit in on sessions all day, but a nice mix would have been appreciated.

It was a great show and we all had a good time. Though I am not a NASCAR fan in particular, I did get to Daytona USA as guest of Oracle’s at the ODTUG party they held there, and though I was less than impressed, when I stopped by the following day as we were leaving Daytona and got a chance to check out the grandstands with some cars on the track, it was very cool. I don’t think I’ll be watching any NASCAR races on the tube at home, but if I get the chance to attend a race in person, I think I’ll take it. Just the sound of those engines as the cars go screaming by is quite impressive. Not quite as impressive as Evo or Rev, but impressive nonetheless