Java Hair

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