Java Hair

I am back from Open World 2008 and been so busy catching up with work that I haven’t had time to post anything.  Being an exhibitor I spent a large majority of my time at the show tending the booth.  It was very busy this year and I spent a lot of time talking to people about their Oracle Forms applications and showing them a demonstration of our product.

My session on using ADF 11g as a Platform for Forms Modernization projects went well.  It was an unconference event and probably had about 12 attendees, they all seemed interested in the topic, however, and that was cool.   Andrejus drew a pretty large crowd during his presentation on integrating Maps and ADF and it went really well.

The ADF Methodology group met at an Unconference event and it was very well attended with many representatives from Oracle making an appearance.  It was nice to attach faces to a lot of these e-mails that have been going back and forth in the ADF Methodology Google Group.  There is still a lot of work to be done on the methodology, but it has come a long way since it started.

The announcement from Oracle that was the most exciting for me was that Oracle ADF and JDeveloper 11g will be released in the near future, hopefully today or this week.  For those of us that have been working with Tech Preview 4, this is very welcome news!

That’s it for now, stay tuned and I’ll be sure to get back to something technical soon!

Tomorrow morning I am off to Oracle Open World 2008.  This is the 5th year that we will be exhibiting there, and I believe this will be the most exciting year yet.  I’m sure that the show will be interesting, it usually is, and I get to hang out with some people that have become friends over the years via the show.  I believe their Appreciate event features Elvis Costello this year.  I don’t think that is going to compare to Billy Joel’s performance last year, or the sheer fact that you had to choose between Stevie Nicks, Lenny Kravitz and Billy Joel, but it should be fun nonetheless.

What I am really excited about this time around, however, is more business oriented.  This year we will be demoing our Evo forms conversion tool, as we always do, but this year we are converting forms to Oracle’s ADF 11g framework, both the ADF Business Components and the ADF Rich Faces layer.  I’m not going to tell you that these forms are being converted 100%, frankly, I don’t think that it’s possible in a practical way.  We are converting enough of the forms to show a fully functioning BC layer and a fully functioning UI layer, however, and that is, IMHO, pretty cool to see.

So if you are going to OOW this year, be sure to stop by Vgo Software’s booth and ask for a demo.  Be sure to check out the group discussion about creating an ADF Methodology that I will be participating in at the Unconference, stop by to see Andrejus Baranovski’s presentation and the other Unconference presentation Andrejus and I will be doing about using ADF 11g as a platform for forms conversions.  It will be similar to the talk I gave at ODTUG, but it will probably be a little more technical with Andrejus’s input.

Hope to see you there!

I am going to be at OOW this year, as usual, and this time I will be presenting my talk on using ADF 11g as a platform for Oracle Form conversions.

My presentation outlines the use of 11g ADF Faces, ADF Business Components and JDeveloper as a target platform for applications that were previously written in Oracle Forms. The 11g version of ADF contains many new features that make it a much better framework for such conversions than others. These include the use of Task Flows and richer JSF components. . 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 and what difficulties still remain.

I signed up for the Unconference early to reserver a spot, so right now it is scheduled for 11am on Tuesday morning in Overlook I. Hopefully when I get there to sign up, the slot will still be available, stop by the booth before then if you are interested in attending or check the schedule that will be posted there.

If you are going to be there, be sure to stop by!

Be sure to check out the rest of the Unconference Schedule.

The talk I presented at ODTUG this year went over very well with the people who attended, but unfortunately, there were not all that many in attendance.  Since I missed the deadline for the normal submissions to Oracle Open World this year, I submitted by talk to Oracle Mix’s session submission area.  As one person put it, Oracle Mix is pretty much facebook for people working with Oracle technologies.

Anyway, you can vote to see my session at Open World by clicking here.  I promise you that my presentation is not a vendor presentation, I don’t talk at all about Vgo Software or the tool(s) that we make that make the process of modernizing forms easier.  What I do talk about is how ADF 11g allows you to rewrite Oracle Forms applications in a web environment and some of the pitfalls you will run into when you try to do this.

The presentation also includes a demonstration of creating a Master-Detail page in ADF 11g, much like some of my previous blog-posts.  It is after all, one of the cornerstones of an Oracle Forms application.