This first day of the ODTUG conference / Kaleidoscope featured the Fusion symposium. Fusion relates to the Oracle Middleware platform and contains a lot of technologies and products. It includes new ones like the ESB, BPEL, Webcenter, ADF Ajax as well as existing products like Enterprise Java, Oracle BI, webservices etc.
The opening speech was by Paul Dorsey, a renowed speaker. Inspired by the constant evolution of frameworks and standards he introduced the ‘thick database’ concept that enables easy adaptation to the available technology. Other interesting talks were from my collegues Peter Ebell about the BPEL workflow tasks and Lucas Jellema about Webcenter and from Duncan Mills who gave an overview of the new JDeveloper 11g (currently as a technical preview avaliable at OTN) and Peter de Vaal about identity management. The day was concluded with a discussion and an experts panel.
It is interesting to note that still many people are developing with Oracle Forms and Designer and discuss the need to migrate to a SOA, internet, ADF world. One advise that all the experts agreed on was that you really need a business case for the migration: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The conference offers more sessions on this subject. Besides, Forms and PL/SQL offer many ways to use and interact with current-date technologies.
As you guys probably know – Oracle has an official position which backs up this message of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” – We are continuting to develop and support Forms and if it works for you then great..use it…. We try to show the opportunities available through other technologies but look at them as complementing, not competing.