Comments on: BEA and Oracle's Middleware Strategy Briefing

By: Robert Loren

Robert Loren — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:14:03 +0000

Thanks Simon. Your blog entry was informative as well, and also the Oracle group thread. I’ve used EJB3 in JDev declaratively, so to me JDev and declarative includes much of what happens there. ADF seemed mentioned mostly in the context of Faces, which is an implementation of JSF of course. I think ADF/BC brings a lot of power to the table, but the drawback to it is it’s one of the few non-standard major architectural pieces in the stack left. This makes sense to have when you consider the closer to the database the tech goes, the more Oracle-specific things are in an Oracle world, and the more value being that way. But that will be part of the challenge in winning over many of the BEA Java diehards. I’m probably reading too much in, but seems like a good compromise if they were to bring in the generation to EJB3 from BC to ADF development proper and perhaps merge the two technologies to keep the power of BC along with the standard of EJB3. I don’t know enough about the underlying architectural challenges to take it further than a hunch, but sure seemed they were giving the nod of recognition to EJB, or maybe just throwing a bone again. The rest of the presentation was very deliberate and clear in it’s details.

By: Simon Haslam

Simon Haslam — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:45:03 +0000

@Robert: Thomas Kurian did mention “declarative development” once or twice, especially in the context of making business developers more productive. I think ADF was on a slide as one of 3 strategic products within development tools (along with JDev and Eclipse Pack) – I interpreted that as meaning ADF Faces and ADF BC.

By: Robert Loren

Robert Loren — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:08:18 +0000

Hi, this was very interesting indeed. Most makes a lot of sense. A couple curiosities for me were that EJB was mentioned twice, yet ADF/BC had no mention. This makes sense industry-wise and in context with BEA, but after attending Shaun O’Brien’s session at ODTUG where it was let on that they were generating EJBs from ADF/BC for BPEL consumption, and now today, I wonder if ADF/BC will continue to be considered the target Fusion model layer technology. Being a Portal 10.1.4 user, I also took note of the continuation of WebCenter, even more brazenly, as the replacement platform for portals, only now they are porting the suite to WebLogic.