Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged future
The Future of Forms is ….. Forms (and some friends) (UKOUG, 2011 – with Grant Ronald)
Dec 11th
Slides for the presentation I did with Grant Ronald during UKOUG 2011, last week in Birmingham. The abstract for this presentation: “Many organizations run enterprise Oracle Forms applications created in the 90s. They now wonder about the future of their application.This session tells how modernization of the application landscape could take place, using a mix of the latest version of Forms and other technologies like SOA, ADF and perhaps APEX.
Forms 11g integration and extension points are discussed and demonstrated. Forms applications serving internal, professional user groups today are typically by and large suitable for continued use. Modernization of these applications therefore typically focuses on integration – with a SOA environment and Event infrastructure and with new user interfaces and Portals – and to some extent to enhancing user experience and functionality of the application.
This session shows how Forms 11g – part of Fusion Middleware and running on WebLogic Server – can be integrated in a modern Service Oriented Architecture and how it can be embedded in Web 2.0 Portals and Applications. The audience will see how Forms can quite easily get a face-lift – to bring it on par UI wise with other modern applications. The session will also discuss when other technologies such as ADF or APEX might come into mix.”
Asynchronous processing in Java applications – leveraging those multi-cores
Feb 19th
Processors are not going to get much faster. No higher clockspeeds are foreseen. The speed of processing will be further increasing through parallellization, engaging multiple CPU cores for handling all tasks rather than a single faster core.
This is but one reason for taking a closer look at the threading model in Java and the way we can do asynchronous and parallel processing as of Java 5. Another reason for my interest in asynchronous processing has to do with (perceived) performance. If an application performs a task on behalf of a user, it may block until the task is completed. The user cannot do anything until the task completes – watching the hourglass or whatever busy cursor is used. With asynchronous processing, a task which the user does not immediately require the results from can be processed in a separate thread. The perception of the user therefore is that the task is performed (or at least processed) much faster than in the synchronous case. And even though it is only perception – perception is usually all that counts!
Furthermore, if the task can be broken in smaller pieces that can be executed in parallel, we really can speed up the task – provided processing power is available. Many tasks involve IO-processing, database access or web service calls – all operations that do not burden the CPU very much and leave room for parallel activities in other threads.
In this article I will tell about my first explorations of the world of Futures, ExecutorServices, CompletionService, Callback interfaces and ThreadPools. Read the rest of this entry »
