Friday on Oracle Open world

Last Friday I was on Oracle Open World in Amsterdam. Although the conference wasn’t as big as I am used to from previous years, there were enough interesting sessions to make it worth wile. An extra advantage was that it was in Holland this year, meaning I would run into a lot of my school- and business colleagues (which happened indeed). These are my findings:

The morning session (a keynote by Ron Tolido from Cap Gemini) was funny, contended a good book tip (Does IT matter? By Nicholas Carr (It’s not new, but I haven’t read it yet)) and a new Oracle tool: ’Oracle BPEL Process manager 2.0’. Great! A new Oracle tool! I love new Oracle stuff, let’s download it and find out. I would find out earlier than I thought…

The second session I attended was ‘Java, JDBC and Web services in Oracle Database 10g: Unleash the power of your Database’ by Manh-Kiet Yap. It was an inspiring session. The new thin JDBC driver offers bind variable names, PL/SQL index by table, proxy authentication and encryption algorithms. There is also a possibility for long to Blob conversion. The JVM runtime engine is now based on J2SE 1.4. The database has a self tuning Java pool, a faster loadjava verifier and has an optimized Java memory management (there was a little remark on the slide saying ‘dedicated server only’, so I asked Manh-Kiet whether it would work on a grid as well. He had no official answer on that, but he was sure it does). What was really interesting is that there is a possibility to publish PL/SQL as a web service from Jdeveloper. A test page is then automatically generated for you. It’s also possible to publish binary data (e.g. pictures) via a web service. A very interesting session.
Click this link for the slides: http://download-uk.oracle.com/owamsterdam2004/1143.ppt

After the lunch I went to the session ‘ Oracle Application server 10g: Messaging and Notifications’. Mobile phone numbers were collected and a nice demonstration was given
Sending sms messages to the audience and voice messages to the presenter’s own smartphone from an Oracle application. Oracle’s collaboration suite uses these techniques to make it possible (among other things) to listen to your e-mail messages (they are read to you by the computer) while you are stuck in traffic. Another nice demonstration was using a Motorola phone to report a damage (by making a photo with the phone) on a certain location (using the GPS from the phone). All the data was, of course, collected using the Application Server.

In the coffee break I walked to the Oracle demo grounds and had a nice conversation with one of the consultants about the Oracle intranet startup service. It is a service that provides the customer with an installation of Portal including a starter site, several enhancements to Oracle Portal and some training in using Portal. He showed me the Xopus XML editor I already had seen used at the Schiphol site (now fully integrated in Portal). RSS feeds can now be used in portal and broadcasted from your portal. But most important of all: the WYSIWYG environment makes viewable what you are doing instead of walking through menu’s and wait what you get like it is with standard Portal. I think these enhancements make Portal much more user friendly and I hope it will be included in Portal in the future (now Oracle ask a serious amount of money for the whole package).
The last session I attended was ‘Productive Application Development for service Oriented Architectures’ by Stephan Janssens. In this session I saw what BPEL is. A good looking and productive development environment. I also saw Eclipse being used besides Jdeveloper and that the english version of the search engine Google has a ‘definition’ link that gives the definition of a trigram that you enter. Handy!
Presentation: http://download-uk.oracle.com/owamsterdam2004/1025.ppt slides