Oracle Open World

Today I visited Oracle Open World in Amsterdam, here are some of the points I picked up.

In the “Oracle Application Server 10g Technical Overview” session David Keene gave an insight into the driving forces behind the AS 10g.
Surprisingly this session was not so technical after all, but a rather highlevel overview. Buzzwords were simplicity, Open Source, Service Oriented Architecture , Event Driven, loosely coupled, composite business solutions and compliance to Open Sandards.
In line with this view he expressed to commitment of Oracle to Linux. Although operating on any platform Oracle Corporation internally now uses Linux.
He quite proudly positioned the recently acquired BPEL process manager as Oracle’s implementation of BPEL. He also announced the release of a Business Activity Monitor in the early part of 2005. This new tool should provide us with end-to-end Business Intelligence during process flows.

Erwin Groenendal of Cumquat technology presented their custom Content Management modules voor Oracle Portal, demonstrating both the extendability of Oracle portal but also that the default content management part of Oracle portal is still not up to par. Presentation

Last but not least I visited Duncan Mills’ presentation on Oracle Forms 10g. The main themes in his story were Forms is not dead and Application Integration. After the leap Oracle Forms took to the web, it will now move towards integration on several levels, Forms with other (J2ee) Applications, Forms with the browser and Forms with the client Machine.
All in all Duncan painted a picture of Oracle Forms and J2ee applications running side by side in a heterogenous environment, leveraging their individual strengths to create a better overall result. Presentation