This weekend, the show goes on again: ODTUG 2006 – The Kaleidoscope of Oracle Development Technology. Our AMIS delegation will do seven presentations, including one on behalf of Oracle Corporation (Steven unfortunately cannot attend and asked me to present on JHeadstart). We hope to not only present our own stories and share our experiences with the audience, we also hope to gain a lot of knowledge. Apart from general interest in what is happening with the Oracle Development tools, both the traditional Designer/Forms stack and the Java/J2EE stack, we want to find some answers to very specific questions. Those include:
- will – and if so how? – ADF Business Components provide support for EJB 3.0 Persistence? If not, is that an indication of the future of ADF BC?
- is it possible to publish services based on Oracle Forms? That is: can we develop services, for example in Java, that interact with a WebForms applications (the FormsServlet) simulating a user acting through the Forms UI, to retrieve data, do data manipulation and execute actions? We are faced with a complex Forms applications with all of the business logic implemented in the Forms. Extracting the logic from the Forms to implement stand-alone services is a very hard process and treating the Forms as Services – not UI based but programmatic services – would seem to be an attractive solution.
- is it possible – in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 and/or in the Oracle ROLAP and MOLAP engines of the Oracle 10gR2 database to connect Facts to a level in the Dimension Hierarchy that is not the lowest level. For example, we have facts that are available at the Month Level of our Time Dimension Hierarchy – the lowest level. We also have another type of fact that is aggregated at the Quarter level, the next highest level in that same Dimension. Can this be implemented, in OWB, in the Database and in Oracle Discoverer?
- are there any changes to be expected in the licensing policy for XML PUblisher? As we understand it currently either we a substantial processor based fee (40k or so) or a per-employee fee ($30) for every employee in the organization. For relatively simple applications at department level with fairly straightforward reportings requirements, that rules out XML Publisher as a reporting technology.
- are the rumours correct that the User Interface for the Oracle Business Rules engine is to be redesigned? The current Rules Author is not ideally suited to have business personnel maintain the rules themselves, even though that is one of the intentions; if this is true, can we have a look at it?
- does the Oracle BPEL PM have an API that allows us to inspect the status of an in-flight process instance? Presumably is does, since that must be what the BPEL Process Manager Console is programmed against.
- any developments around Oracle Designer – we do not really expect it, but one never knows….
- where is SQL Developer going – we have a nice first attempt but at the same time we have identified many areas where we would like to see improvements. What are the prospects?
- how will The Netherlands fare in the World Cup?
When we have them, I will report on the answers.
