Roels Blog

Due to a pleasant evening on Wednesday, I had to skip the first session (at 8:00!). But at the start of the second session, Test-Driven Development in the World of PL/SQL by PL/SQL Evangelist Steven Feuerstein, I was quite awake. Steven demonstrated - in his own special interesting way : what a great presenter! - the advantages of Test Driven Development. The message: Specify your testcases and build your test program before you even start building the program-to-test! . He also announced and demonstrated Quest Code Tester, what looks like a great tool to support PL/SQL unit tests. I surely will try this out soon. Available for download at ToadWorld , free until the end of February. After that one I went to Peter Koletzke for a session with the - rather long title Oracle JDeveloper 10g with Oracle ADF Faces and Oracle JHeadstart: Is it Oracle Forms Yet? . He pointed out the similarities and dissimilarities between Oracle Forms and JDeveloper - with and without JHeadstart. His conclusi

Wednesday was Keynote Day. First in line was John Wookey, who emphasized the continuity of the complete Oracle Applications stack and pointed out a couple of new features and enhancements in the future releases of Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and the E-Business Suite. In this timeslot Giovanni Contino of Ducati got 15 minutes to present himself as an "happy customer". The two Ducati motorbikes that drove through the hall were rather cool. After this break John continued with the four key values of the new features of the products: Search: A Google look-a-like search engine to search through structured and unstructured enterprise data. XML based reporting: Using XML Publisher to create good looking reports. Role based analytics: Presenting exact the information the user needs given his role. Sustainable Integration: Creating a layer above all the different applications, so the end users doesn't even know what application he's using. Then he showed a Sneak Previ

On this Tuesday I spent the whole day at the Hilton (only 1,5 block from our hotel) attending sessions from the Developer track. The day started of with the Developer keynote of the day : Tom Kyte with Things you think you know . The message was that things (read "Oracle software") changes over time and with every Oracle update your knowledge needs an update too. The quote of the day : "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so or just ain’t so anymore or just ain’t always so." This great presentation (especially if it's presented by the master himself) is also downloadable from asktom . You can get an impression by watching the first 3 minutes on video from Eddy Awad's site . The second session of the day was Oracle BPEL Process Manager Performance and High Availability by Francis Ip and Randy Stafford. This was the only session at OOW where I misjudged my knowledge (o

For me this Monday started with an (Developer) Keynote by Thomas Kurian: The next application platform . Thomas pointed out three main trends : SOA, Information Driven Architecture an Grid Computing Architecture. For the developers (about 1200 in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton) he mentioned the tools Oracle offers for building applications on the 3-tier architecture (of course: JDev, SOA Suite and SQL Developer). The most important announcement was the availabilty of the Oracle Developer Depot , were you can easily download an install Java applications to facilitate code reuse and simplify the development process. Of course you can upload your work to this comunity. You can even win a meet and greet with Larry (or an HD TV) if your software is selected as "the best". For the next session a headed over to Moscone for The Future of DB Technology by Andy Mendelsohn. He addressed (a.o.) the next interesting new products / features / options : Information Lifecycle Management H

For me OOW started on Sunday morning with the ODTUG Oracle Developer Suite Special Interest Group Meeting in the Hilton. In this session 2 Oracle Emps of the Forms and Designer Development Depts answered questions of the audience. The highlights : The main goals for Forms 11 are : better Application Server integration; higher interoperability (with webservices, BPEL and browser); ease of upgrade. JInitiator will be replaced by (native) JVM WebUtil will be a part of Forms (not a seperate utility anymore) Forms PL/SQL scanner that checks the quality of the code No plans for extra UI widgets Oracle Applications is migrating to Forms 10gR2, so Forms is here to stay XML Publisher is the standard reporting tool in Applications (you can imagine the consequences for the future of Oracle Reports) Designer 11 will not contain any new functionality, just a new version to keep up with Forms Of course no time frame for the release has been given. At 6:00 pm Charles Phillips had the honour of kicki