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OOW2006 - Day 2 (Tuesday) : Developer Day

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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 (obviously I didn't read the abstract quite well): I got lost after 15 minutes and took the time to finish my notes from the previous day.

After that I went to Business Rules : Core to Agile Applications by Manoj Das. He explained the goals and working of Business Rules a new part of the SOA Suite - rules can be integrated in a BPEL process. The statement was that, because (some) business rules are not static, but dynamic, you need an easy way to change the rules (by the end user). Business Rules is Oracle's solution to that. You should use BR only for rules that are volatile, like discount percentages, client categorization (e.g. gold, silver or bronze customers) etc. He showed some screen prints of the tool, alas no live demo. The IT savings of using a business rule engine is estimated by Gartner on 5 up to 40%, so it looks quite promising - when the product is mature.

The next thing was a Hands-on-Lab Oracle ESB Synchronization. In this session we were challenged to create an end-to-end solution using ESB. A nice break: doing something yourself instead of listening....

The last session of the day was CERN: Building Real-World Solutions with Oracle Application Express by Giovanni Chierico. At CERN (the inventors of the internet!), APEX is used for developing small database centric applications for users all over the world. They managed to put as many as 10 applications in production in 1 year. He showed some screen shots that looked really nice and ended with giving some tips to the audience.

After that I headed over to the Blogger meetup, where I met around 10 of my fellow bloggers. Very good to meet the people you read! A couple of us broke up halfway the meeting to take a bus (one of the 250!) to the Cow Palace to watch the Elton John show. Arriving there I was astonished by the quantity and quality of the food and drinks (even when we arrived quite late). The show of Elton and Devo was great - sadly I had to miss Joan Jett. I went back rather early and had just to wait 10 minutes for a bus (in contrast to some colleagues who had to wait over an hour).

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