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OOW2006 - Day 4 (Thursday) : The Final, Closing Ceremony

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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 conclusion was that Oracle Forms is still better than JDeveloper (because of the learning curve and the more interactive Forms UI), but JDeveloper with JHeadstart is way ahead of Forms - and the development is still going on! One of the funniest parts of his presentation was the moment that a cell phone rang very loud at the first row and he jumped up - dropping his microphone - stating that he would request a JDev enhancement for a ringtones option! Quote of the day: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

The next session was Implementation of an End-to-End Application with Oracle SOA Suite by Roman Dobrik. A good overview presentation of the diverse SOA components, when to choose which component and how these components should co-operate.

The last session of this OOW was a very interesting Oracle BI Discoverer Futures: Protect, Extend, Integrate by Mike Durran. The presentation covers three aspects:
  • Protect : He made clear how Oracle sees the future of Discoverer: SE with new releases and functionality or EE to gain new functionality like integration with BI Publisher (aka XML Publisher), Dashboards and Delivers.
  • Extend : New functionality like Custom Members, Graph Styles and Portal Publishing
  • Integrate : With BI Publisher (he even showed a working demo of this one), Delivers - with Alerting and Distributing iBots that act on worksheets, like BPEL processes that are instantiated upon specific outcomes of worksheet data - and Dashboards. All very cool and promising features!


The last event was the closing ceremony/party, called It's a wrap!, with - again - lots of good food, drinks and music.
All in all it was a very interesting OOW and I really enjoyed it. Hopefully I'll be back next year....

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