Avrom’s Java EE and Oracle ADF Blog

As promised, I’m posting of the presentation I’d been hoping to give at the OOW Unconference Methodology Symposium last week, expanded slightly for the more forgiving medium of a blog. As it turns out, it’s expanded substantially more than I thought, so I’m going to divide it into two parts. This week, I’ll talk about the basics of the methodology, its goals, and the two techniques it relies heavily upon. Next week, I’ll talk about the actual development process it specifies.

“Extreme Reusability” (the name is not mine, but rather Chris Muir’s; however, I decided I like it) is an idea for an ADF development methodology for mid-sized teams (generally around 4-20 developers) that I’ve been recently expanding on. Continue Reading »

We had some great discussions at the Oracle ADF Methodology Unconference yesterday. We talked about adoption decisions (particularly about the whole ADF vs. APEX thing), testing methodologies, integrating ADF applications with reporting tools, and coding standards (interesting tip from Oracle’s Duncan Mills and Lynn Munsinger about this one: don’t get over-exuberant with your package structuring up front. Apps did at one point, and while it worked fine on Linux, porting it over to Windows caused it to break: the names of some of the files (which include whole package trees in them) exceeded Windows’ acceptable length limit. I believe the upshots of all the discussions are in (or will soon be in) the process of wikification.

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Ted Farrell announced this morning that there is a release date for the production version of Oracle 11g: October 1st. The realease won’t have *all* the functionality present in the previews–in particular, WebCenter and full SOA support won’t be present; there’ll be another release at some later date that includes this functionality.

Alas, the most exciting thing I’ve seen so far (even more exciting than this) is something I’m not allowed to talk about in detail. However, I don’t think anyone will get too mad at me if I say this: When SOA Suite 11g is released (I don’t know when exactly, and can’t say when even generally), if it looks anything like the current plans, it’s going to be phenomenal. It’s going to seriously mitigate the disadvantages of SOA, and make it a much more attractive option to a much wider range of development teams. I’m not saying that it will mean everyone should rush to SOA–if you’re part of a, say, two-person development team working exclusively on Java EE apps, I’m still unconvinced it will be worth it for you–but mid-size (as opposed to just huge) development teams, even those that don’t have any of the indications for SOA that I list, will be able to (indeed, well-advised to) seriously consider SOA as an architectural option.

More news as I get it.

October 5th, 2008: So, obviously, the October 1st date did not materialize, and we currently have no date for the initial (AKA “Boxer”) release of JDeveloper 11g except for “really soon.” Ah well.

October 7th, 2008: Woohoo!

If you’re going to Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) next week, I’d love to meet you. As of now, I’m going to be at 3 public (as in, I’ll be there in a capacity where I’ll be accessible, not just as an audience member) events:

• Oracle ACE Office Hours, in the OTN Lounge, Tuesday, 9/23, 4:00-5:30 PM
• ADF Methodology Workshop, Moscone West, Overlook I, Wednesday, 9/24, 9:00-10:30 AM
• ACE Unconference (focusing on SOA), Moscone West, Overlook I, Wednesday, 9/24, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM.

Over on the ADF Methodology group, in a thread called ADF Study, we recently talked about ways to get up to speed with ADF. If you’ve been following this blog at all, you’ve probably guessed (from my sheer number of links to them) that I’m a big fan of the various ADF Developer’s Guides. I want to point these guides up a bit, because they’re a massively underused resource, for beginning and even experienced ADF developers.

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