HJust back, well back last week, from the UKOUG conference.
A quick summary of the cool stuff has to include BPEL at the top of the list, check that out, for orchestrating and choreographing web services. It works like a dream with Axis. Runtimes available for OC4J and JBOSS and another container which I forget right now.
More importantly is the tool though, and the eclipse visual BPEL plugin is a major cool thing, its pretty and it works. check it out.
On that note the Jdeveloper10, and I'm not a Jdeveloper fan I prefer to stick with Eclipse, is looking pretty smart with support for struts pageflow diagrams (diagramming struts-config.xml, how much use would that have been 18 months ago) some really useful looking web-services-security wizards, not available yet but we got a sneak preview and they look like they'd help anyone get to grips with WSS in quick time, and model driven development with synchronised round trip through several diagram stages to code and back again.
I'm not going to go overboard with praise here, but there is some serious *potential* for this to become a top class RAD tool for J2EE, if Oracle don't cut any corners in their support for open standards and synchronised code<->diagram.
We also saw ADF, which I'm a bit more suspect about, I don't believe that Struts is a good choice for RAD, and I speak from experience, particularly because it is not possible to get much encapsulation, reuse and component architecture. Also Oracle tie you in to an Oracle BaseAction reducing the portability of the developed apps. I'd've been happier if we could have seen Tapestry (ok probably not realistic) or even seen the JSF support, which was talked about but not demoed, least not that I saw.
OTOH ADF, BPEL and Jdeveloper together look like a fine path for Oracle to allow people with proprietery skills to make an easy transition to developing oracle apps using J2EE.
Over all it was nice to see that they are embracing open standards, even if they still have a load of work to do to satisfy a grumpy old purist like me..!
Look out for me at the next one ...
Is Verisign a monopoly? Does it matter?
-
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler recently wrote a latter
complaining that VeriSign overcharges for for .com domains due to its
market power...
4 weeks ago
