One of the advantages to using commercial, fully supported framework like Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is that the vendor supplies a list of supported browsers. If something doesn’t work or doesn’t look right, it’s the vendor’s problem.

When we started a recent project, we initially made sure that our ADF 11.1.x pages looked OK in Internet Explorer and Firefox. As expected, no problems. So we started building our application, and the developers used Firefox and Chrome because of the superior tooling these browsers offer for web developers.

However, as has happened in other applications, one screen mutated into the dreaded “one-screen-to-rule-them-all” page allowing a power user to see and change almost every data item in the entire system. And while Firefox and Chrome were able to render our panels inside tabs inside panels inside accordions inside panels, Internet Explorer had to give up at some point.

Lesson learned:

ADF allows the developer to write cheques that Internet Explorer can’t cash. [tweet this]

Have your developers run their pages in IE every day in order to see where you meet the limitations of Internet Explorer. It’s much easier to fix the issues during development than during QA…

Oracle recently came out with JDeveloper 11gR2 (11.1.2.x), and not everyone was impressed. See for example the discussion “Performance and stability of JDeveloper 11gR2 vs. 11gR1” in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group.

If you look up JDeveloper 11gR2 in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy document, on page 9 you will find that 11gR2 does not get the normal 5 years of premier support and 3 years of extended support. Instead, you have only 3 years of premier support, ending June 2014. In effect, Oracle does not consider JDeveloper 11gR2 a real release and will only support it as long as they support 11gR1.

Finally, if you look at the section “Bugs Fixed in 11.1.2.1.0” in “Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF 11g Release 2 (11.1.2.x) New Features”, you see a lot of bugs where the subject start with “backport”. Backporting means to take a bug fix from a newer release and apply it to an older one. So the fact that the very latest JDeveloper release comes with backports right from the start indicates that Oracle is considering 11gR2 the “old” release.

JDeveloper 11gR2 looks like a dead end in ADF development [tweet this]

Would you consider using it? Please comment below.

Even though this question has been asked and answered a million times, it still pops up on various forums regularly. It’s not that difficult:

If you end up on the right-hand side of this flowchart, you start at the JDeveloper ADF Getting Started Guide to learn ADF.

If you end up on the left-hand side of this flowchart:

1. Don’t buy a tool to automagically “convert” your Forms application to ADF or other new technologies.
2. Think about whether a modern Look and Feel for your Forms applications is what you need - see “Ten Years Younger - The Oracle Forms Makeover” by Grant Ronald
3. If you need your Oracle Forms application to participate in a modern IT architecture, read “The Future of Forms is - Forms (and some friends)” by Lucas Jellema and Grant Ronald.

See? I told it wasn’t hard.

Over the last years, the Oracle ACE Program has offered generous travel support to Oracle ACE Directors like me. This has allowed even small and poor user groups in far-off places to invite world-class speakers to their events, with Oracle covering travel and accommodation costs.

This policy has now been tightened significantly - maybe because Oracle’s net income for second quarter of their 2011 fiscal year was only 2 billion dollars.

The new rules supports a maximum of two ACE Directors per event and requires each to give at least two presentations. This means that star-studded events like the Nordic ACE Director Tour to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland we were planning this fall will be very difficult to arrange in the future. You might also see fewer ACE Directors at ODTUG, UKOUG, Collaborate and RMOUG in the future, as the ACE Programme has rescinded travel support for these events.

However, Oracle is still generous enough to fund ACE Director travel, subject to the limitations above. So if you would like me to speak at your user group event, just make sure you don’t invite more than one other ACE Director. As they say in the westerns: “This conference ain’t big enough for the three of us”

To an IT professional, it’s obvious that not every system belongs in a cloud (whether public or private). However, with all the hype surrounding Cloud Computing these days, these voices of reason tend to be drowned out.

After receiving a deafening roar of “CLOUD” from the Oracle marketing machine at OpenWorld last year, it was a pleasant surprise to hear the technology side of Oracle weigh in with some sensible opinions. If you are considering cloud computing, I’d encourage you to take a look at the whitepaper Cloud Candidate Selection Tool: Guiding Cloud Adoption, which contains some good guidance for considering if and where to use cloud computing.

Oracle is not giving away the actual spreadsheet they are talking about - for that, you’ll have to call your friendly Oracle account representative.

I just completed another great training session held by the Oracle User Experience (UX) team. I am privileged to be part of the Oracle Fusion User Experience Advocates team, so Oracle is putting a lot of effort into teaching us about Fusion UX.

One of the topics was the new Financials demo that we learned to give. So now, I can play the part of accounting manager at Vision Operations…

While the General Accounting Dashboard is nice, the really mind-blowing part of the Financials part of Fusion apps is the way it uses the ADF desktop integration features. This means that you can seamlessly download your journal into Excel on your desktop, work with the data and then upload it back into your ERP system. As I know business people, they’re gonna love this!

If you want to see what the financials part of Fusion Applications look like, feel free to send me a mail.

Oracle lists more than 200 new features in WebLogic 12c - unfortunately, I don’t get to use them.

The improvements fall in two main categories:

• Management, Performance and High Availability (HA)
• Java EE 6

As a developer, management and high availability is “somebody else’s problem” - I appreciate the work my app server admin does, but it doesn’t affect the code I write to meet business needs. I welcome performance improvements as much as the next guy - but I want them to be transparent and not force me to code for a specific performance feature of a specific app server.

I would really like to be able to utilize the new features in JEE6, but for the time being, this is restricted to “pure” Java programming. As an Oracle Fusion Middleware developer using various parts of the FMW stack, I will have to wait for my beloved Application Development Framework to be supported on WebLogic 12c. I hope the wait will be short!

As an Oracle Partner, you cannot escape the relentless push from Oracle to become “specialized” in one or more Oracle products.

If the purpose of this program had been to ensure that partners actually know what they’re talking about, I would have been all in favor. But unfortunately, the main purpose of the program seems to be to push Oracle partners to sell more Oracle software. The specialization requirements include demonstrating some knowledge (a good thing), but also selling a specific number of licenses each year (not necessarily a good thing).

A systems integrator like Scott/Tiger doesn’t sell very much software. Instead, we integrate and ensure that the customer is successful with the Oracle software he or she has. We’re just as much a part of the Oracle ecosystem as companies selling licenses - but Oracle’s “specialization” message effectively tells us to peddle some software or go away.

Oracle announced a number of cloud offerings at Oracle Openworld. However, as is often the case with OpenWorld announcements, we are still waiting for actual products to materialize.

The first cloud offering likely to appear as a real product is the Oracle Database Cloud Service. This is because Oracle has already been running this service for free at apex.oracle.com. The only difference I expect is that it will now have a monthly fee and the wording about not using it for production purposes will be removed.

The Oracle Java Cloud Service is still pending and we probably won’t see it until 2012.

For both of these cloud services, Oracle has apparently not worked out the pricing yet. This supports the hypothesis that Oracle felt they had to rush something with a “cloud” moniker to market at OpenWorld, but they don’t really know what their value proposition is yet. Oracle has a history of building great software products, but tends to attach “enterprise” (= very high) price tags to them, pricing them out of reach of 90% of the market. Since the technical cloud offerings should appeal to the wider market, it will be interesting to see if Oracle gets it right this time.

With social computing, cloud and mobile being the big buzzwords in IT right now, it makes sense to ask where Oracle is in relation to these hot topics. Having attended various briefings, sessions and keynotes at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, and discussing with knowledgeable people, I’ll offer my opinion below.

First, does Oracle get social? Well, they’re paying it lip service with Larry Ellison demonstrating social features in Fusion Applications. But they don’t really understand that users already have Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ - and adding yet another social network inside your enterprise application is unlikely to take off. Oracle has hinted that Oracle Data Service might allow you integrate information from other social networks, but that’s still vaporware. And since Oracle has both a suite of proprietary social applications and an OpenSocial product, their strategy in the social space is still unclear. Grade: D

Next, does Oracle get cloud? Not completely, but they are moving in the right direction with the cloud offerings announced an OpenWorld. However, this is still vaporware, and if the thrice-announced Fusion Applications is anything to go by, it will take a while before this offering actually materializes. All we know right now is that they are moving from the usual paid-up-front perpetual licenses to monthly licensing - but that’s still a long way from the hourly billing of a real elastic cloud service. Grade: C

Finally, does Oracle get mobile? Definitely, yes. Many demos included iPads for running enterprise applications, though it is still done using a Safari web browser. But they are working on a mobile container to be installed on your mobile device, which would allow much better integration with other apps and native widgets on your mobile device. Grade: B