OOW Report 1 - JDeveloper highlights + others

Day 2 at OOW, and the start of Oracle Develop Day 1 I had the chance to check out the following JDeveloper presentations, where frequent readers know my interests lie:

Ric Smith's "Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client: Building a next generation rich-client framework with AJAX, JSF and a side of Flash" - Definitely the "Wow-feature" in the JDev 11g ADF Faces RC components demonstrated.... besides Drag n Drop.... are "Active Data" components. An Active Data Component is one that automatically refreshes itself on data changes on the server without the user having to hit refresh.

page hosted from the You can check out a demonstration on the ADF Faces Rich Client Components Hosted DemoOracle ADF Faces Components OTN site. To check out an Active Data demo, click on the Visual Designs tab then the activeData link.

Steve Muench's "Oracle ADF: New Declarative Features for Oracle Fusion Application Development" - JDeveloper 11g has so many new features and improvements on existing technologies it's hard to know where to start. Obviously Steve was very excited about the number of opportunities the JDev team have had to listen to customers and improve the product significantly, from removing the need for much Java programming with the introduction of Groovy expressions, page templating as missing from the JSF spec, through to the inclusion of declarative LOVs, even declarative cascading LOVs, providing a LOV function set way in advance of vanilla Oracle Forms with near zero programminng. Steve stole the thunder from Duncan's next presentation, another significant feature....

Duncan Mill's "Task and Page Flow in Oracle Fusion" - in my honest opinion this is the revolutionary feature in JDev 11g ADF. Other features are natural evolutions, extensions if you will of existing features, or features that should have been there in 10.1.3. But task flows takes web programming and JDeveloper to another level. The ability to define page flows, sequences of pages with logic, and turn them into reusable components, and embed into other page flows, is a very significant advancement. I can already see the JDev 12g feature set.... the ability to do mash-ups between separate page flows installed on different servers..... very cool.

All the feature's presented by Ric, Steve and Duncan are available from the current JDev 11g Technical Preview 2 release, available from the OTN web page.

Paul Dorsey's "Stateful versus Stateless for Web Development" - not exactly a JDev session but heavily related to the whole web development game, Paul's presentation highlighted for architects the many issues and differences between the two architectures.... and many lessons that we've either forgotten since we left the client-server world, or even issues they we haven't even bothered to think of in the stateless web world. Paul definitely has a lot of strong opinions and swims against the Oracle stream, but it's always good to have people who challenge the common conventions *and* have the ability to give many detailed examples to support their view, rather than boring generalisations.

All in all a very interesting day, and I'm looking forward to OOW Oracle Developer Day 2.

Disclaimer: I'm at OOW under the invitation of Oracle and the Oracle ACE Director program. However I did buy my own breakfast.