Oracle Open World - monday

This year, I have the privilege of going to one of the biggest conferences in the world: Oracle Open World. If you look at the numbers... they're pretty huge! During this week, I'll try to keep you posted on the most interesting sessions I followed. There'll be a short summary, and my personal thoughts and views.

Why should you switch to Java 7 (David Keenan, Staffan Friberg)

Summary

The presentation was a summary of, as the title says, why you should switch to Java 7. I'll just sum them up again!

JCommands
Garbage First
Runtime compiler improvements
Sockets Direct Protocol
Performance benefits to

•    Date
•    BigDecimal
•    Crypto
•    String to byte conversion
•    concurrency API
•    Hotspot JVM
•    PermGen
•    Internal strings
•    XML API

Backwards compatibility (source, binary, behavioural)
Heap retuning

My thoughts

Not really a very innovating session, just a sum up of what's new in Java 7 and what's to come in Java 8. A good review, though, and makes you think of upgrading.

Future of development for Oracle Fusion (Chris Tonas)

Summary

Chris gave a demo using ADF Faces. It was a  typical ADF application with fancy graphs and components. Then he showed us the same app, but on an iPad. It had the same functionality, but HTML5 instead of Flash. It also had a slightly different layout and supported gestures and touch. The pagination in tables we so liked in ADF 10g has returned (in an  im:proved way), to avoid scrollbars.

He then talked about the iOS and Android SDK support in JDeveloper, and the visual preview of the app you're building. Apparantly, you build an ADF app once, and then deploy it to Android and/or iOS (and any other vendor Oracle decides to support). Pretty convenient! Further, Chris discussed offline support and gave an ADF Mobile demo. This time, it was a native iOS app, which I thought was pretty impressive.

To end the Mobile part, Thomas Quilligan presented a real-life case. He is from Accenture, an ADF Mobile Beta Program Partner. It was nice to see the Oracle ADF Mobile technology being used in a real-life project.

After that, we moved on to the Cloud part of the talk., with a strong focus on Developer Cloud Service. These are some of the out of the box services that the Developer Cloud offers:

• Source control
• Maven support
• Issue tracking
• Continuous Integration (Hudson) 
• Wiki

The demo of the Developer Cloud Service that followed, was very nice. It showed the full development lifecycle, all brought to the cloud, organized in neat dashboards.

My thoughts

This was a very nice presentation. The ADF Mobile still looks promising, and appears to be finally released soon. The cloud part really surprised me. I've been waiting for Oracle Cloud for quite a while now, but I didn't know they were going to offer something like the Developer Cloud. I really liked that. If it all integrates as well as in the demos, this will definitely be a product I'd want and like to use!

Oracle's public cloud strategy (Abhay Parasnis)

I'm writing an article about this session on Cloudspring. I'll update the link as soon as it gets published.

Classic mistakes with ADF (Frank Nimphius, Duncan Mills)

This was a nice light session about some of the most made errors with ADF. Driven by real examples and questions, Duncan and Frank guided us through. I'll add the slides as soon as they're available, since writing it all out seems a little pointless.

I'll just give a bit more details about one of the errors discussed. It's one we ran into as well, and Frank and Duncan categorized it as 'silent, but deadly' (as opposed to 'unforgiveable' and 'bear traps'). It's about using a bean that is not request scope, but that contains references to UI components. The problem here is that UI components only last as long as a request. They are therefore not serializable, and any bean with a scope higher than request, will want to serialize all it's variables.