I’m at Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores this week for a workshop on implementing Oracle’s best user experience (UX) design practices in ADF.

Yesterday, the Oracle UX team hosted a confidential (strictly no photography!) event demoing some of the new stuff they are working on. If I told you the details I’d have to kill you, but what I can say is this: The future of ERP is as a platform, not an application.

I have been building custom user interfaces for Oracle E-Business Suite for years and have been struggling with inconsistent, incomplete and only slowly evolving APIs. With Fusion Applications, that’s all different - because Because it is service oriented from the bottom up, it becomes easy to build multiple interfaces to the core Fusion Applications services.

You’ll see many ways of accessing the Fusion Application platform on various devices. Oracle will be covering desktop, laptop, and mobile with various products specialized for each platform. But  if you’re not happy with what Oracle is building, you can easily use the Fusion APIs to build your own interface. Who will be the first to implement Fusion Apps on Google Glass?

I was just watching my son play the Neverwinter MMORPG beta. The user interface looks just like other MMORPGs and he could jump right in and start playing.

That’s not because the people at Cryptic Studios lack imagination - it’s because their users already have an expectation of how an MMORPG should look. It would be stupid to risk turning people away by inventing a brand new user experience (UX). Instead, they are using a User Experience Design Pattern that their users recognize.

If smart people (whose livelihoods depend on people liking their applications) use UX design patterns, maybe you should, too? There are well-known UX design patterns for enterprise applications, too. Have a look at the Oracle Design Patterns and Guidelines for some great resources to get started.

As the title says, this is a “Cookbook” containing specific recipes for handling specific tasks. Most of the tasks are development tasks faces by a SOA developer with a few that are more relevant to a SOA administrator.

The 67 recipes cover many components and technologies used in the very large Oracle SOA Suite, including BPEL, OSB, Java in SOA, JSON, OPSS etc. Some of the recipes are fairly simple and do not really contain much information, but serve more to make you aware of features in the SOA Suite that you might not have been aware of. However, the majority are very useful and detailed (include these JAR files, remember to check this checkbox, use this code) and definitely have the potential to save you some time.

I especially appreciate the thorough chapter with recipes for Oracle Meta Data Services (MDS), which is sorely under-used in Oracle implementations. There is really no need to hardwire configuration and environment parameters into code and config files when you have MDS, and this book explains how to use it.

The recipes for using JSON with OSB are also very relevant, as SOA applications start pulling in data from outside the organization, typically in JSON format.

Just like you won’t make every dish in a regular cookbook, you won’t be using every recipe in this book. But if you are working with the Oracle SOA Suite, do check out the table of contents and see if there is anything to your taste. Even if you need just a few of the recipes, the time you save is well worth the cost of the book.

See it on Amazon.com

See it on Amazon.co.uk

See it on Amazon.de

Oracle has just announced a new Oracle Database Appliance, this time with WebLogic. So if you are looking to move to WebLogic and want a high availability environment, read on.

Like the previous editions of the Oracle Database Appliance, this is a physical 4-U rack mounted box that comes with a standard software bundle - new is that WebLogic is included. You connect power and network and run the setup wizards to install the pre-packaged database and weblogic bundles and have a high availability environment up and running in a day.

You should definitely consider this option if all of the following apply:

• You are moving to WebLogic (because you have started building ADF applications or are moving to Forms 11g)
• You want a high availability environment
• You are not very familiar with managing WebLogic (especially in a HA environment)

What does it cost, you ask? Well, it’s a standard HA environment, so it’s Enterprise Edition of both database and WebLogic. You’ll pay $60K for the hardware, $47.5K/CPU for the database EE, $10K/CPU for RAC One (or $23K for full RAC) and $25K for WebLogic EE. So, say you want to start with 4 cores of DB with RAC One & 4 cores of WebLogic, you’ll have to shell out $225K.

Interestingly, this system has pay-as-you-grow licensing - so if you want more cores, you pay up and and are good to go immediately (until you are using all the 24 cores in the machine). This is a one-way street as is usual with Oracle licenses; you can’t go back to fewer cores.

After Oracle’s Cloud announcement yesterday, I was left scratching my head wondering if anything was actually announced.

We got the same message at OpenWorld (see previous blog post) and as far as I can see, got very little new yesterday. The only thing that was actually new is that Oracle has pasted the “Cloud” moniker on some of their latest acquisitions, adding a “Social” component to their cloud.

However, we’re still missing the most important pieces of information:

• Availability date
• Pricing

On past performance, I’m afraid Oracle will build some excellent software and then attach an “enterprise” (= very high) price tag, leaving their stuff out of reach of 99% of the potential user population. The Platform Services (Java and Database) should appeal to the wider market, but only if Oracle gets the pricing right.

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.