Within JDev 11g+ experienced ADF programmers will be familiar with PageFlowScope beans used by tasks flows, in particular Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) where they provide the equivalent of session scope for variables for the life of the BTF for a specific user session. Indeed the Oracle documentation says the following about PageFlowScope beans: Choose this scope if you want the managed bean to be accessible across the activities within a task flow. A managed bean that has a pageFlow scope shares state with pages from the task flow that access it. A managed bean that has a pageFlow scope exists for the life span of the task flow. Given we know BTFs have a distinct beginning and end for each user session, a "life span" as such, and conversely Unbounded Task Flows (UTFs) live for the life of the application which is nearly forever, it would appear that PageFlowScope beans only apply to BTFs. However PageFlowScope beans provide some magic sauce with UTFs that shouldn't be ignored. Before we can have a look at this magic sauce we need to cover some background on modern browsers.
With the huge amount of sessions at Oracle Open World, it’s often hard to find the little gems of information amongst all the marketing. This is true of ADF like all other technologies at the conference, there’s simply a lot of information to digest and filter. Luckily Oracle publishes the presentations PPTs afterwards and it’s possible to find a jewel or two in all the content with some careful searching.
For the ADF developers among us, this blog post attempts to summarize some of the main ADF takeaways from Oracle Open World 2011. Please remember this is my summary, not Oracle’s (I am not an Oracle employee), and Oracle publishes all of this content under the Safe Harbor statement which means they cannot be held to anything they published.
All the links in this post are not guaranteed to be up forever as Oracle may remove them in the near future. I suggest if you're interested in reading the presentations download them now.
Finally I apologize for some of the clunky grammer and phrases in this post, I wrote it on the plane back to Australia with the usual jetlag that fogs the brain.
ADF Mobile
Of the large announcements at Oracle Open World 2011, the soon-to-be-released (2012) Mobile edition of ADF was the most significant in the ADF space. Some key points of the new platform is it supports both iOS and Android, runs on device with a mini JVM, and uses PhoneGap to allow the native app to access the device’s native facilities.
For me the most telling part was the architecture diagram from the Develop Mobile Apps for iOS, Android, and More: Converging Web and Native Applications presentation by Oracle Corporation’s Joe Huang, Denis Tyrell, and Srini India:
Data Visualization Controls
Dana Singleterry and Jairam Ramanathan from Oracle included screenshots of upcoming DVT components in their Building Visually Appealing Web 2.0 Data DashBoards. First we see a new Network Diagrammer:
As can be seen the component demonstrates the relationship between disparate nodes. This is incredibly useful for visualizing relationships in data. Another screenshot showing a different data relationship structure:
In terms of graphs Oracle is looking at a Treemap graph:
…and a Sunburst graph:
...both useful for showing hierarchical data visually. Of all the DVT controls the Timeline graph excites me most, something I’ve asked for in the past:
However I must clearly stress to readers these DVT controls are not in the current 11.1.2.1.0 release, and under Oracle’s safe harbor statement is not guarantying they will ever see be released (but fingers crossed anyway huh?).
Maven integration
As the ADF EMG moderator I’m involved in a lot of discussions in the community about the IDE and the framework. One hot topic is JDeveloper’s Maven support. 11.1.2.0.0 introduced the first cut of Maven support for the IDE, as discussed by Oracle’s Susan Duncan’s Team Productivity with Maven, Hudson and Team Productivity Center. This first slide shows the current Maven support:
Of more interest is the planned Maven features for 12c, which not only tells me Oracle is committed to Maven support, but also there are definitely limitations in the current implementation:
Most importantly here for me is the first 2 bullet points, which means I wont recommend to customers working with Maven until Oracle makes these available. Don’t get me wrong though, a couple years back there was no Maven support and it’s great Oracle is working to fill that gap completely.
What can Fusion Applications teach us about ADF?
Unlike OOW10, this year at Oracle Open World there was considerable more Fusion Applications demonstrations and presentations. This has been a boon as previously we’ve seen a lot of demos of dashboard-like-screens that while pretty don’t show us where the real work occurs for users. Fatema Madraswala from PwC and Rob Watson from Oracle included screenshots of the Fusion Applications Talent Management system (The very first Fusion go-live case study:
It’s curious to me that while Oracle has put a lot of effort into communicating the User Experience design effort put into Fusion Applications, then we see a screen that looks Oracle-Forms like, especially with it’s tabbed interface. In turn the worksheet at the bottom looks cluttered with buttons and fields. Yet with respect designing user interfaces for complex business systems is surely not easy.
I recommend ADF developers to search out as many Fusion Applications screenshots as possible as it reveals an insight into how to build the UI and what is and isn’t possible.
What about E-Business Suite?
EBS customers might feel the whole ADF/SOA bandwagon is passing them bye, what with the focus on Fusion Applications. Yet this year saw presentations tailor fitted to cover integrations points with EBS. I must admit I can’t really comment on the quality of the solutions as I have no direct experience with EBS, so I’ll leave experienced readers to make their own assessment. Check out the presentation entitled Extending Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite from Oracle’s Veshaal Singh, Mark Nelson and Tanya Williams.
MetaData Services
As extension to the Fusion Applications demos, I’m detecting more down-and-dirty technical presentations on MedaData Services (MDS) where the framework can support personalizations and customizations. Gangadhar Konduri and a fellow Oracle colleague discussed the theory and demonstrated customizing a Fusion Applications module, with a focus to what technical people need to know. I must admit in the past I’ve been a little skeptical of MDS et all, not for it’s implementation but just the lack of information around on how to maintain and work with it from a developer/administrator point of view. However I’ll need to step back and reassess that opinion. You can read more in Gangadhar’s Managing Customizations and Personalization in Oracle ADF MetaData Services.
For ADF Experts
For the ADF experts who feel many of the presentations aren’t aimed at them, it’s well worth catching one of Steven Davelaar’s presentation. Steven who is the JHeadstart Product Manager at Oracle extends and pushes the ADF framework to its limits. His presentations often include large amounts of code where I discover new properties and techniques way beyond my current level of expertise. This year Steven presented Building Highly Reusable ADF Task Flows and Empowering Multitasking with an Oracle ADF UI Powerhouse for the ADF EMG (great title Steven ;-).
ADF Tuning
From my own perspective one of the most important presentations I attended was Oracle’s Duncan Mill’s ADF – Real World Performance Tuning presentation. As I now have several clients with production level ADF applications, my focus has moved away from the basics of creating ADF applications to architecture and performance. Duncan’s presentation aggregated a wide range of tuning hints into an easily digestible guide, highly valuable.
FMW Roadmaps
In a separate presentation entitled Certified Configurations of Oracle ExaLogic, Oracle Fusion Middleware, BI and Oracle Fusion Apps by Pavana Jain and Deborah Thompson from Oracle Corp, the future roadmap for FMW releases was revealed. Readers are reminded the safe harbor statement means Oracle doesn’t have to stick to what they present, so take the slides as guidelines only.
The first slide shows the approximate dates of each version:
The second slide reveals which 11g FMW products will be included in each release:
Some readers might find it curious why the 11g 11.1.1.X.0 series continues to at least 11.1.1.7.0 while there is already an 11.1.2.0.0 release of JDev. My understanding this is occurring because Fusion Apps will continue on the 11.1.1.X.0 series for some time yet thus extending the life of that branch.
Finally the third slide the same for the 12c FMW products:
Oh and the ADF EMG had a great event too
The ADF EMG also had a "super" Super User Group Sunday, but people are probably a little sick of me talking about it, so I'll just push you to a link instead.
HP is going to decide whether it will spin off its giant PC unit by the end of the month according to what CEO Meg Whitman told a women’s leadership conference on Tuesday. “It’s a decision I want to make much faster than my predecessor,” Bloomberg reported her saying. “I want to make it before the end of October.” Her predecessor Léo Apotheker had given HP till the end of the calendar year, an untenable pain point for the company. Whitman is also hoping to meet the analysts’ reduced expectations at the end of the month, which is the end of its fiscal year. Consensus calls for $1.13 on $32.1 billion.
In the fashion of the times Adobe is building a cloud and in the fashion of Adobe it’s called the Creative Cloud. Adobe calls it a major “transformative” new initiative. It’s meant to sell classic Adobe desktop and newfangled tablet applications. Adobe’s got a half-dozen cross-platform Touch Apps for content creation on tablets, Android to start in mid-November, Apple next year despite Apple’s rejection of Adobe’s Flash widgetry. In response to Apple’s distain Adobe seems to be moving increasingly to the more acceptable HTML 5. For instance, it’s buying Vancouver-based Nitobi Software, which makes PhoneGap, an open source platform for building cross-platform HTML5- and JavaScript-based mobile apps and donating its code to the Apache Software Foundation.
IBM is buying privately held security ISV Q1 Labs, whose software is used to detect hacking threats and attacks through real-time data analysis. Terms were not disclosed. Q1 Labs, which competes with HP’s ArcSight acquisition and EMC’s RSA unit, will become part of a new IBM Security Systems Division to be run by Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan and combine 10 other security acquisitions IBM’s made in the last few years.
With the onslaught of mobile devices and platforms from multiple vendors, the current technology underpinnings of mobility solutions are in a state of flux. With the hype surrounding the hardware and software offerings across the mobility solutions, it is a challenge for enterprises to differentiate between the offerings and also to plan for enterprise mobility strategies. Across the solutions, however, there are four distinct patterns that have emerged, which are fundamental to the underlying architecture of various mobility solutions. Each of these patterns solves a broad usecase and has their own advantages and disadvantages. Understanding these patterns provides enterprises a clear view of evaluating multiple solution offerings, compare the pros and cons and also determine a mix of technologies that they can adopt for strategic mobile offerings.
Seems we will probably be deprived of the spectacle of Oracle going after Google and Google doing a lot of whimpering because it looks like the Oracle v Google trial over Google’s use of Java, which is set to start on Halloween, will probably be postponed to give precedence to a big unrelated criminal trial. The FOSS Patents blog says that the trial judge, William Alsup, is making postponement noises. It says he “just put in a new ‘notice re pretrial conference,’ which says that the Oracle-Google trial ‘will likely be postponed’ and that the Halloween trial date ‘will not yet be vacated’ though it ‘now seems unlikely’ to work out.”
The Jelastic platform as a service enables any Java application to run in the cloud. Hivext Technologies has announced free beta availability of Jelastic, which runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes. Java applications can be uploaded in minutes without changes to code or programming language and with no need to write for specific APIs (application programming interfaces). Application developers can choose which stack components they want and need, and their application will run and can scale easily on the Jelastic platform. In addition, the company announced its first hosting partners – ServInt, in the U.S., and Host Europe, for Europe – that will offer Jelastic to Java developers. “Application developers can leverage existing Java skills on the Jelastic platform, which is the world’s first cloud platform to host and auto-scale any Java application," said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Hivext Technologies. “Our mission is very simple: we make it easy to run Java code from the cloud, without locking customers into a single vendor.” Jelastic supports any JVM-based application including pure Java 6 or 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy. During the beta program, SQL databases supported are MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Non-SQL database support is provided for MongoDB and CouchDB. Supported application servers include Tomcat 6 and 7, GlassFish and Jetty. Jelastic provides load balancing and caching though integrated nginx, and developer tools integration via Maven and Ant plug-ins.
Salesforce CEO and sometime drama queen Marc Benioff claimed on Twitter Tuesday night that Oracle had canceled his keynote speech entitled “Welcome to the Social Enterprise” scheduled for 10:15 the following morning at Oracle OpenWorld. He said he was moving it to a restaurant in the St Regis because “The show must go on! Sorry Larry!” Oracle said the speech wasn’t canceled just moved to Thursday morning at 8am due to “overwhelming attendance” at the conference. Oracle, however, is hosting a concert Wednesday night featuring Sting and Tom Petty so only party poopers are expected to be up and out early Thursday morning, making rescheduling tantamount to a cancellation.
This is a great place to start learning Java. I think the book is good for beginners to start learning Java, as well as great reference for those experienced with Java. The book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs. It uses javac and java commands to compile and run. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. Both worked fine, but I also have an interest in learning to use IntelliJ IDEA. The book covers the Java language, the Java Library, Software Development with Java Beans, Swing, Servlets, and ends with building 2 sample applications.
Apple and Samsung could have a decision on whether Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be temporarily banned in Australia next week pending trial for patent infringement. As part of the drama the Wall Street Journal said the court heard evidence from Apple’s then-chief patent counsel Richard Lutton that Steve Jobs tried to head off hostilities last year because Samsung was such a large supplier to Apple. Obviously since their litigation has gone global his phone call was futile. Some weeks ago Samsung informally agreed to withhold the challenged tablet from the Australian market until the court rules. It countersued in Oz on September 17 charging the iPhone and iPad with infringing seven of its patents.
Samsung has offered Apple some kind of deal so it can put its Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the Australian market next week, or so a federal court in Sydney was told Friday, according to reports by both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Apple has been seeking a temporary injunction from the court to block the device from being sold. It accuses the Galaxy Tab of being a dead ringer for its own iPad in an infringement of its patents, the same thing it’s told courts on three other continents. Terms of the proposed armistice were not disclosed and Apple’s lawyer Steven Burley said the company would need time to consider it. Perhaps he was just being polite since he has claimed the Galaxy would launch with the “velocity of a fire hose” – impacting iPhone and AppStore sales as well as the iPad because buyers would become “Android people.” However, he did reportedly say that Samsung’s “inconvenience would be diminished and we would be comforted” through the secret proposal.
Last week Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call with analysts that Autonomy was shopped to Oracle before HP bought it and that he was appalled at the price asked. He also said he didn’t need Autonomy because unstructured data can already be added to Oracle’s database, a better solution than a standalone unstructured product. What Larry said about Autonomy being shopped around jibed with what the rumor mill had been saying but then Autonomy chief Mike Lynch told the Wall Street Journal it wasn’t true that Autonomy was shopped to Oracle– (and that Larry’s grasp of the way unstructured data should be handled was dodgy) – although he conceded that some investment banker might have thrown out Autonomy’s name as a possible buyout candidate for Oracle. He also said that Oracle builds products using Autonomy technology.
China’s Lenovo and Taiwan ODM Compal Electronics are going to form a joint venture that Lenovo, which hopes to dislodge Dell as the world’s second-largest PC vendor this year, expects will expand its PC production capacity. They’re going to open a new manufacturing center in Hefei, a town in eastern China. The pact, the first joint venture between a PC brand and a contract manufacturer, calls for the pair to invest $100 million to start, followed by an additional $200 million in the next 18 months depending on business conditions and capacity expansion.
Comparing itself to kryptonite, Violin Memory thinks it’s got the stuff in hand to put an end to classic mechanical storage arrays in the data center. The disk arrays would be replaced by Violin’s built-from-the-ground-up 6000 Series NAND flash Memory Arrays, which it calls the industry’s first all-silicon storage systems. They’re supposed to have the reliability, performance and economics to be deployed as mission-critical primary storage. The 6000’s “Rack in a Box” skills extend to virtualization, private and public clouds, and Big Data initiatives. The company says its approach to flash aggregation created a completely hot swappable platform that accelerates all business-critical applications, allowing them to be virtualized and deployed in private clouds.
HTML5′s local storage is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and most talked about features in the HTML5 technology stack. Local storage is part of Web Storage specification and is supported by all modern browsers (destkop and mobile). Although local storage (or Web Storage) sounds rather sophisticated, the functionality is very easy to use. You basically get a map as storage inside the browser (available to all browser windows). You can insert, delete or read key/value pairs. That’s it. Data stored in local storage (localStorage) will be there when you close and open the browser. There is also session storage (sessionStorage). As the name implies, it will be only available as long as the browser window is open, and will be cleared when browser window is closed. The only other thing to know is that data saved by a page is only available for a pages from the same domain. In other words, a page loaded from abc.com, doesn’t have access to data saved by page from domain xyz.com.
The development of IT environments have naturally led to complexity. Put it down to the very nature of capitalism. Different vendors working together to achieve a common goal isn’t a common occurrence. Each vendor has over the years developed its own monitoring and reporting systems. This is all well and good for each specific application or system. It doesn’t work effectively when applications are executing across an IT enterprise comprised of everything from mainframe to cloud. Many of these cost are so ingrained into the IT system they aren’t perceived for the real impact they actually make on the business’ bottom line. For example, how much does it cost to maintain the service desk? If customers are submitting more help tickets than IT is catching ahead of time, then the business is losing money through the service desk.
Terracotta, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Software AG, is out with a new release of BigMemory, the widgetry that bypasses Java garbage collection to enable caches over 1 terabyte. With commodity terabyte servers now coming out of Dell, HP, Oracle and IBM, the upgrade promises to let a Java application gorge on tens of terabytes of in-memory data at microsecond speed. The refreshed widgetry has added Automatic Resource Control (ARC), which dynamically allocates memory resources across multiple data caches and does automatic load balancing. Terracotta claims ARC “changes the game for in-memory data management” by giving users control over their memory resources and relieving them of the cost of trial-and-error iterative tuning. It’s supposed to do memory-based cache sizing at individual cache as well as grouped CacheManager levels.
This book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Let’s first set the context of my normal skillset. I am a .NET Software Architect and Developer. I have been 100% in the .NET world since 2001 (with a very little sprinkling of VB6). I recently decided to expand my skillset into the Java and iOS world. This is the first book on my long journey into the world of Java. I think this book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Although the book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs, that does not take away from the book's learning quality. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. The book covers the core language in-depth, has a short chapter on Swing, briefly introduces applets, but does not touch on Servlets. The book covers Data Types and Operators, Control Statements, Classes, Objects, Methods, Packages, Interfaces, Exception Handling, Inheritance, I/O, Multithreading, Enumerations, Autoboxing, Static Import, Annotations, Generics, Applets, Events, introduces Swing, and using Java's Documentation Comments.
Let’s first set the context of my normal skillset. I am a .NET Software Architect and Developer. I have been 100% in the .NET world since 2001 (with a very little sprinkling of VB6). I recently decided to expand my skillset into the Java and iOS world. This is the first book on my long journey into the world of Java. I think this book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Although the book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs, that does not take away from the book's learning quality. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. The book covers the core language in-depth, has a short chapter on Swing, briefly introduces applets, but does not touch on Servlets.
After two days of apparently futile settlement talks, Oracle and Google have been ordered to give up their Saturday and on October 1 take one more stab at resolving Oracle’s claims that Google’s Android operating system treads on Oracle’s Java patents. Meanwhile, Oracle has been told to review its patents claims by September 29. The judge is hoping against hope it’ll abandon some of its 21 claims (seven patents, three claims per patent) simply to make the case more manageable. Therefore, it’s still not clear whether the trial, set to start October 31, will actually come off or be stayed in whole or in part pending re-examination of Oracle’s patents by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Patent blogger Florian Mueller thinks Oracle will accept a stay rather than abandon too many of its claims since, as the judge has decreed, it would have to give up whatever it abandons for all time against Google. And a stay could run a year or two.
SAP said Tuesday that it’s buying Crossgate, a Munich-based hosted B2B integration house that makes it possible for companies to integrate and network with trading partners, clients and suppliers and do electronic data exchanges with any business partner regardless of its technical skills. Terms were not disclosed. Apparently Crossgate has helped 40,000 business partners in various industries exchange documents and data. Its service eliminates costly point-to-point integration. It’s also got e-invoicing services covering the entire process of inbound and outbound invoices, including signatures and compliance monitoring, which integrate with customers’ back-end systems and finance processes.
A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly though, I was reminded of something that is probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time soon. Based on this, and some of the other things I heard at the show, I decided to catch up with fellow IBMer Marc Haberkorn. Marc is an IBM Product Manager and is responsible for IBM Workload Deployer amongst other things. I asked him about IBM Workload Deployer, the competition, and cloud in general.
From time to time in JSF and ADF Faces RC applications there’s the need from one managed bean to retrieve another, typically from a lesser scoped bean to a greater, such as a requestScope bean retrieving a sessionScope bean to access its methods. There’s essentially 3 avenues to solving this problem. With these 3 approaches in mind it’s interesting to gather some statistics on how long it takes each method to retrieve each type of bean. The following chart shows 5 consecutive runs of each method, per bean type, where each method is repeated in a loop 10000 times (so we can see the statistical differences).
Oracle narrowly vaulted Wall Street’s expectations Tuesday when it reported its first fiscal quarter. Its results encouraged people to think budgets aren’t in lockdown mode. Revenues were up 12% to $8.37 billion returning a non-GAAP EPS of 48 cents a share, up 14%, against estimates of 46 cents on $8.35 billion. On a GAAP basis EPS was 36 cents, up 36%, for a total net of $1.84 billion. Although there were no large deals, new software license revenues, a key metric, were up 17% to $1.5 billion. Analysts had predicted a 15% rise. The company’s all-important software license updates and product support revenues were also up 17% to $4 billion. Oracle co-president Safra Catz claimed “company-specific momentum.” Despite the turmoil over there, European sales were up 60% in the quarter, an important number because Oracle gets 30% of its revenue from Europe. However, hardware sales slouched 5% to $1 billion. Oracle still has faith though; it said it hired 350 salespeople in the quarter. In a statement co-president Mark Hurd said, “Our high-end server business – Exadata, Exalogic and Sparc M-Series – delivered solid double-digit revenue growth in Q1. In contrast, revenue declined in our low-end server business. By moving away from low-margin commodity hardware and focusing on high-end servers, we increased our hardware gross margins from 48% to 54%. Our strategy to grow the profitable parts of our hardware business is paying off.” That means selling widgetry that’s based solely on Oracle IP and that won’t happen until fiscal year 2013, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, when hardware should start showing top-line growth. Meantime, he said, he doesn’t care if “our commodity x86 business goes to zero.” Oracle’s not making any money selling other people’s IP. He did not address Sun’s server losses to competitors. In a step towards Ellison’s nirvana Oracle next week is supposed to announce a new high-performance Sparc microprocessor and a new high-end, Solaris 11-run, fault-tolerant server called a Sparc SuperCluster. Ellison said the new Sparc T4 chip is up to five times faster than the T3 part it replaces, and the new all-Oracle SuperCluster, engineered to use the T4 along with Exadata’s flash and disk storage system, is supposed to be cheaper and faster than anything IBM’s got. It’ll apparently do data analysis in-memory. Evidently Oracle is about to put out three other purely Oracle “engineered systems” at OpenWorld in a couple of weeks. The issue of unstructured data came up during the conference call, which gave Larry the chance to take out his switch blade and go for HP. He said Autonomy, the unstructured data company HP is buying, was shopped to Oracle and he was “shocked” by HP’s “absurdly high” bid of $10.25 billion for the British software company. He then explained that the Oracle Database hadn’t been simply an RDBMS for 20 years and had absorbed object database methodology when it came along, then text search and XML, and now it’s supposed to integrate unstructured data too and process it as well as Autonomy. For its next trick the database will interface with anybody’s Hadoop appliance and process the Big Data that Hadoop feeds it. After starting the widgetry six years ago Oracle is supposed to go GA with its Fusion apps by Christmas. Evidently Fusion already has 200 customers. Oracle is also going to start pushing CRM cloud apps (SaaS stuff like Salesforce) this quarter. Oracle shares were tickled 3% after-hours after falling 2.3% during the day. It closed at $28.35. Nothing was said during the conference call about the court-ordered negotiations Ellison had Monday and Tuesday with Google CEO Larry Page to resolve Oracle’s Java infringement suit. Oracle guided to non-GAAP revenues up 4%-8% to $9 billion-$9.34 billion this quarter on new software license revenue up 6%-16% and hardware flat to down 5%. Non-GAAP profits should be 56 cents-58 cents a share. The Street figured revenues at $9.36 billion.