From the Blogosphere

Book Review: Succeeding with Agile

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:20:00 EST

I have been implementing and improving development processes for a while now. Either directly when I am brought in as a Software Process Engineer, or indirectly when I am brought in as a Software Architect. I have not been involved with process improvement on all my engagements. The ones I was not involved with already had a decent development process in place, or they already had an initiative underway. I have never personally lead a process improvement initiative to Scrum. I always implement a configurable process repository that allows for everything from OpenUP, to UP, to RUP. I have never had the request for Scrum nor have I tried to sell it as an option. The main reason for that is until recently I have found it to be incomplete when it came to enterprise scale. The Scaled Agile Framework has taken the initiative and filled in the gaps. The book Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise does a great job of covering the Scaled Agile Framework. I have seen Scrum attempted multiple times. Depending on the perspective they all failed and they all succeeded. Watching from the sidelines, our consult team's view was they failed miserably, but according to the internal managers that made the choice to go with Scrum they were a huge success. Depending on who was asking the development team, us or the managers, they had completely different answers.

Got REST? Build an HTML5 Mobile App

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

There are literally thousands of different REST APIs available today, and new APIs are being created and exposed daily. There are API aggregator sites such as apigee.com and programmableweb.com that collect APIs from various sites. apigee.com makes available a very nice API console where a REST service can be tested. Testing a REST service is cool but what if you wanted to build a mobile app using it? Tiggzi, the cloud-based mobile app builder comes with a REST API console and makes it super easy to connect to any REST API. Check it out: 1. Enter any REST service URL. In this example I use Cocoafish Location API. Now, this is the most awesome part. You can use any REST URL here. You can of course do get, post, delete and push.

When Was Your Last Enterprise Architecture Maturity Assessment?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST

Every company should plan regular architecture capability maturity assessments using a model. These should provide a framework that represents the key components of a productive enterprise architecture process. A model provides an evolutionary way to improve the overall process that starts out in an ad hoc state, transforms into an immature process, and then finally becomes a well-defined, disciplined, managed and mature process. The goal is to enhance the overall odds for success of the enterprise architecture by identifying weak areas and providing a defined path towards improvement. As the architecture matures, it should increase the benefits it offers the organization. Architecture maturity assessments help to determine how companies can maximise competitive advantage, identify ways of cutting costs, improve quality of services and reduce time to market. These assessments are undertaken as part of the Enterprise Architecture management.

Five Questions You Need to Ask Before You Outsource an Agile Project

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:45:00 EST

If you think that the following points are an oversimplification of a very complex subject of outsourcing agile project – you will be right and I agree with you. However, I think these questions are a good starting point for your research before you actually go ahead and outsource an agile project. You are already engaged in outsourcing and have established a good working relationship with the outsourced vendor. You have tried agile way of working internally and it has worked for you. You want to extend it to outsourced projects.

The Consumerization of IT – What It Means for the Architect

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:00:00 EST

Consumerization is described as the trend for IT to first emerge in the Consumer space and subsequently makes its way into the enterprise world. But what exactly in the consumer world, that is making the users, demand the similar things from the enterprise IT. To understand the underlying need, we need to first examine the basic requirements of the user. Kathy Sierra, co-creator of the Head First series of books and founder of javaranch.com, describes the hierarchy of needs from the user(s) perspective. The needs are stacked in the order of increasing engagement from the user. Starting with the basic needs of a defined functionality and its correctness, moving on to the learnability, efficiency & usability and finally culminating in intuitiveness and enchantment. Merely provision of correctly working functionality is not guarantee of the success of the application(s). The idea is to hook the user; the application needs to do something extra.

Why Alerts Suck and Monitoring Solutions Need to Become Smarter

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:15:00 EST

I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering :) Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of. It's therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users.

So, You Want to Outsource an Agile Project?

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

Irrespective of what the Agile Manifesto says (“Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation”) we do require a signed contract for ANY medium to large software outsourcing engagements – and that includes agile projects. Why? Because when there is a commercial arrangement between two parties for delivery of any service where a significant amount of financial transaction is involved, there needs to be a clear agreement on: What is the service that is going to be delivered and what will be the charges for those services? What happens when things go wrong? Dos and Don’ts of how the interaction will happen.

Cross-Platform Mobile Website Development – a Tool Comparison

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:15:00 EST

Gartner says, in three years, mobile application development projects will outnumber PC projects by 4-1 ratio and in four years, 50% of the people will primarily access their emails from a mobile device. So, the necessity of establishing a mobile channel for your customer is – well a no-brainer. However, should you just build a mobile website or should you also invest in building native application is not easy to decide. There can be no doubt that you need to have a website optimized for mobile devices. What is the best way to build and maintain that website is not a simple decision.

Write Once Run Anywhere or Cross Platform Mobile Development Tools

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:45:00 EST

To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive. Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this) Management perception compounds the problem. Anybody, not intimately familiar with this technical challenge, perceives that the effort of developing a mobile application should be proportional to the size of the screen. In other words, since mobile screen is much smaller than a PC or a Laptop screen, the effort required for developing application should also be proportionately less. Hence the budget for developing and maintain mobile channel becomes small!

Do People Lie More on Email?

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:22:00 EST

Yes, if you are to believe the study done by Mattitiyahu Zimbler and Robert S. Feldman of the University of Massachusetts. (See this) “…some degree of deception present in all three forms (face-to-face, instant messenger, email) of communication, it was increased in both instant messaging and e-mail, with e-mail messages the most likely to contain lies…” The author goes on to draw the conclusion that “deindividualization” effect leads to lying. When people grow psychologically and physically further from the person they are in communication with, there is a higher likelihood of lying. No, if you go by what is written in the book “59 Seconds: Think a Little – Change a Lot” by Richard Wiseman.

Immersing into JavaScript Frameworks

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:40:00 EST

During the last month my colleagues and I were immersing into the world of modern JavaScript frameworks. We didn’t start from scratch though. My business partners spent the first 5 years of this century porting PowerBuilder, a used-to-be-popular client server tool, to a JavaScript framework. That product was called XMLSP and you can still find its 5-year old version online. The word AJAX was not even invented back then. In 2006, a killer UI framework Adobe Flex 2 was released and we started using it. It was clearly better than any AJAX offering, and I was not shy in publishing blogs and articles explaining its superiority to any AJAX solution available at the time. Flex remains a great solution for developing UI for the enterprise Web applications, and our company,Farata Systems, is committed to support any client who decides to hire us for any Flex/AIR Web/Desktop/Mobile project. But the world of software and hardware is hugely different in 2012 comparing to 2006. And we are stepping into the same JavaScript river once again.

The Three Pillars of Collaboration

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:30:00 EST

Do you have a funny feeling that you seem to be doing the same work over and over in your office? Grand projects are initiated with a flurry of meetings and earth shaking intentions, but amnesia sets in as soon as everyone steps out of the conference room. Or responsibilities are handed from person to person like a baton in a relay race, with a loss in context at every step, till they end up in the lap of someone who has scarcely a clue about the original intentions. Or files sent back and forth, till they settle in an obscure corner of the business never to be found again. And you end up doing the same work over and over, burdened with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, when the exact same issues are discussed yet again in a meeting.

How to Scale Agile

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Scaling agile is not simple. The complexity increases not in proportion to the size of the team but at the square of the size of the team. That means a 20 member team project will be 4 times as complex as a 10 member team. To ensure that complexity does not turn into chaos it is inevitable that the pure agile way of working may have to be sacrificed – is it possible without violating agile manifesto? It is also inevitable that the agile practices will need to integrate into other practices of the enterprise.

Survey: Agile Projects Are More Successful

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:15:00 EST

Surveys conducted by Scott Ambler have consistently (2008, 2010 & 2011) shown that Agile and Iterative Projects have been more successful. Apart from the fact that Agile has been consistently been more successful compared to traditional approach, these survey result show two more interesting result – one of them is very surprising. 1) The gap between “Iterative + Agile” and “Traditional + Ad-hoc” has been increasing It is not clear why there is a dip in the success rate of all types of project in 2010. But, leaving that aside, the gap has been consistently been increasing (2008=7%, 2010=13% and 2011=18%). So, does it mean that people have really mastered the art of how to manage Agile and Iterative projects? Or, does it been, people who are good at project management have abandoned Traditional approach and migrated to Agile or Iterative approach?

Fifty Most Influential Management Gurus

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:00:00 EST

Every two years, The Thinkers 50 publishes a list of The 50 Most Influential Management Gurus. Harvard Business Review is the media sponsor and McGraw Hill is the video sponsor. The list contains many well-known names. I have listed some of them: * Jim Collins (Good to Great & Build to Last), * Michael Porter (Competitive Advantage), * Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All The Rules & Now, Discover Your Strengths), * Don Tapscott (Wikinomics), * Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point & Blink), * Gary Hamel (The Core Competence of the Corporation), * Seth Godin (Purple Cow), * Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence & The Pursuit of WOW!), * Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat), * Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) and * Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) However, what I find most interesting is that the list has eight people of Indian origin!

Why Rule-Based Log Correlation Is Almost a Good Idea - Part 3

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:15:00 EST

We'll see below some examples of security attack scenario that many people will put forth as a perfect example of how powerful, valuable and simple correlation is. As you can see, the overall approach of using static rule-based correlation on these is simply flawed. Attack Scenario Example 1: Identity Theft There are numerous ways to perform an Identity Theft attack, but let's focus on just one of them, recognizing that somebody cannot be in two places at the same time and hence that a user cannot log in your infrastructure from VPN and locally from the office "at the same time." Furthermore, if he connects through VPN, then disconnects and then "shortly thereafter" he reconnects locally, then it is probably Identity Theft.

Scaling Agile – Is It Possible Without Violating the Agile Manifesto?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:30:00 EST

Apart from what is explicitly stated in the manifesto, there is an unstated belief that “any” software can be developed by a small group of highly talented & motivated individual as long as they are sitting within shouting distance, have continuous access to people who can decide what the software should do and they can work the way they deem fit. This belief is elaborated through 4 value statements and 12 principles behind it. These 16 statements can broadly be classified into 5 categories of “how to” or “preferred method of” … However, when complexity increases beyond a certain point, it becomes infeasible for a small collocated team to handle it. The reason can be many. For example, you may not find enough people like Dennis Nedry (Jurassic Park) “…who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code…”

An ADF Logic Bomb

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:15:00 EST

One of my talented colleagues discovered an interesting ADF logic bomb which I thought I'd share here. The issue is with the instantiation order of ADF Faces scoped beans in JDev 11g when using Bounded Task Flows embedded as regions in another page. Regular readers would be familiar that Oracle's ADF solution is built on top of JavaServer Faces (JSF). ADF supports bean scopes such as ViewScope, PageFlowScope and BackingBeanScope on top of the regular JSF ApplicationScope, SessionScope and RequestScope beans. Readers should also be familiar that the beans have a defined life (ie. scope) as detailed in the JDev Web Guide:

Why Rule-Based Log Correlation Is Almost a Good Idea - Part 2

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

In this installment, we'll see that modeling attack scenario is doomed for failure. Attacks are not deterministic, and trying to model an attack as a series of discrete steps will just not work. By managing all your logs you get universal visibility in everything that is happening in your IT infrastructure." Yes, this is a true statement. But to tell that you can easily flag security attacks using rule-based correlation is a major overstatement. Rule-based correlation essentially automates the "If this is happening here" and "That is happening there" then "We have a problem." More precisely, "If this precise event is taking place at this particular time in this specific device" and "That precise event is taking place at that particular time in that specific device" then "We may have a problem." Of course, you can set a time window (not too wide as we'll see later) and you can specify a group of devices (not too many as we'll also see later), but in the core of the engine it will get translated to plenty of single specific rules.

Why Rule-Based Log Correlation Is Almost a Good Idea...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:15:00 EST

Rule-based log correlation is almost a good idea. It sounds like a good idea, it appears to be a good idea and many people will tell you it’s a good idea, but in fact it is not. Rule-based log correlation is very complex, limited in use and applicability, and boasts a terrible ROI. It will give you a false sense of security, and this is a bad thing. We will look at the reasons why this is a false good idea, and what are some ways to augment the use of logs to improve your security through pragmatic Risk Management.

Apache Ivy and JDeveloper Integration

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:15:00 EST

As software applications grow, a common technique to reduce the complexity is to break the overall solution into separately built and deployed modules. This allows each component to be worked on independently without being overwhelmed with detail, though the cost of reassembling and building the application is the trade off for the added flexibility. When modules become reusable across applications the reassembly and build problem is exasperated and it becomes essential to track which version of each module is required against each application. Such problems can be reduced by the introduction of dependency management tools. In the Java world there are a few well-known tools for dependency management including Apache Ivy and Apache Maven. Strictly speaking Ivy is just a dependency management tool which integrates with Apache Ant, while Maven is a set of tools of where dependency management is but just one of its specialties.

The Next Web Architecture

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:04:00 EST

I was listening to Roger McNamee’s predictions of technology investment trends and came across two new terms – Hypernet and Hyperweb. The first term is where the Internet is overlaid with smartphones. He says that smartphones are now 50% of the web devices and growing. The second term refers to the software infrastructure for the Hypernet. The current infrastructure of mostly “index search” (read Google) is not going to work for the Hypernet. We need HTML5. Here are his ten hypotheses for tech investing. These are interesting and thoughtful hypotheses and like any predictions they are unknown in terms of velocity (when would it all happen), but certainly we see several of these at play even now.

Why Testing in Production Isn’t as Stupid as It Sounds

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:45:00 EST

One of my colleagues this week was consolidating the results from our recent Application Performance Management survey, and one interesting finding was that 40% of customers have at least one release cycle a month. Out of those respondents, one third experience a Severity-1 incident each month as well. That’s a pretty compelling pair of statistics, and they might explain the continued frustration and conflict between development and operations teams. It’s also perhaps the reason why this DevOps underground movement can no longer be ignored (even by Gartner). There is no doubt development organizations have become agile, but does deploying this frequent change make the business more or less agile? For example, if one in three releases creates a Severity-1 incident, then surely agile development becomes a risk to the business. We’re at the point where Operations either has to start managing change better or simply restrict the amount of change that can occur.

Is Write Once Run Anywhere Ever Going to Be a Reality?

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:00:00 EST

The interest in mobile applications started towards the end of last millennium! Since then, as the saying goes, lot of water has flown under the bridge. The technology scenario has changed beyond recognition. None of the platforms which are popular today was in existence when we started our mobile journey. In fact, if you look back, you will find that every three years there is a churn in among the popular platforms. One of the top 3 popular mobile platforms will lose out to an upstart and a new leader also emerges. Three Year Technology Churn Cycle Three years back we were still talking about 5 platforms (iPhone, RIM, Symbian, Windows and JME) apart from mobile web. Though iPhones had started becoming popular, features phones accounted for majority of the market. In the enterprise Blackberry (RIM) still ruled. Outside the US, Symbian based Nokia devices were by far the most popular devices. Android was still in the realm of emerging technologies with interesting possibilities but no market share. HTML5 was something that was expected to happen somewhere in the distant future. iPad simply did not exist!

Truly Rapid (Mobile Apps) Prototyping with StackMob and Tiggr

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:21:00 EST

The blog post is written by Crawford Comeaux an independent mobile app developer that recently participated in Startup Weekend down in Baton Rouge, LA and ended up winning. This post is about how he used StackMob and Tiggr to quickly build a web app prototype during the Startup Weekend event. His app is called AudienceAmp and he needs your help to win Global Startup Battle. Please vote here if you like his idea. Here is his story. I love Startup Weekends! They provide me a chance to easily find like-minded people looking to make their ideas a reality and they’re nothing but fun. Grueling, exciting, stressful fun. On any given weekend, there’s likely at least one going on somewhere in the world. I’ve been to four of them, successfully pitched one of two ideas at each and my teams have placed three times. These things are like crack for wannabe entrepreneurs with ADHD…or at least for THIS wannabe entrepreneur with ADHD! If you are not familiar with the program, you can find out more here.

Technology Predictions...for 2020

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:00:00 EST

This time of year everyone starts making technology predictions. So rather than making my own predictions for 2012 I thought it would be more fun to predict what 2020 could look like. Don’t worry even the Mayan’s don’t believe in the “End of the World” 2012 prophecy so I am fairly confident humans will still [...]

An Obscure JDeveloper Bug

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:00:00 EST

There’s a rather obscure JDeveloper bug that only effects IE7, for af:columns in af:tables that show af:outputText fields based on dates that are null (phew, try and say that with a mouth full of wheaties). It occurs in 11.1.1.4.0 and 11.1.2.0.0 (and all versions in between it’s assumed). In the previous picture from IE7 if you look closely, you’ll notice that the HireDate2 column has lost its border for the null entries. Note the other columns even when they are null, still have a border. If we look under IE8 (or any other browser for that matter) we see the problem doesn’t occur at all:

RichFaces 4.1 M3 – New Components, Mobile Support, and Better Performance

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:56:00 EDT

The RichFaces team has been doing an amazing job on RichFaces 4.1 and today released Milestone 3. Many components in 4.1 have been optimized for mobile. You can see the Milestone 3 components showcase deployed to OpenShift – Red Hat’s PaaS. It uses device detection and will show the mobile optimized version if you access from a mobile device. Staying on mobile topic, if you want to build HTML5 and native mobile apps using cloud services, try Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder. With mobile support, resource handling has been improved. The goal is to reduce the number of requests as well as reduce the size of JavaScript, and CSS sent to the browser. Performance improvements will not limited to mobile, but will also give a standard Web app a boost in performance.

Not Everyone Is an Application Expert

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:15:00 EDT

The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VP of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special”. What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. Thats fine, but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money, if this happens IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.

Application Monitoring with JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:54:00 EDT

What happens when mission critical Java applications slow down or keep crashing in production? The vast majority of IT Operations (Ops) today bury their heads in log files. Why? because thats what they’ve been doing since IBM invented the mainframe. Diving into the weeds feels good, everyone feels productive looking at log entries, hoping that one will eventually explain the unexplainable. IT Ops may also look at system and network metrics which tell them how server resource and network bandwidth is being consumed. Again, looking at lots of metrics feels good but what is causing those server and network metrics to change in the first place? Answer: the application. IT Ops monitor the infrastructure that applications run on, but they lack visibility of how applications actually work and utilize the infrastructure. To get this visibility, Ops must monitor the application run-time. A quick way to get started is to use the free tools that come with the application run-time. In the case of Java applications, both JConsole and VisualVM ship with the standard SDK and have proved popular choices for monitoring Java applications. When we built AppDynamics Lite we felt their was a void of free application monitoring solutions for IT Ops, the market had plenty of tools aimed at developers but many were just too verbose and intrusive for IT Ops to use in production. If we take a look at how JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite compare, we’ll see just how different free application monitoring solutions can be.

The Magic Sauce for Multi-Browser-Tab Support in JDeveloper ADF Apps

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EDT

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.

ADF Takeaways from Oracle Open World 2011

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:57:00 EDT

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.

The True Costs When IT Is Silo, Not Application Centric

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

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.

HTML5 Local Storage – Building a Sample App in Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:38:00 EDT

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.

Application Performance Management On-Demand

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:22:00 EDT

I thought it would be good to start blogging about my experiences with customers just so you get an idea of how important Application Performance Management (APM) has become. A few weeks back I met with a customer who had issues, the expression on their face said it all. It started with an apology that several people couldn’t make our meeting, why? because they were investigating a production outage. You might think I’ve just made that up, I can assure you this was real and a frequent event which I’ve witnessed many a time. It can be especially annoying when you’ve travelled many miles to chat with a customer expecting to have a productive meeting and then the alarm bells ring. However, an outage in this scenario just validates the reason why you’re there in the first place.

Retrieving Managed Beans Programmatically

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:30:00 EDT

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).

Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder Upgrades

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:21:00 EDT

Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder upgrades with brand-new UI and very cool new features. Brand-new attractive UI Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder got a new and very attractive UI. You can see how it looks below but the best way to experience it, is to log in or sign up. You will like it. Upgraded export-and-build capability with support for Android, iOS, and mobile Web That’s big one. From the screen shot you can see that it’s now super easy to get the source code and build for Android and get the source code for iOS.

Practical Email Optimization and Archiving Strategies

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 12:34:00 EDT

Given the popularity of email and diverse ways that it is used for managing various forms of unstructured data attachments including photos, video, audio, spreadsheets, presentations and other document objects, there are corresponding back end challenges. Those back end challenges including managing the data storage repositories (e.g., file systems and storage systems) that are used for preserving and serving email documents along with enabling regulatory or compliance mandates. Email archiving is an important enabler for regulatory compliance and e-discovery functions. However there is another important use for E-mail archiving which as a data footprint reduction (DFR) technique and technology enables storage optimization, being green and supporting growth while stretching budgets further. There is after all no such thing as a data or information recession and all one has to do to verify the trend is to look at your own email activity.

The Axe Soup, Cake Mixes, and Frameworks

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:30:00 EDT

I always get excited when I see another person questioning the use of frameworks that ask you to either replace one language with another or write additional code as a life support to sustain the framework’s functioning. This time my kudos to Christin Gorman, who did a great job explaining why using the Hibernate framework over SQL is a bad choice. Watch this video , where Christin uses the Cake Mix metaphor to deliver her message loud and clear. In the past I was using a different metaphors. One was about the goat and rabbi. The other one is about the Axe Soup a.k.a. Stone Soup. I remember this story about a soldier returning back from war. He was very hungry, and, when reached some village, he asked a women living there to give him some food. She rejected. Then he asked for a pot of water so he could cook a soup form his axe. She became curious and agreed. After placing the axe in a boiling water he asked if she had just one small potato to add some flavor to the Axe Soup. She gave the potato. Than he asked the woman about a small onion, and on and on and on. When the soup was ready, he removed the axe from the pot and fed himself with a tasteful soup.

Data Management, Circa 2011

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:30:00 EDT

The world of Data Management has never been this vibrant as now. Only five years back, if you were to start a new database product company, the VC’s would have thought you to be real crazy. Why start something in an established market with 3 leaders – Oracle, IBM (DB2), and Microsoft (SQL Server)? Then we started to notice “specialized” appliance products such as Netezza (now IBM) and Greenplum (now EMC) crop up, to focus on large scale data analytics. This trend was soon followed by Oracle (Exadata) and now HP (Vertica). But what I am talking about is a list of new companies backed by well-known VC’s addressing the Data Management problems of the Internet era. We can roughly divide the data world into two – operational data management and analytic data management