Oracle Developer Tools and ThoughtsEnterprise IT Tools and Thoughts, dealing mainly with Oracle Developer tools (Forms, Reports, APEX)

There were very good news yesterday at the APEX presentation made by Oracle and the team behind sie-solutions (website). The most interesting features that will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release were discussed in the morning sessions.

In the afternoon, there were 6 speed training sessions related to the following features:

• Graphic look for an APEX application
• Preparing an APEX application for smartphones
• JQuery in APEX
• Plugins
• Dynamic actions
• How to break down a database using poor programming habits within APEX

For Oracle Forms developers, the most interesting feature is what is called dynamic action, another term for trigger. I already raised that issue in this post a while back. In essence, I was concerned that in order to mimic a trigger behavior in APEX, you had to resort to javascript which a number of people are not comfortable with. Now, with the wizard in the 4.0 release, you should be able to implement some very interesting features in APEX.

As far as plugins are concerned, it is the way to go if APEX is to grow. However, I raised an issue dealing with the fact that most companies won’t use a plugin unless it is certified free from trojan, virues etc. The reason is that APEX is deployed in the database and as such a well (bad usage) crafted plugin would open the data in the DB to external mining. In this case, I think a plugin store similar to Apple store or Google market should be the way to go. Who is going or willing to manage it ?

Anyway, excellent presentations by the team behind sie solutions.

There is an upcoming workshop on Oracle Business Intelligence tools in Montreal. Here are the details:

Thursday March 25, 2010
Oracle Bureau de Montréal
600 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Suite Ouest 1900
Montréal, QC H3A 3J2

Details can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=107620&src=6760842&src=6760842&Act=237&evite=237.

Fortunately, 2009 is now gone. Really bad year as far as I am concerned. I lost my father in October after an illness. That does not justify the lack of posts or the updates on the various forms components I have here. The mood was not there unfortunately.

However, I did manage to squeeze out a nice Excel-like javabean that can be connected to Oracle data sources from Forms. While that works, I am totaly at a loss of what can be done with it since I am not really a spreadsheet expert.

So, if you have in mind some nice business scenarios for such a bean, please let me know. That would include for example one or more tables and simple usage scenario for a spreadsheet usage within Oracle Forms. Send them to info [at] degenio.com

The one I have done was just to import the data from the table and from there do some charting within the Excel bean. It would be interesting to get some financial usage scenarios.

These are available for those who need them. For the time being, they are in maintenance mode.

Currently, I am involved with JDeveloper 11g and transitioning from Forms.

The long awaited Oracle Forms 11g version is now available. See this page on OTN.

Information technology company Oracle Corp said Monday April 20, 09 it is buying Sun Microsystems Inc in a cash deal the company valued at $7.4 billion after IBM abandoned its bid to buy SUN earlier this month.

That is the latest news and the one I expected. Just this past saturday, during a Java lecture, a student was wondering whether Java had any future and I said that Oracle should be buying SUN given the fact that the whole Fusion strategy is predicated on Java. As far as the price is concerned, I was a bit off mark since I was expecting the deal to be close to $10B.

At any rate, MySQL and Java are now Oracle properties, if the deals goes thru. That shows at least that the top guys at Oracle know what they are doing. Brilliant moves.

I have been working on adapting FRITE, the rich text editor to work with right to left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew and the results are here.

Arabic

Hebrew – Translation of “Here is how my Hebrew text should look like in FRITE” courtesy of Eran Zohar.

The only addition to the code was the following statement:

document.putProperty(“i18n”, Boolean.TRUE);

But I still need to validate the overall workflow with users that work with Arabic or Hebrew on a daily basis.

I guess the same applies for Persian, Urdu and other right to left languages.

IBM is rumored to be in the final stage of acquiring SUN which everybody knows is behind JAVA. So what could be the effect on Oracle development tools if this deals materializes ?

Looks like it is going to be a highly complicated issue that could even see JAVA being forked to maintain its independence from any one vendor. Could this bring Oracle to shift its focus from JAVA as the main development language for its Fusion strategy or better see Oracle take a lead in a new JAVA ?

The 0.12 release is now available and can be downloaded from the sourceforge page.

I will be making a special page for this bean here on degenio.com. In the meantime, let me know of any special features you would like to see in this bean.

In version 0.13, I will be adding other languages and polylines.

If I have time, I will get Rhino to work with the gmap form module and from there use Google map with directions. So, within the form module, you should be able to get directions from point A to point B.

Special, special: Today, March Friday 13th (what a coincidence!) is the last day for the PJC competition. We have a heated race over there and it should be a very close call. If you did not vote, please go here and VOTE

Here is an update to the static google map. I have added the following:

• User can now enter address info using only latitude and longitude
• User can zoom in and zoom out using a popup menu on the image itself
• User can pan (vertical and horizontal) in either directions.
• Some minor changes to the class structure. Now using Mercator projections for panning.

In order to better manage this project, I will upload everything on sourceforge this week.

Here is a screenshot: