OTN TechBlog

The public discussion re: Oracle blogging continues, with insightful posts today from Brian Duff (employee) and Doug Burns (nonemployee).

I'm pleased with myself that I brought this up because I've been getting a lot of good feedback and advice from the community. I still stand by my original point - which is essentially that Oracle's blogging community is largely ignored (often for the wrong reasons) -- but am also fully aware that we have our own work to do.

This AM, Paul Vallee sent me a formula that based on his experience could really help us break this wall down. Here it is; if you are an Oracle blogger (employee and nonemployee alike), you should take it to heart:

• For every 3 blog posts you write about your own stuff, write one that
  links and discusses another blogger's post.
  
• For every blog post you write, post two comments in the comments
  section of another blogger's post.
  
• Maintain a blogroll linking to external parties with your favorite
  blogs.
  

Hey, Oracle Database 10g SE/EE is now available on Vista, thanks to all the chatter about it on OTN Discussion Forums. (XE is already certified on Vista.) Christian Shay has more info.

Now, if we can just get that port for Mac OS X/Intel going....

The Falcons have returned to the Oracle towers in Redwood Shores. Check out the new babies on Falcon-cam!

Background about the Falcons is here.

I'll be snapping some pix later today on the floor so you can get a flavor of the proceedings.

As you have no doubt heard, Oracle has released Technology Previews of Oracle JDeveloper 11g and OC4J 11g, as well as a Developer Kit for Spring. (See this page for all downloads etc.) Great for getting started with Spring.

For those of you who like prognosticating about product strategy, Oracle also "unveiled" its vision (mixed-metaphor alert) for next-generation middleware, which is best described in this new white paper - the key aspect here being the Spring-like Service Component Architecture (SCA), which is designed to let architects focus on "assembling" composite applications through the representation of business logics as reusable components. In this model, entire services are abstracted as objects, vastly simplifying the design of SOA.

Thomas Kurian is finishing up his keynote and will certainly provide more details on this.

OK, I decided not to snap any photos as folks like Eric Marcoux have already done such a great job.

A few things stand out for me from this year. First of all, this was the first time OTN had its own pod, and it was great to meet and speak with so many attendees. (Furthermore I met a whole bunch of newly minted Oracle Fusion Middleware Regional Directors.) It was also great to see the house packed for the Oracle tradition of treating Java developers to a free movie - this year, Spider-Man 3. The theater had 500 seats and 95% of them were occupied.

What struck me the most though? I didn't see a single person seemingly under the age of 25 on the floor.

In years past, it was commonplace to spot obvious teenagers, or even pre-teens, roaming the floor. Not this year. Is Java perhaps becoming the "new COBOL", for real?

In terms of "news", most of the people I spoke with were impressed by Thomas Kurian's keynote (see video replays here), in particular Duncan Mills' demo of the Oracle JDeveloper 11g Technology Preview. I think that for a whole bunch of folks, Oracle9i JDeveloper was their most recent look at the product (with interest in Eclipse perhaps interceding) - but now JDev is piquing their interest as tooling for "business process" development and orchestration, not just as a narrow Java IDE. No one I spoke with was aware that JDeveloper is now free, either.

I met Dave Chappell, Oracle's new Chief SOA Technologist - nice guy. Hope to do a podcast with him on the topic of SCA soon, which is a hot one this year.

Oh, and Sun released a version of the Java SE SDK under the GPL. Seems a bit late to the party to me, but you can't please everyone.

Just started to build out a new OTN Developer Events calendar. If you are a Google Cal user you can save this entire calendar if you like; others can simply do a read-only here.

This is far from complete (still need to "install" InstallFests and several others); still a work in progress.

I really need to thank Paul Gallagher for all his great ideas re: community building on OTN. His blog is a great source of information and ideas.

Perhaps most important, he had the great suggestion to enhance "strategic" Oracle blogs by complementing them with a dedicated discussion forum. This would allow much richer knowledge exchanges. Oracle bloggers, what are your thoughts?

He also has some good comments on OTN Semantic Web, some of which are feasible, and some of which are not. (See Larry Dignan's recent entry on ZD Net as well.) Regardless, I can't wait to see the Oracle blogs portal become Semantic Web-icized.

Our friend Dan Morgan of the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group (PSOUG) tells us that date/time/lineup of this year's Seattle Oracle Day is now set:

Am I alone in thinking that Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of new-media advertising agency aQuantive ($442m in revenue last year) is as sure a sign of a bubble as Petco.com's infamous Superbowl halftime ad - this time, an online advertising one?

(Speaking of bubbles, I predicted the last one in 2000 - one of an all-together different kind, of course. No one is alleging accounting chicanery here.)

Does Google have Microsoft in such a small "box", as Scoble contends, that the latter has thrown all financial decision-making checks-and-balances (what a perfect metaphor) out the window?

I can see the flames now - "How can an Oracle employee question the wisdom of titanic acquisitions?" - but flamers, it's hard for me to believe that you think  Oracle's acquisition targets don't make sense, even if you question the underlying acquisition strategy. In contrast, Microsoft has paid $6 billion to become an Web design/ad agency (remember Razorfish?).

Mystified.

The 2007 Semantic Technology Conference gets underway today, with Oracle serving as the "Title Sponsor."

The agenda is a fascinating one, with presenters representing Boeing, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, and every type of organization in between. And on Tuesday, Siderean CTO Bradley Allen is offering a case study about the underpinnings of OTN Semantic Web.

On Thursday, I will have the pleasure of doing my own demo at Oracle HQ in front of some conference attendees. If you're one of them, I look forward to seeing you!

I was blog-tagged by Jeff Pulver over the weekend (his invention I believe); so I guess I'm it.

1. I am a law-school drop-out.
2. Until the age of 14, my childhood hero was Napoleon Bonaparte. Thereafter, it was Joe Strummer.
3. My father was a Hungarian-English translator at the Nuremburg Trials.
4. When I was a little kid I often played "house" with Alexis Stewart (neighbor in the building).
5. Being a short-order cook was the funnest job I ever had.

A nice tandem announcement: The Underground PHP Oracle Manual 1.4 has been published, and Zend Core for Oracle 2.0 is out. On top of that, a couple weeks ago we published a nice two-part guide to creating PHP apps that use database-based authentication (specifically, the venerable Virtual Private Database feature).

The OPAL stack (see Chris Jones' great blog on this subject) is really becoming a nice alternative to LAMP, in situations where it makes sense to explore one. (The PHP Discussion Forum on OTN is raging!) I still find it pretty hard to believe though that so many people in the PHP community don't even know that Oracle Database XE exists, even though I encounter that fact on a weekly basis.