Guest Author: Ivo Dujmovic
I tend to read technical books, so I was pleased to be given the opportunity to review a book co-authored by an old colleague:
Despite the personal relationship, I will try to not let this cloud my opinion of this book.
This Oracle Press book sets out to provide a single resource to cover all aspects of developing in an EBiz environment. It is aimed at developers or professionals who are either starting out with eBiz, or have some Apps knowledge but may not have experience of all the technologies discussed.
The first four chapters are a brief introduction to eBusiness Suite itself and some key concepts that developers would need to understand, such as Multi-Org, Flexfields, Auditing and Logging.
The following chapters takes a topic at a time and gives a brief introduction into what the technology provides and a brief overview of how it works and what it does. The meat of each chapter is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create a simple “Hello World” type of customization in a Release 12.0 VISION environment, interspersed with handy hints of any “gotchas” you may come across. Finally there are some best practises and general comments for the topic, such as coding standards or implementation tips.
The chapters cover:
- Concurrent Programs
- Forms
- Reports
- BI Publisher
- OAF
- CLAF
- Workflow
- XML Gateway
- Moving AOL Objects between instances
- SOA
- SQL performance
Although I did not try out the step-by-step examples myself, I did read them through and they made sense to me. In the main, I found the writing style to be straightforward and easy to read. The authors do not assume prior knowledge and soon get you into the interesting part of the chapter, so there is not too much preamble. Concepts are explained concisely with examples where needed, so a newbie will be able to grasp the knowledge that is being imparted
I was a little disappointed in the Workflow chapter, in that the chapter introduction seemed a bit confusing, but the examples were quite interesting. I also thought the SOA chapter was very short. It would also have been nice if the code used in the book was available online.
My personal highlights of the book were the OAF chapter, which was the longest chapter and covered a multitude of useful areas, and the CLAF chapter, which was very illuminating even for me, as this topic is a poorly documented area.
The main drawback is also the main advantage of this book, in that they do try and cover everything in one place. The authors themselves acknowledge that some of the topics covered deserve a book in their own right (and many of them do have such books available).
Overall, if you are looking for a simple overview of the main development techniques with eBusiness Suite, then this book would certainly be worth investing in. Although the topics are covered fairly briefly, I believe there is enough discussed in each chapter to allow the basics to be picked up and give a good grounding for further detailed reading into the topic
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