ODTUG 2008 day 1: WebCenter and SOA

Today was the first day of the conference odtug kaleidoscope 2008, if you don’t count the symposiums on Sunday. The keynote was presented by Vince Casarez, VP at Oracle and responsible for Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle Portal and Oracle Reports. He showed several demo’s of WebCenter 11g that contained BEA products, rebranded as WebCenter components. One example was WebCenter Interaction. It is the product that BEA calls “BEA Aqualogic User interaction” and is used to create enterprise portals, collaborative communities, and composite and social applications.
As a whole, the keynote was a bit confusing: it showed functionality for business users, developers and portal administrators. Using different components and tools. It was not always clear what functionality solves what business case. I guess that is typical for the current situation of the Fusion Middleware layer: With the acquisition of BEA, portal, web 2.0 and community software has been added to the already elaborate stack from Oracle. We will have to wait and see how the mixing and matching will turn out….

The in depth session I visited promised to talk about building composite applications using WebCenter, SOA and Web 2.0. Unfortunately they spent 45 (!!) minutes on generating business components from two database tables in JDeveloper. The interesting part of the session covered two topics: generating events to EDN and exposing BI components to WebCenter. Because they spent so much time on the Business components and the marketing lingo, they only had 10 minutes for these demos. So that session was disappointing.

The last session I attended was the session about AIA. This was actually a very good presentation. It gave an overview of the architecture of AIA. The presenter, Annaji Garimella, talked about the concepts of Enterprise Business Objects, Enterprise Business Services and Application Business Connectors. He also spent some time explaining the technologies that are used to realize these concepts. He concluded with governance options that are part of AIA. The only thing I missed in the presentation was a short demo, or example in JDeveloper. Other then that, this was a very good overview of AIA.

After this first day of the conference, two things stand out:

• Oracle is very busy integrating BEA Aqualogic in the Oracle 11g release, as opposed to first releasing Oracle 11g.
• ODTUG is moving on: the keynote was on WebCenter and SOA, not on Forms, Java or Apex.

Tomorrow the Oracle Ace Directors briefing takes place. I hope we hear something we can blog about…. preferably about the BEA acquisition.