I’m back in Stuttgart after UKOUG Tech13, and everybody is asking how it was. Well, great, naturally. Here is why:
My initial plans were to see lots of presentations – there was a wide palette of well-known speakers and interesting subjects that were not to be missed. Well, this time my plans were NOT realized. I was constantly at the PITSS stand talking to people. And I enjoyed it. Even an introvert like me can enjoy three days of ongoing excellent conversations with people from all kinds of organizations, with different challenges, questions and ideas. The picture below shows PITSS’s stand 9 with my colleague demonstrating something presumably interesting to a charming group of students. So what were we discussing all day long with the streaming flow of people?
After summarizing my collection of business cards and notes, I concluded that the conversations fall into four main categories:
A. 38% were about APEX, and how to get there from Forms
B. 29% were about Forms 11g or Forms 12c perspectives
C. 25% were about ADF, and how to get there from Forms
D. And the remaining 8% people just wanted to talk to PITSS’s guys & gals (aka Bernhard and Madi, the two PITSS colleagues in charge this year) – which was just lovely.
Disclaimer: My inner statistics nerd is trying to force the conversations into matching patterns. It is possible, therefore, that some of the ABC-type discussions also fall into the D category or conversely. But, apart from this, what was different from almost all previous conferences is that this time most people knew exactly what they wanted => no endless debates about APEX vs. ADF.
For Forms developers, typical discussions were centered on:
– ways to modernize Forms applications, by giving them a similar look and feel as the newly developed ADF and APEX screens
– what to do with all those Java warnings when running Forms
– analyzing and documenting complex Forms applications
It was great to meet some of our customers who are working on a day-to-day basis with PITSS.CON – thank you guys for the great feedback and ideas.
The ADF and APEX people had common concerns:
– number one was how to speed up the migration process
– then what to do with the PL/SQL code from Forms
– or how to get to Forms 11g first as an intermediate step
– how to help Forms developers learn the new frameworks and to help the ADF/APEX developers understand Forms
All in all, it was a successful developer conference. It was big enough to cover the main development trends in Oracle, and yet small enough to stay focused on what’s important.
