Recently I has not posted any new posts as I was busy with some new projects as well as during May attended several conferences and in some I also did presentations. Here I will post slides from these conferences. If you are interested in some of these topics then ask me to come to you as well and talk about these topics :)

Agile Riga Day

In March I spoke at Agile Riga Day (organized by Agile Latvia) about my experience and recommendations how to adopt Agile practices in iterative style.

RailsConf

In May I travelled to RailsConf in Baltimore and I hosted traditional Rails on Oracle Birds of a Feather session there and gave overview about how to contribute to ActiveRecord Oracle enhanced adapter.

TAPOST

Then I participated in our local Theory and Practice of Software Testing conference and there I promoted use of Ruby as test scripting language.

RailsWayCon

And lastly I participated in Euruko and RailsWayCon conferences in Berlin. In RailsWayCon my first presentation was about multidimensional data analysis with JRuby and mondrian-olap gem. I also published mondrian-olap demo project that I used during presentation.

And second RailsWayCon presentation was about CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Jasmine that I am recently using to build rich web user interfaces. This was quite successful presentation as there were many questions and also many participants were encouraged to try out CoffeeScript and Backbone.js. I also published my demo application that I used for code samples during presentation.

Next conferences

Now I will rest for some time from conferences :) But then I will attend FrozenRails in Helsinki and I will present at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. See you there!

I am trying to tell more people at Oracle OpenWorld about Ruby and Rails and how it can be used with Oracle database. Unfortunately my session proposals were rejected by organizers but now there is a second chance to propose sessions at mix.oracle.com and top voted sessions will be accepted for conference. But currently my proposed sessions do not have enough votes :(

I would be grateful if my blog readers and Ruby on Oracle supporters would vote for my sessions Fast Web Applications Development with Ruby on Rails on Oracle and PL/SQL Unit Testing Can Be Fun!.

You need to log in to mix.oracle.com with your oracle.com login (or you should create new one if you don’t have it). And also you need to vote for at least one more session as well (as votes are counted if you have voted for at least 3 sessions). Voting should be done until end of this week (June 20).

And if you have other oracle_enhanced or ruby-plsql users in your
organization then please ask their support as well :)

Thanks in advance!

People

Last week I participated in annual Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference. There is quite wide coverage of conference in various web sites and blogs therefore I will write just some personal notes that I wanted to highlight.

For me the most value was meeting with different interesting people. At first thanks to Justin Kestelyn and all OTN team for Oracle community support. Oracle ACE dinner, bloggers meetup, OTN lounge and unconference were great places where to meet and discuss with interesting and active Oracle community members.

It was nice to meet Kuassi Mensah and Christopher Jones who are supporters of dynamic languages in Oracle and supporters of Ruby in particular. And also had interesting discussions with Rich Manalang – Ruby guru at Oracle, who is from the AppsLab team.

This year there were quite a few Sun people in the conference. Scott McNealy and James Gosling were doing keynotes. And I had interesting discussions with Arun Gupta and Tim Bray. BTW they have very good coverage of Oracle OpenWorld in their blogs (and also have a fresh look at it as they were for the first time here).

This year I did two unconference sessions – Oracle adapters for Ruby ORMs and Server Installation and Configuration with Chef. They were not very many attendees but at least it seemed that those who attended were satisfied with content :) This year Oracle Develop track was located quite far from unconference location and probably this also was a reason why there were not very many attendees (as my sessions were quite developer oriented).

Technologies

Here is the list of Oracle products and technologies that I am interested in to spend some time investigating them:

• Fustion applications. I expected to hear more about next-generation of new Fusion applications but there was just short demo in the final keynote and a promise that they will be available sometime next year. User interface of new applications seems much better than for the current Oracle applications as well as current beta-testers are telling that usability is really much better. So I am really looking for trying them out.
• Application Development Framework (ADF). I am not a big fan of ADF drag-and-drop development style (that’s why I prefer Ruby on Rails :)) but as ADF is the main development platform for Fusion Applications then it will be necessary to use it if we would like to extend or customize Fusion applications. But what I would be really interested in is how to integrate JRuby with ADF – it would be nice to use ADF Faces UI components to get ADF look and feel, but to use JRuby for model & controller business logic development.
• SQL Developer unit testing. It was nice to see that finally Oracle has PL/SQL unit testing support in latest version of SQL Developer which hopefully will increase awareness about unit testing among PL/SQL developers. Steven Feuerstein gave very good “motivational” talk about unit testing during converence. But I still can’t decide if SQL Developer repository based unit tests is the best way how to do them. E.g. as all unit tests are stored in database repository you cannot version control them with Subversion or Git (which is the place where we store source of all PL/SQL procedures).
  Therefore I plan to make enhancements to my ruby-plsql gem to support more PL/SQL data types and then it would be possible to write PL/SQL unit tests with Ruby and RSpec which would provide more compact syntax compared to current utPLSQL framework. Need to write blog post about it :)
• Oracle Coherence. Recently I have heard many references to Oracle Coherence in-memory data grid which is often used to achieve high-scalability of web applications. Therefore I am thinking about Ruby client for Coherence and potentially using Coherence as cache solution in Ruby on Rails applications.
• Java in database. Recently I did some experiments with Java stored procedures in Oracle database – and the main reason is that it could provide integration of Oracle database with other systems that have Java based API. I already did experiments with creating Oracle client for RabbitMQ messaging system.
• Oracle object types. Many Oracle products (like Spatial Data option) are using Oracle object types for storing data. Currently these object data types are not supported by Ruby ActiveRecord and DataMapper ORMs. Need to do investigation how they could be supported and how to use Ruby e.g. for accessing spatial data in Oracle database.

Oracle Magazine’s Developer of the Year

And finally during Oracle OpenWorld annual Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice Awards 2009 were published. And it was pleasant surprise for me that in this year I got Oracle Magazine’s Developer of the Year award. Thanks to Oracle people who promoted me and thanks for congratulations that I received :) Here is my picture and profile from the latest Oracle Magazine:

Photo © Delmi Alvarez / Getty Images

On last day of Oracle OpenWorld I did my unconference presentation – Using Ruby on Rails with legacy Oracle databases.

As I did not know if anyone will come to listen to it I was glad that six people attended (including Kuassi Mensah from Oracle who is helping to promote Ruby support inside Oracle). And on the previous day I also managed to show parts of my presentation to Rich and Anthony from Oracle AppsLab team.

I published my slides on Slideshare:

And I published my demo project on GitHub:

Thanks to all Oracle people who recognize my work on Ruby and Oracle integration and I hope that our common activities will increase number of Ruby and Rails projects on Oracle :)

In the previous post I wrote that I didn’t quite like drag-and-drop development style in JDeveloper that I experienced during Oracle OpenWorld hands-on session.

Today I was in Oracle BI Answers & Dashboard hands-on session and during this session I was also drag-and-dropping to create reports, charts and business intelligence dashboards. But in this case I liked it as it seemed natural way how to create such reports.

The main difference why I liked it was that I got immediate feedback how the end report will look like – after each change I could immediately see and test real report with real data. And such immediate feedback is key prerequisite for interactive analytical reporting development.

In JDeveloper case I needed to compile and build everything and restart local application server after each change to see real results from any change – and it took at least 10 seconds for just sample “hello world” application. I assume that this lag will be even longer in larger real projects. Probably it is not so long time but when you compare it to 1 second feedback time then anything larger seems long.

I also visited Oracle demo grounds where I discussed my concerns regarding JDeveloper drag-and-drop development style. At the end we reached common understanding that JDeveloper and ADF framework is really good for former Oracle Forms developers who do not want to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript and auto-generated applications could be quite OK for internal enterprise applications. But if you want to build advanced web applications you still need to learn and be expert in these web technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript).

Today was my first day at Oracle OpenWorld and here are my first impressions from the sessions I attended.

The first one was Building Web 2.0 Social Applications in Ruby on Rails with BEA AquaLogic Interaction by Chris Bucchere where he explained how they built social application for BEA conference participants. And it was interesting to see also some code examples from this application that he presented.

And then after that I participated in three Oracle Develop hands-on sessions about Oracle SOA suite and WebCenter. I signed up for these sessions because I thought that they will be more technical and code-intensive compared to other sessions.

As a result I spent three hours in Oracle JDeveloper but all I was doing was dragging-and-dropping and filling some pop-up dialog boxes. I did not write single line of Java code during these workshops. And as a result I had just vague idea why all the dragged components worked together.

Having experience of coding in Ruby and trying to create small and beautiful code this drag-and-drop development did not feel quite natural for me. And I am afraid that this drag-and-drop development approach will create bunch of developers who will not be able to create real code anymore.

The other consequences of this drag-and-drop style coding is that it is hard to version control the resulting generated code and it is also much harder to unit test such generated code. Probably this is the reason why I could not find any OpenWorld session about unit testing and test-driven development.

Am I missing some hidden beauty of drag-and-drop development? Or am I spoiled with beauty of Ruby?

I just returned from RailsConf Europe in Berlin and attended a lot of good Ruby and Rails related sessions.

I also tried to submit there my session proposal about using Rails with Oracle but as there were too many good proposals and as my topic was with too narrow topic then it was not accepted. Therefore I used opportunity to give 5 minutes presentation about Oracle enhanced adapter in RejectConf where anybody could present anything.

Here are my slides that I used in this presentation. And at least one participant was interested in this topics as he uses Rails and Oracle and did not know about my adapter.

My next public appearance is planned at Oracle OpenWorld unconference where I have recerved time slot on Thursday, September 25th at 10am. Please come there if you are attending Oracle OpenWorld and are interested in how to use Ruby on Rails with your legacy Oracle databases.

If you still have not voted for my session proposal “Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle E-Business Suite” then please do so :) Voting deadline is near – July 13th.

In any case I am going to be at Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in September. So if some of my blog readers will also be there and would like to have some chat with me about Oracle and Ruby then please let me know.

mix.oracle.com team created opportunity to suggest and vote for sessions at Oracle OpenWorld conference. Therefore I will also try this opportunity and will suggest topic which is covered by many posts in this blog – I proposed session Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle E-Business Suite.

So if you would like me to present this topic in Oracle OpenWorld conference then please go to mix.oracle.com and vote for it!

I gave short presentation about “Using Ruby with Oracle” at European Ruby conference Euruko 2008. You can download presentation slides at their site. My collegue took a video of my presentation so probably after some time I will post it as well :)

Either because of this presentation or maybe just because more people are interested in Ruby on Oracle the number of visits to this blog is fast growing during the last days. Which makes me more motivated to do more investigations in Ruby and Oracle area.

One area of further research could be standardization of different ActiveRecord Oracle adapter patches – otherwise now I have different patches in each project and this becomes quite hard to manage.