Oracle ADF for Forms & PL/SQL Developers

As you can see, I added a page element to the right with the book(s) I'm currently reading. I bought Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers yesterday. Even though I'm still working on Forms projects, I think it's important to stay on top of the new technologies and get at least the basics of them down. Also on my wish list is the APEX book by Jon Scott and Scott Spendolini, it should be out next month, I can't wait.

I nearly finished my apex home accounting application, it just needs a report or two with some balance overviews. My next project will be a new website for our band. If I find the time, I'll also make the same projects with JDeveloper+ADF, could be interesting...

APEX and a list of Months

My colleague Dimitri will be glad to hear I started experimenting with APEX again. I have been doing my home accounting in Excel for years, and it seemed like a nice project to try and build in APEX. As I wanted the data structure to be a little different, I didn't just import the excel sheets, but designed a new data model and started from there. I might still import the excels to have the old data available in Oracle as well, even write a small ETL routine to convert to the new model. For now I'm just having fun learning a new way to make client interfaces.

One of the (mainly SQL) 'issues' I had was creating a select list with all the months of a year, in a meaningful and efficient way. I used a combination of date formatting and a row generator, you can read more about that here.

Are you the smartest?

I finished the last test of Oracle's "Are you the smartest?" contest yesterday, it was about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and it was hard...
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: AYTS is an annual contest organised by Oracle. It consists of attending four sessions of Sales Consultants presenting business solutions. This year's sessions were about BI Suite, JDeveloper & ADF, SOA Suite and Identity Management. I liked the BI and JDev sessions, the others were a case of "slow death by powerpoint" for me.

I liked the ease, transparancy and intuitive interface of the BI Suite. JDeveloper and ADF I had already worked with, and I'll admit it's an amazing and wide-ranging tool (for free!), but when it comes to building User Interfaces, my bets are on APEX. As for winning prizes (first price is a trip to Oracle Headquarters in SF, USA), I don't think I'll be among the lucky ones...