Kscope 2013 Summary – It’s a developer’s world !

Check out the full Kscope photo album here

This year ODTUG Kscope was a new experience for me. Whereas during past conferences I only presented, this year my company OraPlayer ran a booth so I got a new experience of meeting the Oracle Forms community first hand as a “booth babe.” Well it was more like an ADF Mobile live demo factory. What a week we had! With 3 sessions to present and another dozen OraPlayer with ADF Mobile demos, we are beat. Truth is, meeting real customers with real business problems that we could help was a nice addition to the conference agenda.

Despite my utter exhaustion, I wanted to summarize my lessons learnt and sessions that taught me something. This year, Kscope was also unique in the fact that Oracle pulled out all the stops and had an incredible lineup of speakers for the ADF for Beginners and the ADF Advanced tracks. A shout-out to Oracle, where we were treated to have 7, YES, 7 product managers of ADF. Having such incredible resources available gave us not only great sessions but also one-on-one support from the PM team. We had several in-depth sessions with Joe Huang, Lynn Munsinger, Susan Duncan, Shay Shmeltzer, Duncan Mills, and of course Michael Ferrante, the new Forms PM. We will have blog posts on most of the tips and tricks we learnt shortly.

Check out our photos from Kscope and the Oracle developer community events here.

My top 3 sessions in no particular order had to be

1) WebLogic Server Application Security — Implementing the Superstition With ADF Security, Peter Koletzke , Quovera – Duncan Mills, Oracle Senior Director and Architect. They dug really deep into ADF security and how to build an infrastructure as the basis for connecting Oracle Access Manager, Active Directory, or Oracle Identity Manager. This alongside a complete live demo of securing and ADF application using the weblogic native connectivity.

2) Tied for second place was the Open Q&A with the ADF Product Management and Oracle Development Tools – Where are We and What’s Next, by Bill Patakay, Oracle Corporation. These two sessions were in the Oracle ADF Symposium that was on Sunday. We got a first-hand account of the future of the Oracle development environment straight from the mouth of the VP of product management and his team. The overall themes were ADF Mobile and Cloud computing, which of course was music to my ears. He even mentioned our OraPlayer–Oracle ADF Mobile customer story in his presentation. The best part was that before he began, he asked the audience if anyone there had Oracle Forms, and I burst with pride as the entire room raised their hands 🙂 This also meant we had our work cut out for us with a room full of leads the first day. We were then treated to a glimpse of new features that will be in the next version of ADF Mobile. Then we were asked by PM Joe Hung for a wish list of new features for future versions of ADF Mobile. At the top of our list was of course native calendar integration, but we were happy to hear from Shay Shmeltzer that there is a trick to implement it in the current version. We will share our experience with it in a future blog post.

3) Oracle ADF & JDeveloper for Forms Developers, John King, King Training Resources. It’s always a treat to be in one of John King’s sessions. I always enjoy seeing how other experts present topics in my field. Especially since no matter how well you think you know the subject, John always surprises you with something new.

All in all the conference was great! Large enough to have a variety of sessions and speakers at any given time but small enough to get personalized technical support from a variety of Oracle PMs. Now we have our work cut out for us to follow up with the many customers who were interested in getting started with ADF Mobile on Forms and others who wanted to migrate to Forms 11g.

You can download my session slides here:

How Do I Do This in ADF?!?! ADF for Oracle Forms / APEX / PL/SQL Developers This session was aimed at ADF beginners and aimed to assist developers just beginning development with ADF. We explored the major features needed to build enterprise applications and explained how to do them using Oracle’s ADF technology. Click here to view the slides.
Do I Need to Migrate / Re-develop My Oracle Forms Applications? (Experts Panel) I hosted this session along with Oracle product managers Michael Ferrante (Forms), Lynn Munsinger (ADF), David Peake (APEX), and Christian Shay (.Net) and overall guru John King. This was an Expert Panel / Open Q&A about if, when, why, and how you should migrate your Oracle Forms. We represented all major development technologies, including Java, Oracle ADF, Oracle APEX, and .NET as well as new third-party development tools.Click here to view the slides.

Strategies to Move Forward with Oracle Forms: What Now? What’s Next? This session explored the predicament of companies with existing Forms investments who are facing difficulties moving their legacy systems into the next generation. The session covered essential information on preserving their Forms investments going forward and adapting them to new cloud and mobile environments. Click here to view the slides.