Friday, July 22, 2005

OTN Forums: here we go again!

Oracle have updated the forum software underlying the Technet forums. Which means at the moment they are are frequently unavailable and currently wholly unreliable. This is the third time I have been on the receiving end of an upgrade to Oracle's forum software and every time it's been shambolic.

It's easy to mock Oracle's incompetence here, and I will. As someone who uses the OTN forums quite frequently (I am, after all, an ACE) I am on the receiving end of crashes, lost posts and general frustration. So mockery is my recompense.

I know JDeveloper promises "one click deployment" to iAS10g servers but we are supposed to test our code before clicking that button. The fact that the web site is falling apart at the moment - dodging formatting, missing pages, hideous Java error stacks and grindingly slow performance - is inexcusable. Whatever else I may think about Java and J2EE it is a language blessed with a plethora of cool testing tools. Still, at least when we do eventuially get to post stuff we have graphical emoticons instead of boring text ones :)

There is a more serious point: the forums are a public demonstration of Oracle's abilities in the web environment, and this is where Oracle want to make a big splash. So they ought to regard the forums as an advertisement for their abilities in this sphere. After all, if Oracle can't make an iAS10g site highly available and resilient what chance is there for the rest of us?

They certainly ought to make sure the site is stable before publicizing "an improved user experience overall" on the OTN homepage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Except of course the Forums are not actually Oracle software they are using Jive. To be fair thought the period of instability with this release has been shorter that previous upgrades. I suspect that this has a lot to do with loading rather than anything else - you know when you upgrade anything it needs more resource no matter what it says on the tin. And resource issues are the hardest to test for.

APC said...

>> they are using Jive

Fair point. The forums have generally been more reliable since Oracle moved to Jive (no more Edge Side Include errors!)

I'm prepared to concede that the other Jive-powered sites I visit (like Artima) I don't visit very often, so maybe I just miss their upgrade pain.

Cheers, APC