At last, the Oct-2007 DE SIG!

Next week the third UKOUG Development Engineering SIG of the year happens at the Oracle London office. I should have blogged about it sooner but we experienced a slight agenda malfunction hem hem. Fortunately our friends in Oracle Consulting have come through to plug the gaps and spare my blushes. It's ended up being themed around some of the newer tools in the Oracle development space. We have two presentations on Application Express, two on JDeveloper and one on PHP.

I have been trying for ages to get somebody to talk about PHP and Oracle without success. So I am grateful to Tim Hall for accepting the challenge. I'm hoping that he'll turn up in his full ACE Director fig: tiara, ermine robe and chain of office. Also speaking is Jeremy Duggan, better known as the Chair of the Modelling & Design SIG. I think this is Jeremy's first time on the other side of the fence , so I'll keep my fingers crossed for him during his presentation. The session which most intrigues me is Simon Day, talking about requirements and testing with JDeveloper. Mapping user requirements to delivered code is one of IT's black holes, so I am keen to known what JDev offers us in this regard.

One of the talks I tried to get but which didn't materialise was an introduction to the Microsoft development environment. It occurred to me whilst listening to Xen Lategan's presentation at BVP in June that I knew very little about the Microsoft architecture. I could guess the function most of the boxes in the architectural diagram because the Oracle/J2EE stacks have similarly-shaped boxes in similar places. As the October agenda seemed to be moving towards a tools theme I thought it would be an ideal opportunity for Microsoft to evangelise their toolset to a fresh audience.

Unfortunately the only presentation they could offer me was a talk on Visual Studio 2008 New Features, which apparently would enthuse the audience to upgrade immediately from VS2005. As I doubt that any of the expected audience uses VS of any flavour I had to regretfully turn this down. Still it is good news for those people who regard Microsoft as an all-devouring beast. The Borg has assimilated all the customers it wants right now, at least on the development tools front. Presumably the unassimilated remnants are too hardcore (or too few!) to be worthwhile. So we're safe ... for the time being.