Oracle JavaOne and Oracle Develop 2011

The 2-day developer event that was held in Hyderabad on 10-11 May witnessed participation of over 3000 Java developers, programmers and enthusiasts. They all gathered to learn about latest developments in the areas of Java and Oracle development tools. Featuring nearly 100 sessions covering a range of topics, the event provided an opportunity to interact with leading Java experts. There were keynotes delivered by Hal Stern, CTO of Juniper Networks and Oracle biggies such as Nandini Ramani, Param Singh and Amit Zavery. Java Champions and Oracle ACE Directors. The developer community got to learn plenty of hands-on learning focused on Java and next-generation development tools from Oracle.

Commitment to Java

Nandini Ramani, VP of Java Client Development at Oracle in the Fusion Middleware Group reiterated Oracle's commitment to Java and shared a detailed perspective on Oracle's strategic vision for the platform. According to Nandini, Oracle is strongly focused on increasing the developer base.

Ramani said that Oracle was doing all it could to make Java more relevant and competitive in the marketplace. Ramani said that improving the productivity of Java developers is critical in keeping the platform at the forefront of software development. Oracle is focusing on the 'modularity' as this is the building block for developing, deploying & evolving all Java apps, she added.

Ramani announced the release of next version of Java Development Kit --JDK 7 (around July 2011) and the release of the public Beta version of JavaFX. She said that while the focus with Java might be more on the server side, Oracle did want to enable data binding from the client. 'Today, no business is complete without the client side. We are on all kinds of front end devices and they all need a UI; you cannot do everything on the server side. Java has a huge role to play in the coming years and with our commitment and pace of execution, we are there and the race is barely on.'

Strategic Alliances

Talking about the significance of alliances with IBM, Red Hat and Apple, Param Singh, Senior Director for Java Product Management at Oracle, said that vendors were starting to come together and work towards innovating on the platform. 'It had not been the case for the last couple of years and a bifurcation of the platform looked likely. Now we have vendors like Red Hat and Apple working with us'.

Talking specifically about the alliance with IBM, he said that other than the slight disconnect with SWT and AWT and things like that, from a core-library perspective, both Oracle and IBM did pretty much the same thing. ' We compete in other areas and it is great to compete in areas where we can offer value addition but, in the case of Java, it was best for us to come together and we did just that.'

Oracle Application Development Framework

Amit Zavery, Vice President of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java products, introduced the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), a Java EE development framework. Zaveri said that, Oracle ADF simplified Java EE development by minimizing the need to write code that implemented the application's infrastructure thereby allowing users to focus on the features of the actual application. Oracle ADF provides these infrastructure implementations as part of the framework. 'We at Oracle have been using it internally to build feature-rich apps and, going forward, we see external developers starting to use this framework as a modern way of building apps. This will also allow many of our customers to do quick development and invest in the right areas instead of having to worry about re-writing the UI every couple of years,' said Zaveri. It was announced that the Oracle ADF (with more than 150 additional components), was now available for free.