Behind the scenes of OBUG, literally!

This week I attended the OBUG Benelux Connect 2009 user conference. OBUG stands for the Oracle BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) User Group. The conference was held at the Metropolis Cinema Complex in Antwerp. One of the sessions I planned to attend was the “Report from the R&D Lab – Analyzing the upcoming 11g Release of Fusion Middleware” session by Lonneke Dikmans and Lucas Jellema. The presentation was held on behalf of WAAI, a collaboration of four Dutch companies in which Lucas, Lonneke, and I participate. Goal of the WAAI collaboration is to share, bundle, and expand knowledge on the upcoming Fusion Middleware 11g release. In this presentation, the initial findings and research of WAAI would be made available to the audience, including real world examples and demonstrations. At least, that was the plan...

From Kuassi Mensah from Oracle -who had an earlier presentation on Database Web Services and SOA- we heard that you couldn’t hook up your laptop. That meant no demo’s! And nobody had informed the speakers about this! Even stranger since Javapolis is held at the same venue and tons of demo’s are given there each year. While Lonneke, Lucas, and I chatted about this we got the idea that I could do the demo backstage while they did the presentation. We asked the Metropolis crew, who was more than willing to help out. Thanks a lot for that guys!

Time was running out while Lonneke and Lucas showed me what to demo and virtual machines, SOA composites, schema’s, and other stuff quickly moved from one laptop to another. Lonneke and Lucas stayed remarkably calm given the situation. Just a few minutes before the presentation we crawled through a secret hatch in the back of the cinema. While I “installed” myself right next to the digital projectors, professional sound systems, buttons, wires, and tons of popcorn Lonneke and Lucas went back to do the presentation. Guided by their instructions during the presentation -while we couldn’t see each other- we still managed to show Fusion Middleware 11g stuff to the audience :-) It turned out to be a great presentation after all, despite the organization or lack of it. Also quite educational when it comes to the inner workings of cinemas and good for the friday afternoon talks with colleagues :-)