Today was the last day of Oracle OpenWorld. It was the fifth time for me, so the amazing crowd that floods San Francisco doesn’t surprise me anymore. There was a big difference this time, though: it was the first time that JavaOne was part of the conference. I had visited JavaOne twice before. Both times the conference was in Moscone. For obvious reasons, this was not possible this time. Moscone is big, but not that big….
They moved JavaOne over to the Hilton, Park 55 hotel, and Nikko hotel where Oracle Develop also took place. Being in these hotel feels smaller and less ‘buzzing with energy’ compared to Moscone. It didn’t bother me, because I am used to it: they did this before with Oracle Develop. But for the JavaOne visitors, it was a step back. I attended a session about SOAP versus REST webservices. The session was very well attended, it was a repeat from the day before. The room was small and one of the presenters had to leave early because he had a plane to catch. I think that if this session would have been located at Moscone, it would probably have fitted all the people that wanted to attend on Wednesday. This would have improved the quality: the story became a little one-sided because the SOAP guy left..
The problem of finding sessions that you want to attend was even bigger this time than last year: adding JavaOne to the mix increased the amount of sessions you have to chose from to an incredible number. The schedulebuilder doesn’t help. In fact it seems to deteriorate evey year: I missed some sessions I would have liked to attend: for example the session by Mark Simpson on Governance. Some sessions ‘dispappeared’ from the schedule: for example the ADF session by Sten Vesterli.
Now let’s take a look at the bright side:
I loved meeting all the Oracle Ace Directors, Oracle Productmanagers and the people from Oracle Technology Network again. Meeting here every year really makes the community sustainable. You can do a lot of stuff online, but it really helps if you meet people in person once or twice a year. I even bumped into some Dutch people I hadn’t seen in a while. It feels like one big reunion all week long.
We had our first ‘official’ session of the new SOA BPM enterprise methodology group at the unconference sessions. We talked about best practices for using existing database logic in a SOA environment, and tips for communication with .NET services in your enterprise.
I attended interesting sessions (in random order, since this blog contains random thoughts):
- Dirk Staehler showed the methodology Opitz uses with Oracle BPA Suite for enterprise architecture, SOA and BPM.
- A nice overview of use cases for SOAP and use cases for REST webservices
- A demo showing the use of UCM, more specifically the imaging solution with the prebuilt integration with Oracle BPM for invoice processing
- The BPM CAB where I met with the people responsible for the integration between Oracle BPA Suite11g and Oracle SOA suite11g and Oracle BPM Suite11g.
- The partner council that was organized by Juergen Kress. Dave Shaffer was doing a great job getting the feedback from the partners and explaining the roadmap and other stuff that I can’t talk about
Of course, it was not all work: I had great breakfast, lunches, dinners and coffees with friends. I visited the Oakland museum to check out the awesome Pixar exposition and of course went to the appreciation event at Treasure Island!
All in all, the conference was a huge success for me and I am already looking forward to next year!
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