DOAG 2012

This week the German Oracle User Group, or DOAG as it is called in German, held their yearly conference. Like other years, the location was the conference center in Nuremberg, a beautiful city in the south.

Vennster was well represented in the SOA/BPM Space, we did the following sessions:

• SOA Made Simple: service design (Ronald van Luttikhuizen)
• SOA Made Simple: creating a roadmap for your SOA (Lonneke Dikmans) 
• Effective Fault Handling in Oracle SOA Suite 11g (Ronald van Luttikhuizen)
• Introduction in Eventing in SOA Suite 11g (Ronald van Luttikhuizen)
• Using the B2B Adapter in a Dutch government project (Ronald van Luttikhuizen)
• Securing heterogeneous systems using Oracle WebServices Manager (Ronald van Luttikhuizen and Jens Peters)
• Deployment in Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite (Lonneke Dikmans)
• Stop generating your User Interface! Start designing it (Lonneke Dikmans)

You can find the slides by Ronald and me on slideshare:

• http://www.slideshare.net/lonneked
• http://www.slideshare.net/rluttikhuizen

Of course there were also other presentations by other presenters ;) DOAG is a big conference, with over 400 presentations. Most of them cover cases, others explain the latest developments. There is a number of tracks that are of interest if you are working in the 'middleware space': BPM, Middleware & SOA, development, Java and Strategy and Business.  The English spoken sessions are not as popular as the German language sessions, but both are well visited. 

I visited three sessions, one case study titled "Dynamische Benutzer-Workflows mit SOA und BPM-Suite" by Arne Brüning, one about the new developments in EclipseLink called "The Evolution of Java Persistence" by Doug Clarke and the last one was a session titled "NoSQL and SQL: Blending the Best of Both Worlds" by Andrew Morgan. All three happened to be presented by Oracle. They were very different in nature. The workflow session discussed a customer case. It was interesting from that point of view. I would have preferred more technical depth, but the presenter was well prepared and had an interesting story to tell. The session by Doug about Eclipse gave a nice overview of the latest developments and put them into perspective of the history of TopLink and EclipseLink. I think that this is a good strategy: it shows that EclipseLink is both proven and modern: it has been around for years and part of the original team is still working there PLUS they have solutions for new developments like JSON, REST services, NoSQL and multi-tenancy. The final presentation was an example how not to do that. The presenter put NoSQL in the title in an attempt to attract a crowd. But the session was really about MySQL clusters. A lot of people left the session while he was talking, because it was completely off topic. The presentation itself was not bad, but the title was misleading.  

Unfortunately I did not have time to see more sessions, because of all the presentations we were doing ourselves. There certainly was a lot more I would have liked to listen to and I hope we will be back next year!