normality resumed

or at least what passes for it in my life...


Been an interesting few weeks. I've been doing the rounds of the Oracle bloging world and quite frankly: either the Usenet kranks have joined in force or the level of intelligence in the community has dropped markedly!

What passes for "Oracle blogging" nowadays is nothing short of blatant company-sponsored, ill-disguised, outright marketing. The number of posts in blogs that are nothing more than just repetitive, boring and stupid reiterations of company policy is overwhelming.


The blogsphere in the Oracle universe was usually a good reference for technical matters, outside of the so-called "official line". Not anymore. Apart from the really good places for technical info - you got them on the right column here plus a few others I haven't added yet such as the good folks at Pythian - there is very little going on that is worth reading. And a lot that is just downright "toe the company line" crap.





Sorry, but I've always called a spade by its name.






I mean, when a major proponent of ADF and all the Fusion cacophony has TWO (that's 2, folks!) pages of blogging explaining how to implement correctly a dropdown listbox with that technology, I ask you: who is pulling whose leg?

A dropdown listbox, folks! Two pages of blogging! I must be dreaming: it takes about three lines, tops, to explain how to do it with the "inefficient" and outdated "older" technologies.



Someone is having a bad taste joke, at the expense of the Oracle development community!




I'm reminded of how the Attorney General Department in Sydney has spent the last 7 (that's SEVEN, folks!) years trying to deliver at least ONE application! Of course, they are using this new development "technology". At my (tax payer) expense...



And they are by no means the only case of projects gone horribly wrong. I'd be struggling to find ONE major j2ee + Oracle development project involving large coding that has gone through without major problems in the last 5 years, here in NSW.

No, implementations of Oracle's ebusiness suite are NOT examples of "fusion" technology, they use Cobol (of all things!) and are mostly just an install-then-config proposition. Not a design-develop event. I said: MAJOR development projects!


One only, please! I can't find it...


But it's all company-sponsored "goodness", so obviously this is just another rant by a "disgruntled ex-employee".



Or something...





Enough of that rubbish, anyway: that deranged j2ee + ADF crap is not getting anywhere within cooee of our development group. We're sticking with .NET and a few other choice technologies that actually can deliver, instead of mega-projects that never reach production.


And if that means we have to use SQL Server instead of Oracle, then so be it! I'm done waiting for Oracle's senior management to wake up and smell reality, instead of pandering to the latest "bleeding edge" rubbish.



APEX is the only new, promising development technology to come out of Oracle in the last 5 years - aimed at the small to medium size development shop. ADF and all the other j2ee rubbish is impossible to manage without an army of designers and developers and COMPLETELY unfit for any environment other than the "Cecil B. de Mille - cast of thousands" kind of project.



As such, I'm concentrating new development efforts on APEX + Oracle and .NET + SQL Server. Not worth wasting our time with anything else, quite frankly.



Catchyalata, folks.