The Development Layer

Sorry about the time lag in posting this next article in the Roadmap series. I've been hit recently with a double whammy: a few days of jury duty immediately followed by an electricity outage that's now lasted for several days. In fact, I'm actually writing this article during the blackout and hoping to post once Southern California Edison pull things together again...gives me something constructive to do while I'm Dancing in the Dark.

In building the roadmap for the Development layer of the Roadmap, three important considerations heavily influenced the final product:

• Oracle's development tools continue to expand and evolve rapidly. In fact, much too rapidly for me to keep up with most of it. This is where I rely most heavily on the buzz from the Oracle user community. This space is just too large and changes too quickly for me to do hands-on testing and form first-hand opinions on all the various development tools.
  

• The development layer is closely tied to certain components in Fusion Middleware. For example, changes in JDeveloper seem to be driven by evolution in industry standards and revisions to OC4J; the latter is really a middleware infrastructure component. As another example, although Oracle is certainly publicizing the hot-pluggable functionality in Fusion Middleware, I suspect the hot-pluggable concept may be a more complex proposition with the addition of ERP or CRM applications. So my goal is to stick with Oracle components in any architecture utilizing Oracle applications until I see more evidence supporting hot-pluggable in this type of environment.
  

• As is true throughout the Roadmap, migration from sunsetting to newer technologies is a concern. Most specifically, the sunsetting of OAF and Oracle Forms and Reports are big concerns here.

NEXT UP: The Lifecycle Management Layer