AMIS25 Beyond the Horizon Conference 2016

I've just returned from the AMIS25 Beyond the Horizon conference in the Netherlands.  AMIS are celebrating their 25th anniversary and put on a top rate conference with Oracle technology speakers from around the world.  They also hosted the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge at which I had the privilege of leading a team.  Featuring 30 ACE Directors from around the world the challenge was to design solutions using Oracle Cloud Services.

Here are my highlights from the 2 day conference.

Geertjan Wielenga (Oracle) with some slick, live JET demos

1) Oracle JET : Two excellent live demo sessions from Paco Van Der Linden (AMIS) and Geertjan Wielenga (Oracle).  Both gave live coding demonstrations of the JavaScript Extension Toolkit which is not a new JavaScript framework but rather a toolkit of the "best of what's available and what's most stable".  Oracle JET is included as part of PeopleTools 8.55 now and we should start to see PeopleSoft applications using these rather clever tools for charting, responsive UI, data binding of page UI elements and more.

AMIS developer Maarten Smeets on ICS Adapters

2) Why Build an Oracle Cloud Adapter: Maarten Smeets (AMIS) talked through the challenging development of new Oracle Cloud based adapters for Oracle's Integration Cloud Service.  More information on ICS adapters from Oracle here including a list of currently available adapters.  Probably best not to build one that someones already built.   You can find Maarten's excellent presentation here along with his example source code.

Prof. Steinbuch blows our minds with robotics

3) Keynote: The future of cars, robots and humans: Professor Maarten Steinbuch from Eindhoven University of Technology gave a thought provoking and captivating insight into robotics currently available, prototypes in the pipeline and what the future might look like.  He affirmed Moore's Law still to be valid and expects computing power to continue to double every few years.  If you want to understand what that might look like then if you take a 35 steps and double the size of the step each time then you'll have traveled around the world  several times!!!  This is fun to do with grains of rice on a chessboard too.   He discussed self drive cars (now a reality thanks to Tesla) and AI robot pets for the elderly who are too frail to keep a pet and the truly amazing robots that can assist a surgeon to stitch together 2mm diameter blood vessels. Whether you agree with this level of advancement or not it's happening.  

Reactive Programming Intro - Paco Van Der Linden

4) Reactive Programming: Paco Van Der Linden (AMIS).  I had never heard of reactive programming but in the world of web development the developer has to worry about asynchronous events and data streams.  This paradigm (with accompanying libraries ReactiveX) makes things a whole lot easier.  Many of my reader's world will consist of PeopleTools and maybe a bit of JavaScript so might be wondering if this is all relevant to them.  Well, it's probably not if you just stay with the synchronous model of PIA component interaction.  PeopleTools is nice as we generally only have one event at a time to manage and the component processor and client-side JavaScript does all the hard work for us.  But, I wonder where PeopleTools will go with an increasing demand for smarter and ever simpler UIs.

  

Database on Oracle VM Magic from ACE Director Francisco

5) Oracle VM for Oracle Databases.  Francisco Munoz Alvarez (ACED).  So here's a conundrum.  Which should be faster?  

1. Oracle database running on dedicated hardware (using Linux),
2. Oracle database running on the same hardware but on a virtual machine (using Linux) inside Oracle VM hypervisor

Interestingly enough.... the answer is (2) - the database running inside Oracle VM !!!!  At least... it is according to Oracle ACE Director Francisco Alvarez.  How can introducing another layer of software (the hypervisor) possibly increase the performance?  No one seemed to know... but this was a fascinating deep dive into the value of visualization to Oracle databases.  Given that Oracle VM is free to use it might just be worth some time testing it for yourself.

All the other sessions from the AMIS conference can be found on the AMIS Technology blog.

OTN Cloud Developer Challenge 

My project for the Cloud Developer Challenge was to demonstrate 100% PeopleSoft Patching in the Oracle Cloud.  This involved:

1. building a PeopleSoft Demo Database using Oracle Database Cloud Service 
2. provisioning a PeopleSoft Update Image instance in the Oracle Compute Cloud Service using an image from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace
3. provisioning a Windows 2012 r2 server instance in the Oracle Compute Cloud on which to run PeopleSoft Change Assistant.

I'm gong to tell this story in detail very soon.

OTN Cloud Developer Challenge teams hard at work

Honestly Geertjan.... we are listening to your product briefing

Super Cool, inflatable session rooms.