Oracle Developer Day

After a long absence, Oracle finally came back to Singapore to meet her developers and fans with an event yesterday. Unfortunately, I only had time to attend two session in the morning. Nevertheless, I still drew some benefits from my attendance. I learnt that:

• Oracle's Linux distribution is free for production and development if you do not wish to get support.
• Oracle XE was more than a database. It contained Oracle Application Express that allows you to quickly create small applications or share Microsoft Excel spreadsheets securely (kinda reminds me of Zoho's product offerings). But I'll definitely be looking at this product in the coming weeks.
  
• Oracle Business Process Architect (BPA) is a new tool for business process owners to manage workflows. I wonder how much differences are there between this and the BPEL managment tool that integrates with JDeveloper or Eclipse.
  

New buzzwords I have learnt:

• SDO, which stands for Service Data Objects. It's going to be an additional application interface layer over and on-top of Web Services, COM objects etc. for accessing data. Did I get it right?
• SCA, which means Service Component Architecture. Hmm... SOA 2.0?
  
• Fusion Middleware - a family of middleware products including application servers, development tools, business intelligence, user interaction, business process etc. Repackaging?
• BAM, which means Business Activity Monitor. I'm not too interested in this one, since there's no real need for such information in Bioinformatics, or is there? Maybe I'll look at it, but not in the near future.
  

There is no end name-calling. ;)

On to SL... the virtual expo made Wired's headlines. The article focuses mainly on the poor performance of the SL engine, which I think many SL residents would agree. It was interesting that the system was only able to cope with 100 slersons (pronounced as slur-sens, a new term I coined for SL residents). So according to the article, 60 vendors would mean only 40 participants. Now that's bad. But I believe Linden Labs are trying to work on the lag issues and I'm looking forward to the new version due tonight.

Last night, I made L$8 and met with a colleague. Oh, I built my first structure in SL. It was a sign post that you can put in your garden. I put this in one of the "Singapore" lands, and hopefully it'll stay. Here's a picture of it:


In two Singapore SL lands I visited, there's a sandbox area that you too can get your hands dirty creating stuff in SL.


Some symbols of the Lion City. It always start with a "C"!