Lucas Jellema of AMIS posts a good writeup on Oracle BPEL process manager and Oracle BPEL designer tool over on his blog after attending a session at last week's Oracle OpenWorld Amsterdam conference.
He also posts a writeup of his interview with Oracle's John Wookie, Sr. VP of Applications Development about how we are Eating Our Own Dogfood by making extensive use of Oracle Tools and Frameworks technologies as part of our e-Business Suite development. The article correctly describes Oracle Apps as planning to uptake ADF and JSF in its future development, but since ADF is an evolution of our existing Business Components for Java (BC4J) framework which over 2000 developers in Oracle Apps are using today, it's worth pointing out that BC4J is already a core part of their J2EE Technology Stack which wasn't clear in the article if you didn't already know that Oracle Apps was a big BC4J user. They will evolve to take advantage of new features in the broader ADF offering in the 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 releases of JDeveloper as their schedules, and our release deliveries, allow.
In many ways, Oracle ADF's prescriptive application building-blocks (our "ADF Business Components"), its flexible data binding architecture, and it's heavy internal "dog fooding" use by applications development teams already mirror the type of environment and internal usage that Microsoft has been trying for several years to achieve with their Microsoft Business Framework. A key difference is that BC4J and ADF have been shipping for the J2EE platform, and in steadily increasing internal use by Oracle Applications, since 1999 in one form or another, as well as already in use for years by tons of external customers, too. The Microsoft MBF project is tied to the recently further-delayed WinFS technology which got pushed out of the Longhorn delivery train recently. So it will still be a while before their prescriptive application-building framework comes out, and likely a while longer before any internal applications built on top of MBF by the Microsoft Great Plains and Navision engineering teams emerges. Microsoft gave a presentation on MBF at last year's PDC 2003 conference in Los Angeles, and the similarities to ADF in terms of approach, ideal tools support, and runtime architecture were interesting to note. The presentation included some screen shots of their planned tools integration for MBF framework-based application-building, but at this point it would likely be Visual Studio 2007 or later before Longhorn + WinFS + MBF + those screen shots were something customers could start using to build production applications. Even then, they would be applications that run only on the Windows/.NET platform.
2:12:51 PM 
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