Blog On

By David Roe | Published: February 23, 2009

It’s been a really, really long time since I’ve posted anything and I feel pretty bad about it. I had a little dialog going a couple months ago from OpenWorld, but other than that I’ve not really posted anything of significance for some time. The problem was that I was pretty busy at work and felt bad about spending extra time on Oracle blog posts when I could have been doing actual Oracle work. So alas I’ve been a bit heads down most of the year, but now my workload has lightened a bit and I feel very good about a fresh year of blogging.

So what have you been working on?

The past couple months have been very fun technology-wise. I’ve actually recived a good amount of interest around the .NET API from a number of clients and even put together several Site Studio/ASP.NET demos. The integration of the two is a little tricky, but you can get the full editor functionality out on an ASP.NET form. This was all prior to the SS 10GR4 release as well, which from my initial tinkering provides quite a few new services around editing and preview(all of which are undocumented, so you have to look at the services file in the component for the list).

I’ve also been doing some work with ALUI…now known as WCI(Web Center Interaction). ALUI is really my favorite of the Oracle portals(though that could be how often I’ve been running in to it as of late). From what we’re hearing in Oracle circles UCM will provide content management to all of the WebCenter portals, but the feeling is that ALUI will provide the most functionality and seems to be the one all the demos are being run on. Please note that I could be totally off on that assessment as Oracle tends to use the word “WebCenter” as a catchall phrase for every product, so it often gets confusing about what product you’re talking about.

It’s a bit of a hobbie but I’ve also been writing some ISAPI and Apache filters. Most of my projects have been URL-rewriters, which is about the simplest thing you can do in a filter, but I really find them fun to code. Unless you’re working with IIS7 writing a filter for either web server requires some C code, which is not a language I work in very often. Really the only thing I do in C is code web security filters for UCM which is really all based on a sample project that takes all the trickery out of the task. I’ll probably post a couple of my samples soon even though they’re not exactly content management related.

Plans for ‘09

Despite the bad economy and there’s actually a lot to be excited about when it comes to content management and more specifically Oracle. I’m not sure how R&D budgets are being affected by the downturn, but it’s pretty clear Oracle had quite a few items in the pipe before things started slowing down. All of that said, here are some of things I’m hoping to write about this year.

1. Oracle’s recent release of Site Studio 10g4 will have some major benefits and changes to how we approach and when we can do when implementing a WCM project. I’ve been working with some of it’s new features now for the past week or so and I’m already really, really impressed with what it can do.

2. The hodgepodge of Portals and applications all labeled “WebCenter”. Most of my portal related posts have to do with capabilities and theory, but nothing all that tangible. I’ll hopefully be release some samples soon.

3. CMIS. I haven’t heard a lot about it lately, but it’s still out out there. Last I checked there hasn’t been much of an update though Alfresco did release a connector for their CMS.

4. More .NET….There’s a lot of interest in anything UCM and .NET.

Ok that’s it. Thanks to everyone who sent me a “where are you” email, hopefully there won’t be any more extended blogging breaks.