The development of Oracle Mix


Rich Manalang just posted a very nice entry on the Oracle AppsLab about the technology behind Oracle Mix, how we developed it and so on. Read it here.



Oracle developers on OSX unite!


All my ranting aside, Oracle RDBMS is pretty good. It’s got good performance, and lots of features you really need in a database. I shan’t proclaim it my favorite database, but it’s definitely something I have no problem working with. Except for that one small detail…

Yeah, you guessed it. Oracle support on Mac OS X is kinda… nonexistent. The best solution I’ve come up with is to run Parallels with a Windows or Linux instance and run Oracle XE inside of that. But that only works if I want to use the JDBC thing driver. OCI development? You’re screwed. And the Parallels route isn’t exactly painless either. Especially from a performance point of view.

So what do we need? OCI8 precompiled binaries would be a good start. But in the end, the only workable solution for all developers on OSX in the world who wants to be able to use Oracle is a compatible Oracle XE for Intel OS X. It shouldn’t really be to hard, right? It’s just a BSD beneath the covers…

Anyway, it’s kinda interesting. If you’re a consultant or a developer, OS X is definitely the superior platform. That’s a fact (well, except for Java 6…). The lack of Oracle support forces people to develop their application against Postgres and then let continuous integration – you are using CI, right? – tell you if you made any Oracle-unfriendly mistakes. That doesn’t really sound to professional.

So, go on and vote for this in Oracle Mix. The links are here: https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/we-need-the-oracle-clients-oci-jdbc-for-the-apple-intel-osx-platform,
https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/compile-oracle-xe-for-intel-os-x



Oracle Mix has launched


The last 5 weeks, a team consisting of me, Alexey Verkhovsky, Matt Wastrodowski and Toby Tripp from ThoughtWorks, and Rich Manalang from Oracle have created a new application based on an internal Oracle application. This site is called Oracle Mix, and is aimed to be the way Oracles customers communicate with Oracle and each other, suggesting ideas, answering each others questions and generally networking.

Why is this a huge deal? Well, for me personally it’s really kinda cool... It’s the first public JRuby on Rails site in existance. It’s deployed on the “red stack”: Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Database, Oracle SSO, Oracle Internet Directory. And JRuby on Rails.

It’s cool. Go check it out: http://mix.oracle.com.