Thursday, December 29, 2011

Newsflash - the replacement for the Oracle Support HTML interface will be....HTML

Like many other Oracle peeps, I got an email telling me that the current Flash and HTML interfaces for My Oracle Support were to be replaced by a new snazzy ADF based UI.

What has irked me is the way that some people have implied that the new interface won't be HTML.One example is the Oracle Infogram ("There's a new version of MOS in the works, not Flash and not HTML"), though I've seen similar (especially on Twitter which is admittedly constrained by the 140-character limit).

Let's clarify this. Browsers mostly render HTML (though they deal with straight text, images, maybe video and some other stuff). Through plugins, they can do Flash or Java.

But the new Oracle UI will be HTML. HTML spewed by a bunch of App Servers running Java and ADF, true, but still HTML. Going further, if you actually do a 'View Source' in the current HTML support application, right at the top it has meta name="generator" content="Oracle ADF Faces"

I don't know how much, if any, of the ADF layer of the current HTML application is being re-used for the new UI. They may well have done a complete throw-away and rewrite. But it isn't a novel technology stack being used here.

Maybe this is nit-picky. I just had a horrible feeling that there might be some people out there in Oracle land (and, if I'm being blunt, I don't mean developers) who don't realise that Oracle Forms stuff is an exception and that the main web development paradigm consists of mid-tier code generating HTML (probably with lots of javascript too, but that's a separate issue).