This year, the UKOUG (Tech15 for me of course) is held in Birmingham. This is my first time in this city and I must say that the ICC Birmingham, where the UKOUG take place, is really an impressive building, quite well deserved by bars which is an excellent point.

This is also my first time at an Oracle event. I’m not a DBA guy, when talking about Oracle, i’m mainly working with WebLogic and Java in our Middleware Team and the first thing I noticed when I took a look at the agenda of this Tech15 event is that there is, in my opinion, not enough presentations around WebLogic. I wasn’t able to find a single session about WebLogic un the agenda of the first two days which is, for me, a small negative point because I was hoping to see something around that (monitoring, logging, performance, Security Store management, aso…). Of course there are many sessions that talk about integration, SOA, Cloud services, aso… That’s also very interesting but that’s not my main priority I would say.

Session of the day

The first session I attended talked about the Oracle API Catalog (OAC) and the API Manager, presented by Robert van Mölken (AMIS) and Simone Greib (Oracle). I think this session was the most interesting of this first day for me because we always talk about development best practices, development tools, architecture, aso… But we almost never talk about the management of what has been developed and I think that having this kind of information and metadata on the OAC Console (also accessible from JDeveloper) can clearly help to keep a clean and performant development phase and ease the management of what has already been done.

You don’t want to create something that is already available, especially if it is working! This API Manager exist on-premise or in the cloud and can be used to harvest internal or external APIs, reference and manage them within your enterprise which actually look like a great and useful tool and it can also be integrated with the SOA Suite, the Oracle Identity Manager, aso…

The interesting thing in this API Manager is that the “curator” and “admin” groups are able to publish or not the APIs because you probably don’t want all your APIs to be available by everybody within your enterprise. Moreover, it can also be used to protect your APIs with a security layer like requesting a secret key for authorized access only.

The second session of the day that I found very interesting was the one presented by Franck Pachot, my colleague from dbi services that you probably already know but talking about this session may have sound a little bit too much so I choose the other one ;).

After this interesting first day, I must say that I’m quite impatient to see what will come tomorrow.