A letter to the editor in the latest issue of Oracle Magazine:
I am getting to the point where I can't read your magazine any more. I'm a developer, but all of the Oracle Magazine articles I see lately discuss Java, JDBC, SQLJ, JSP, XML, SOAP (Dial?), UDDI, WSDL, LDAP, Servlet, JSP, etc. In our shop, we use Oracle products named Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i. I never see articles on these products. Doesn't anyone else use them any more? Are we the last ones?Mark Castaldo
mcastaldo@strllc.com
I'm baffled by technology professionals who cheerfully watch the march of technology continue onward without even trying to understand what's going on. How can Mark know that he's providing the best value to the company, and his company to its clients, stuck on Oracle 6? Does Mark know what functionality JDBC could provide? SOAP? LDAP?
And from a magazine perspective, I wonder what does Mark expect to be written about Oracle 6 that hasn't already been written.
Re:Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i
petdance on 2003-01-08T17:23:14
Ah, mea culpa. I didn't realize that the Developer & Designer tools didn't bump up in versions like the rest of the Oracle DB.My comments re: Java etc still hold, though...
Re:Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i
ziggy on 2003-01-08T18:59:14
Not necessarily. There are plenty of shops that are using legacy software products. Sometimes the reasons are technologically and fiscally sound. Other times the reasons are simply artifacts of history. (I worked at a PRIME shop once where the main languages in use were FORTRAN IV and Fortran 77. Why? Because the system where the company initially leased computer time many years before used PRIME computers, and FORTRAN IV was the only language available...)My comments re: Java etc still hold, though...Re:Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i
ziggy on 2003-01-08T19:08:35
D'OH! Damn submit button..In many cases, scrapping a system in favor of a new or updated package is foolish -- especially if the existing system works well, but the alternatives are unknown, untried and untested (by an organization). I'm sure there's plenty of demand for Oracle-only skills, especially if a company is offering its services to organizations that use Oracle widely and deeply. Marching to the beat of "new technology" benefits the vendor, not the customer.
Of the acronyms this baffled reader listed, I can see his complaints: if he is not dealing with web front ends, then JSP and Servlets are useless. SOAP, WSDL and UDDI are not as useful as the hype merchants would have you believe. If he's not using Java, then Java, JDBC and SQLJ are irrelevant. And, because he's dealing with relational data, he may have no need to use XML or LDAP.
All of a sudden, the guy's got a very good point.
Re:Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i
petdance on 2003-01-08T20:20:24
All of a sudden, the guy's got a very good point.The point that I got from the letter, especially his oh-so-cute "SOAP (Dial?)", was that he had no idea what any of these technologies were, and was proud of it.
Far be it from me to say that there's necessarily any value to SOAP/JDBC/whatever to this guy, but he should at least have some passing familiarity with the concepts of many of them. Otherwise, he's going to wind up like the COBOL-only programmer who finally decides to learn C and fails miserably when it came to producing results.
I envision the letter writer sitting there flipping thru the magazine saying "Huh, JDBC, I don't know what that is" and skipping the article. If you see JDBC enough times, you should think "Hmm, maybe I should get a clue about it". Then he can actually make an informed decision about how JDBC applies to him, rather than hand-waving it away as "alphabet soup", yet another cutesy way of saying "I don't want to spend any brain cycles on this."
Being aware of technology and adopting it are two different things. It's of no benefit to pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
One of the things that I enjoy most about The Perl Review is brian's insistence on covering other languages as they relate to Perl. Take Ed's PHP article in the latest issue. He doesn't say "You should use PHP instead of Perl!" He just explains some differences. The reader is left with some information about a different language, which he may find interesting. Personally, part of me likes the way that arrays in PHP are keyed like hashes and ordered like lists.
Re:Oracle Developer 6i and Oracle Designer 6i
pudge on 2003-01-10T14:36:48
That's what you like, what you think is best. I see no reason, though, to think he might have perfectly valid reasons for disagreeing with you (assuming he does, which to me isn't clear). Frankly, I think the neverending technology hunt is a waste of time. I only barely know what some of those technologies are, and I don't want to know. My life is busy, my brane is getting full, and I figure if I need to know about those technologies I eventually will. To each is own...
