At the end of summer, the yearly Oracle Summer Camp takes place. For the seventh time in succession, the venue was the Lagoas Park Hotel in Oeiras near Lisbon:
This event is offered exclusively to Oracle Partners and features 5 days of hands-on trainings on a range of tracks (although you can choose only one track):
- Process Cloud Service & Application Builder Cloud Service
- API Cloud Service & Integration Cloud Service
- Cloud Application Development: OracleJET + Developer Cloud Service, Application Container Cloud Service, Oracle Stacks + Container Cloud Service, Wercker & Oracle Management Cloud Service
- Chatbots
- Enrich SaaS with PaaS (CX & ERP Cloud)
The trainings offer the opportunity to get trained by Oracle Product Managers and have a deep-dive experience into one of the tracks. For me, Cloud Application Development was the track of choice for this year to get some real hands-on experience with the different Oracle Cloud offerings and related products on this topic.
… to find some old acquaintances in the bar and having dinner and a few small beers.
As you can see from the picture below, at the time the cloud environment
around the hotel had already been provisioned.
The first day started off with the community’s “pater familias”, Oracle’s Jürgen Kress, for introductions and the program. For my track, this started off with one and a half days of introduction and hands-on Oracle Jet by Geertjan Wielenga. Although this part did not directly need any cloud environment, it was still a valuable introduction into JavaScript based development and a look into the future of Oracle’s UI technologies, as all Cloud-based products already have or will migrate to OracleJET as their UI technology. For me, it shows how we can build upon (or extend) Oracle’s native Cloud UI to offer new functionality or integrate our offerings into the same toolkit. And the good (and unexpected) thing is that the entire OracleJET toolkit is extensively documented and comes with a very large set of components, which use is documented and exemplified in the online OracleJET Cookbook.
beautiful Lisbon and seemingly had dinner in Hulk Hogan’s Portuguese Fish restaurant.
The next topic on the agenda was kicked off Wednesday by Oracle Product Managers Maciej Gruszka & Peter Nagy and concerned Cloud Application Development. During these sessions, we covered a whole range of topics from Oracle’s Cloud Application Development portfolio. Ranging from Oracle’s Developer Cloud Service (SCCS, CI, WIKI etc. in the cloud) to its polyglot Application Container Cloud Service to run Python, Java SE, Ruby and Node.js applications.
But for me, the most interesting topic was the introduction to the recently acquired Wercker stack. In a nutshell, my description of this tool would be: “cloud-based platform that CI’s your application into a Docker image”, making this an ideal tool for your microservices environments. Using a simple YAML file, this allows developers to build a CI/CD workflow consisting of pipelines and steps to produce new docker images. For me, this is really something to spend some extra time on in the next weeks and I am looking forward to it!
For Thursday night, we were invited to attend the Oracle provided “Networking Dinner”. This year’s event took place in a nice industrial location in Lisbon, the LX factory
On the final day of our training track, I did some hands-on work on the Oracle’s JCS (Java Cloud Service), by migrating an Java EE app running on-premise (inside my VirtualBox environment) onto the Oracle Cloud Service. Finally, we were introduced to Oracle’s Management Cloud Service but I must confess that this covers the more “operational” side of things and as I am mainly working as a developer, I decided to skip the labs and perform some more diving into Wercker.
Although I liked Portugal very much, both the food and the climate, one of the good things of returning home was saying goodbye to Portugal’s Superbock and having a decent beer to kick off the weekend:
