Russell Beattie

This is a pretty good interview with Jacob Christfort, CTO & Vice President Oracle Mobile Products and Services Division. He talks about XHTML and his thoughts about mobile technologies, etc.

It's actually a neat interview with a key insight. Like Microsoft did almost 10 years ago by deciding that the Internet needed to be part of all its apps (I remember thinking back then that it was a little extreme... doh!), Oracle is pitching wireless as an integral part of all middleware. He gives the analogy of security in an application server. You don't buy a separate security server, you expect that its integrated and that's how they're pushing wireless support.

We provide a development platform for building multi-channel applications. That's really the Holy Grail that we've been after for so many years and we've spent a lot of time building wireless and voice support right into our application server. And we are very proud that we have achieved market leadership I think in providing J2EE application server support for wireless and voice.

That means you can write this XHTML XForms application that I described. You can write that today on our application server and get it translated and transformed to anything from WAP to Voice XML to Compact HTML to SOAP to HTML for PDA, Handheld PC, Palm, all of these things are compatible. So you got this multi-channel altering model on our application server.

It's interesting how they are using XHTML and XForms as a basis for various transformations which then go to the client. But then later goes on to talk about different UI flow and the different jobs that mobile devices do, so I'm not really sure if they've got their whole pitch down perfectly yet... How much reuse is really being utilized in a normal app and what exactly is Oracle doing to make this easier?

Anyways, good overview of enterprise mobile from Oracle, worth taking a gander.

-Russ