As Published In July/August 2004

A Winning Combination: Two Developers, Four Hours, and Oracle JDeveloper
By Kelli Wiseth

It's appropriate that Gimlisoft, a small company whose name was inspired by the dwarf, Gimli, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, should win a contest against several software industry giants. After all, despite Gimli's size, he is a capable opponent. "That dwarf may be small, but he sure is strong and can move pretty fast," says Daniel Carlsson, founder and president of Gimlisoft, an Oracle partner and independent software vendor. This small Swedish upstart represented team Oracle at Comdex Scandinavia in January and in just four hours, using the complete Oracle stack—Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Database—team Gimlisoft's Daniel Carlsson and Christofer Edvardsen built the winning application in the Iron Chefs of Web Services Challenge, beating opponents representing BEA, Novell, Microsoft, and WebMethods.

Cooking Up New Applications

Iron Chef is a cooking competition in which celebrity chef contestants are given a hodgepodge of ingredients from which to concoct an edible dish. The Iron Chefs of Web Services competition (www.joinwow.org/pressroom/01.21.04.asp), sponsored by WOW, the World Organization of Webmasters, gives contestants the chance to create a Web services application from a hodgepodge of existing Web services, using a particular product set. According to the WOW organization, the competition is designed to give "vendors an opportunity to showcase the tools and techniques they have developed for creating Web services applications." It's an interactive event hosted during Comdex to give attendees of the trade show "a chance to watch great programmers create applications using the same tools they could use today."

From a selection of five existing Web services, contestants had to use at least three and build a new application. For their application, Carlsson and Edvardsen put together a Yellow Pages Web service, a stock quote service, and an NFL headline service. The application let a user search for companies in a specific industry or region and then select from the companies found to obtain a company address and other details, including a stock quote. While it's performing these coordinated tasks, the application also continuously runs the NFL headlines.

As Carlsson points out, one of the points of Web services technology is to enable application-to-application integration, which is why he and Edvardsen incorporated the three Web services the way they did. "Although the application was not particularly marketable," says Carlsson, "we wanted to show the Web services actually working together." Most of the competitors simply populated a browser page with the separate input stream of each of their three selected Web services, rather than tying them together the way Carlsson and Edvardsen did.

Gimlisoft and Oracle JDeveloper

Carlsson and Edvardsen used Oracle JDeveloper 10g (JDeveloper 9.0.4) to build the application, using the product's power to streamline the development process. For example, says Carlsson, "We used a lot of nice features in JDeveloper—we were able to automatically generate stubs for the Web services from the WSDL for each of the Web services. We also used JDeveloper's Business Components for Java [BC4J], because we actually had a little database connection in our software—we stored the company information in an Oracle database. It also helped us during the data modeling, of course, with the Business Components for Java framework."

Carlsson and Edvardsen also used the UIX components of JDeveloper to build the interface for the application, "so we have a user interface with tabs, drop-down menus, and the like," says Carlsson. (Based on the latest J2EE and XML standards, UIX is a precursor of the upcoming JavaServer Faces (JSR-127) standard; UIX is also used to render the user interface in the Oracle E-Business Suite applications.)

It's not surprising that team Gimlisoft was able to leverage so many capabilities of Oracle JDeveloper, because it uses the tool every day in the development of its own software product, Gimli CRM, an innovative, Java-based metadata-driven system that integrates with third-party content providers, such as Dun & Bradstreet, via Web services.

According to Carlsson, the core strength of the product is that it provides a flexible information engine that works with metadata stored in the database, so entities such as "company" or "person" aren't represented in Java code but, rather, are stored in the database as metadata.

For Gimlisoft customers, the advantage is that "we can develop new functionality very fast—in a matter of days, whereas our competitors take months or years." Because Gimlisoft's system is metadata-driven, says Carlsson, "we don't have the problems associated with version control, compatibility across various versions, and other such issues related to maintaining multiple code streams."

Gimlisoft's CRM software provides the full range of marketing and sales functionality, from displaying product information to registering support for claims or questions, for example, but, says Carlsson, "the main solution we provide is the tool for the sales guy." Gimli's CRM helps the salesperson create quotations, do mass mailings, and create marketing campaigns. Because Gimli CRM runs on everything from desktop machines to PDAs, "if he sits in his office and calls his customers, or if he is out at a customer site, our system helps him store all the information about the customer interaction."