Surfing the Developer/2000 wave

By Daniel Bill

When you're using a complex tool like Developer/2000 or Designer/2000, it's nice to get all the help you can. That's a primary reason you're reading this journal. One of the most powerful sources of information today is the Internet or World Wide Web. The Web is basically an interconnection of hundreds of thousands of sites, each containing information about various topics. The Web can be a great source, but finding the right information isn't always an easy task. If you've used the Web before, you know that in order to find what you're looking for, you need to use a search engine. You can think of search engines as your surfboards! Several major search engines are available (e.g., Yahoo, Vista, and Webcrawler) that enable you to easily search for occurrences of key words in Web sites. All you do is type in the word or words that you want to find, then click the Find button, and voila! You have a list of sites containing those words! The problem is that a search will usually turn up more sites than you have time to view.

For example, searching for sites containing the phrase "Developer/2000" will give you a list of hundreds of sites. Filtering through such a long list to find the ones that are really useful to you can be quite time-consuming. In this article, we'll show you how to find the right information and save time doing it. We'll also highlight some of the best sites for information about Developer/2000. In addition, we'll review some of the most useful sites pertinent to application development. Table A is a quick reference of some Oracle sites.

Table A

These are some of the most useful Oracle-related Web sites.

Oracle's home page

The largest and most well-known Web site about Oracle is--surprise!--Oracle's own home page, found at www.oracle.com, as shown in Figure A. This is the place to go for the latest information on all Oracle products. You'll also find the latest Oracle announcements, offers, programs, and general information about what's happening and where Oracle's going. This isn't Oracle's only Web site. Other sites around the world provide local information, such as the Europe site (www.uk.oracle.com), which contains pages dedicated to specific European countries. An Asia Pacific site is also available.

Figure A

You can reach Oracle's Web site at www.oracle.com.

Oracle's white papers

Buried deep in the maze of Oracle's home pages is one of the most useful resources you'll find in getting helpful technical information about Developer/2000 and other Oracle products--Oracle's white papers. At last count, there were 105 of them. By the time you read this article, there will probably be even more. Usually written by the product managers and the technical gurus of the tools, Oracle's white papers provide a wealth of information about a myriad of technical topics, such as "All You Need to Create Windows Bubble Help," and "Designer/2000: The Repository API and Other Supported Access," just to name a couple. Many of these papers deal with the practical applications of using Oracle's tools in a real-world environment.

The Web address for Oracle's white papers is tiburon.us.oracle.com/odp/public/library/cr/html/cr_white.html. You can download any or all of these white papers in either PDF, Microsoft Word, ASCII text, or Postscript formats or as an executable file that can be exploded. (Note: You can download the PDF viewer from Adobe at www.adobe.com.) The next time you're out surfing, take a look at some of Oracle's white papers. You'll find that they're one of your most useful sources of information.

User group sites

Several of the Oracle-related user groups have Web sites that announce upcoming meetings, publish meeting agendas and minutes, and provide general information about the user group. While most of these Web sites won't provide much more information than this, a few exceptions are out there. Of the local user group sites, the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) goes beyond the mark by providing information that's useful to all Oracle users. Located at spieg.interealm.com/p/rmoug/index.html, the RMOUG home page gives you access to an excellent online newsletter with helpful tips and articles. The full text of the current issue and back issues of the newsletter are also available online.

More useful to the general Oracle development community are the two international user groups: the International Oracle User Group (IOUG) and the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG). You'll find the IOUG home page at www.ioug.org. If you're interested in upcoming conference information or want to order proceedings of previous conferences, this is the place to go. This site also contains a detailed list of books on Oracle topics. The ODTUG home page, located at www.odtug.com, focuses on the application development side of Oracle. You can find a summary of the ODTUG conference proceedings and information on ordering the full documents here.

Oracle magazine

One of our favorite sites, and one that's very well put together, is the site created by Oracle magazine, found at www.oramag.com. Oracle magazine is a bi-monthly publication available free from the Oracle Corporation. The Web site contains the full text of each Oracle magazine issue, back to 1994. In order to read the magazine articles, you'll need to access the Archives section of the Web site. Before you can get there, however, you'll have to follow the instructions to set up a free user account and password. Clicking on the Archives hot spot will take you to the log-in area and account setup area. Once you're in, you can click on any of the issues and read the full text.

A great feature of this Web site is the search capability. Using the search command provided, you can search for an occurrence of a word in any of the available issues. For example, if you're looking for an article dealing with VBXs, just search for the word VBX, and you'll immediately find an applicable article! You should also check out the Forum to get the "tip of the week."

Oracle Developers resource home page

The Web page of the Oracle Developer's Programme is found at tiburon.us.oracle.com/odp. Many of the home page sections are available to registered members only. Registration costs $395. However, a lot of good information is available for free, such as the Editorial Pulse section.

Our own home page

Let's not forget our own Exploring Oracle Developer/2000 Designer/2000 home page at www.cobb.com/eod/index.htm. Here you can find a summary of every issue of this journal. In each issue, you can read the full text of a sample article. If you're interested in a particular back issue, you can order it through the Web site.

Conclusion

If your career involves using Oracle's Development tools, it's critical to stay on top of what's happening in the Oracle world and learn how to use the tools to their fullest potential. Checking out some of the Oracle-related Web sites on a regular basis is one good way to do this. [Note: Web sites change frequently, so we cannot guarantee that all the sites listed in this article will still be intact when you read this article. If you have favorite Oracle sites that we didn't mention here, please fire me off some E-mail, and we may add them to a future issue.]

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