Oracle Fusion or Adobe Flex or ... ?

I wanted to blog about this already a long time. Especially when I was at Oracle Open World last year where they showed the new Oracle Fusion Applications, more particular, the Sales Forecasting app (see my blog post here).

I’m confused, I’ve always believed the future will have four big development areas: .NET, Java, Flex and APEX (not ordered in a particular way).

Oracle can work with all four of them, some better than others. Oracle is writing their new Application Suites in “Oracle Fusion”, I thought that was Java / ADF, but at OOW 2007 the front-end of the Sales Forecasting application looked like Adobe Flex.

As you all know, I’m in big favor for Oracle Application Express (APEX) and when I’m talking or giving presentation about it, I often mention Oracle Metalink. “The support system of Oracle is written entirely in APEX”, I often say.
When I was in Metalink today I saw there’s also a part that’s not APEX! The Software Configuration Manager brings you to another url and application. Although the page is a jsp page, I believe the front-end is written in Flex.

In the beginning of 2007 I’ve been looking into Adobe Flex too. I got it working with Oracle (see blog post) and even tested how to integrate it with APEX a long time ago here (site no longer online).

I must admit the front-end of Adobe Flex looks very good and I had some discussions about it in the Apex Forum and with Carl Backstrom. He convinced me you can do the same with AJAX, css and javascript, which is true if you look at the Interactive Reports of APEX 3.1.

Nevertheless I’m confused about the strategy of Oracle, particular about their Fusion Applications. Will the front-end be completely Flex? Or will it be partially ADF JSF? Or will they do a part in APEX? ;-) And what will be the future way to go in development?

As I already said at “APEX vs. ADF” talk last year: the Java arena is changing so quickly, it looks like they never “finish” something and that there’ll be always something new and more sexy…

I believe we’ll have a mixture of all development environments. People use whatever they want, we just need to be sure it integrates nicely. I“ll keep focusing on APEX as I really believe in the product and I enjoy working with it.

But what do you think is the future? What direction is Oracle going to follow for their applications? Do you have some comments?