I warmed up to OAS portal after seeing that they've integrated their Portal Development Kit with Struts, but I'm still not convinced it isn't just a half-wanted orphan on their product list. The amount marketing bullshit on OTN for this product is impressive, but the actual support for Portal is pretty weak.

The biggest problem with Portal is the infrastructure component, which is a database schema that is supposedly used for single sign on. When I tried to install the Portal infrastructure, got this error:

    Initializing DCM..ERROR: Caught exception while initializing DCM.
    java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00942: table or view does not exist
    

I did a google search and I ran across this article. Great, I thought, now I can create the damn schema. I started looking on OTN and there was nothing. On metalink, I find lots of people asking Oracle, "where can I get the RepCa" tool?" All Oracle seems to say in response is, "Wait a week." This was way back in April. Honestly, how hard can it be to just put a little SQL script to create the schema out there and have people run it?

I am starting to half-believe that Oracle Portal is really just a Fire and Motion attack on Java and the J2EE environment. In that article, Joel makes the observation that, "The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP." The same principle applies to chasing the implementations of any big company's software. Even if the attack isn't planned, and is really a consequence of an incompetent QA and release process, I am still wasting my time chasing the latest and greatest half-integrated, half-supported code produced by the big company.

Update:

July 20, 2004

I am updating this on the link b/c this was on the Oracle feed and I'm sure no one will bother to read my blog regularly. I doubt if my complaining had anything to do with it, but Oracle just released a version of RepCA for windows. Hell, maybe it did. If you search for RepCA, this blog post turns up number four. (Note that I did clarify a few points). Thanks to Amit Sangvhi for the tip on the release of RepCA for windows.