Inventor of Oracle UCM Named "Oracle Innovator"
August 5, 2009 - 9:50am — bexThis is nice to see... my former boss Sam White was named an "Oracle Innovator:"
That's pretty cool... only 23 people in all of Oracle are "innovators," which is pretty impressive considering the company probably has 100,000 employees. That's like the top 0.02%!
I personally thought this product was innovative because of how Sam took a very holistic view of the problem. Way back in the 1990's he saw how people were misusing Java as an "applet" platform... when it was really excellent at being a server. He invented this component plug-in architecture that was way ahead of its time. Only in the past few years have people recognized this model and labeled it as the "Inversion of Control" pattern... but few still understand its power. Not to mention that the entire system was based on web services, before there was even a word for it!
Sam also eschewed "object oriented programming" in favor of "data-driven programming," which was also against the grain. People sometimes look at me sideways when I bash object oriented philosophy... but once you work a lot with "pure" objects you see what a maintenance mess it can be. In addition, Alan Kay -- the inventor of object oriented programming -- also agrees that the currently philosophy is not what he intended and easily leads people into the weeds.
Congratulations, Sam!
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