EATD: Day 2 - Presentations, Exercise and Special Evening

The second day we started a bit earlier because we had some big topics and wanted to let the people do something!

In the morning John started with the AJAX & Javascript presentation.
I'm sure John will go into more detail about that on his blog.
There were again a lot of live demo's into this presentation. Most people were really interested in this area, which is not so surprisingly. AJAX is *hot* these days and it allows you to have a real web 2.0 app.
That's why we foresee for this presentation a longer time (over 2 hours).


After this session we had our "special" mystery guest speaker: Carl Backstrom.
If there were no problems with his flight, Carl would have been "live" in Belgium, which would have been awesome... as he couldn't make it, he recorded an exclusive video message about AJAX and APEx 4.0.
Thanks Carl! You did a great job!
The room was so silent during the video and I saw some peoples mouth falling open... Just to say the people really enjoyed it.
For us it was also an honor that we could show some more after my "sneak preview" blog post of some weeks ago.


Then it was time for the people to do something themselves. They are all addicted to pc's, so they were really eager to show their potential. The AJAX exercise went really well for most of the people. I also did a little contest, as we put a "bug" into the application... the first who corrected it got a little Oracle gadget. Bart won... but then there were other people who found some other "improvements" to our AJAX code! Of course they also got something ;-)
AJAX and Javascript are very browser dependent, so testing everything in different browsers is really necessary! It was a lot of fun.

After lunch I presented 3rd party integration. There're so many 3rd party products, all in different areas. For ex. I showed some AJAX/Javascript implementations like the Yahoo User Interface Library and highslide. In another area I touched for ex. the ApexLib framework.
Should you use 3rd party integration? Yes and no. You've some pros and cons. But there're some really cool things in "wonderland" or other additions that make your life much easier.

The last presentation of the day was about the Apex Dictionary. John showed some advanced features you can use in APEX by using the APEX Dictionary. I think this is one of the topics most people are underestimating... A meta data-driven framework as APEX can be really powerful. It's unbelievable what you can get out of the dictionary.

In the evening we organized a special "AE-diner". We invited everybody to join us to an exclusive restaurant, La Vierge Noire, in Brussels. I also would like to thank IBM and Oracle for their sponsorship. With their help we could do "that bit" more.
I really liked that evening. Talking with people offline, with a nice wine and some excellent food.
Also, for John and me it was special... we both gave a little speech and toasted on our first open APEX training days.

The pictures speak for them ;-)

The day after it would be a lot harder to present (or to keep listening) ;-)
But about the last day, I'll tell you everything tomorrow...