OOW07 Day 0: Apex Roundtable and first sessions

Sunday morning started great... My wife and I agreed some predefined times to talk to each other with a webcam and Sunday morning was such a time. As my son is only 7 weeks old, he can't say that much yet, so seeing him through the webcam was so nice, it really cheered me up.

John and I arranged to meetup at 9.30 am to go to Moscone. Almost there, Dietmar Aust popped against us. OOW is such a place you meet all the guys you know from the internet (blogs, forums, mails, ...).
As I live in Belgium, John in the UK, Dietmar in Germany, Patrick in Austria, Carl in Las Vegas, ... it's nice to meet them in real life some times.

Sunday was also the starting day of the first sessions at Oracle Open World 2007.

I had the privilege to do the first APEX session, which was the "Oracle Application Express Roundtable". I wasn't alone on stage, I was really pleased that the "Application Developers of the Years" 2005 till 2007 and some of the APEX Development team accepted to be in the panel.
Before I opened the floor for questions from the public, I asked following questions to my panel:

• Tony Jedlenski: What’s your TOP coding technique?
• John Scott: What’s your TOP security feature?
• Patrick Wolf: What’s your TOP improvement?
• Carl Backstrom: What’s your TOP web 2.0 feature?
• David Peake: What’s the most impressive app?

There were more than 100 people participating in the APEX Roundtable. Every year APEX is getting more known...

After quickly having some lunch I raised back for John Scott's session about "Debugging in APEX". He did a terriffic job as people after the training stept up to him to congratulate.

John explained some different possibilities you can use for debugging. The natural things most of the Apex Developers are using like the developer toolbar or the debug mode of your page... But did you know you can debug your APEX application with SQL Developer? John showed from all possibilities a nice demo. I think people appreciated that.



Afterwards I followed two other sessions: Tony Jedlinski talked about portable themes and templates and how he made such an application. And Raj Mattamal was talking about security. I already saw that presentation before (at ODTUG), so I already know a lot of it. But Raj is enjoyable to listen to and nice to look at.

In the evening there was a keynote speech of Larry Ellison, mainly about the history of Oracle and what had happened in the last 30 years. I found it a really enjoyable presentation. Unbelievable how it all started! I sometimes recognized my life in some of his stories. Working during the nights, start very small, building up money... There was also a lot of humor in the show which I really liked ;-)



After the keynote, John and I went to the Welcome reception. We had some food and drinks and there was a nice picture taken of us. I'm sure John will put that picture on his blog, so I'll only show you a dancer at the event.

There was a band playing music such as a song I really like "Ice Ice Baby" from Vanilla Ice. We didn't stay that long as we were both tired... so time for bed now!