ODTUG08 - Wednesday

In the morning I prepared for my presentation, downloaded Firefox 3 and did some tests with that. It seems to work fine with APEX, although sometimes there're some strange things going on. I'm not sure it's due to Firefox or it's just my connection with the internet in the hotel...

I missed the first session and a part of the second session about "Building Advanced Tabular Forms" by Marcie Young. A lot of people have problems with the tabular forms or want to see it extended, which I also believe is necessary. Marcie explained how you can create "better" tabular forms by bypassing the wizard and create it yourself. I believe the use of collections is the way to go, especially if you need to do validations as well.

Then it was my turn. I presented "Creating Advanced Charts in Oracle Application Express". I tried to make it as interactive as possible, which I think succeeded. I talked about how to create charts, how it works and how to get more out of it.

Next it was Patrick Wolf's turn for "Increasing Your Oracle APEX development productivity with Open Source Tools". Although I already use most of the software he mentioned, like Firebug, the Webdeveloper Toolbar and some of the tools he created: the Apex Builder Plugin, the Apexlib Framework and Apex Essentials. The software I didn't use yet are YSlow and Live HTTP Headers. I liked his presentation as I also believe people can definitely improve their productivity by using some more tools, especially Firefox and Firebug.

The whole Wednesday there were some excellent APEX sessions I looked forward too.
For ex. Anton Nielsen's "How to Hack an Oracle APEX application". I loved Anton's presentation. His style, his content, the topic... very good. I will probably also need to verify some of my applications, but one lesson you should know: go to APEX 3.1.1.
With Anton and Marcie on the picture.


The last session of the day was "Building the New Stuff: AJAX, JSON and APEX 3.1" by Carl Backstrom. This session was more an advanced one. Carl is "THE" guy about AJAX in APEX, so he could tell a lot of things about all of the above. He showed some new techniques to do things in APEX, basically what the backend is of Interactive Reports. You should check his examples site out for all the examples in an APEX 3.1 jacket.

In the evening we had a party with nice food, drinks and people. I didn't stay that long as I have to prepare for the next day...