Friday, July 04, 2008

APEX is getting popular

On Tuesday I was in the Netherlands to give a presentation about "The Future of APEX".

The location was astonishing! The place is called Media Plaza and is located at the "Jaarbeurs" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It's definitely an innovative place where you get lots of ideas, so a very good place to talk about Oracle Application Express.

There were 135 people subscribed for this free seminar, so we can definitely say that APEX is gaining a lot of interest. I did a poll about who was in the audience and everybody already heard about APEX! Not everyone worked with it yet and I was surprised there were so little on the latest version of APEX. But that turned out great, as I could show them some cool new features ;-)


We split the evening in two parts. In the first part I briefly talked about my way to APEX, gave an introduction in APEX, but for the most part I did a demo with hints & tips. I like to show things and I think APEX is really good for that.

I created a completely new application and included some of the nicest features in APEX: of course Interactive Reports, but also how easy it is to include images (Blob support), do PDF printing and adhoc changes.

I liked the interactivity with the public very much! For ex. I gave an example where I created a new column in the Interactive Report, called "new list price", basically the list price of a product increased with 10%. At one time a nice lady asked me if the new value is physically stored in the database (which isn't) and how to get the changes in then. I first started to explain how you could do it, but as APEX is extremely RAD, I just decided to do it in front of 135 people. Live demo's is always a risk, but if it works, the public loves it! Doing these little things shows the real power of APEX.


In the second part I talked about the future of APEX or what we may expect in the coming releases. I briefly touched custom item types, new versions of 3rd party products, declarative ajax, improved error handling etc. but most of the time I spend on the Forms migration to APEX tool the Apex Development team is working on (I recorded David Peake's presentation at ODTUG ;-)), the Data Modeling capabilities that will be in SQL Developer and of course Websheets!

Looking at the many questions I got, the feedback afterwards and that people started to be enthusiastic with each other about our lovely development tool, I believe this evening was a success. I definitely enjoyed doing it!

19 comments:

s1m0n said...

It was definitely an interesting evening! i liked the video, also ;P great work!
Unfortunaly these meetings are rare in the Netherlands, although there is a lot of people interested in ApEx. Perhaps more events will come??

Johannes de Jong said...

Hi Dimitri,

Like I said by email, you are a great speaker. I hope we see more of you in the Netherlands for Apex related talks.

I've got two questions for you, that I could not ask due to time constraint.

1. JavaScript library. Do you think Apex will replace it's own Javascript functionality with one of the industry leaders in that field i.e. jQuery as Carl hints over here: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2424428�

2. What is your opinion of using "plug-ins" like Patrick's ApexLIB Framework & Apex Builder Plugin?

There is a group at my work that are against it.

Anonymous said...

AOEXBLOGS IS DOWN...FIX PLZ!!!!!!

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Johannes,

Thanks for the compliments.

Concerning your questions:
1. I think the current javascript libraries will be extended with something like jQuery, yes.

2. I like Patrick's tools very much and have used them for ex in DG Tournament. However I don't tend them to use in production systems of my clients, as there's also a risk doing that. Patrick is the only one who can give support, so I make my client dependent on that. Although it's open enough so I can probably change some code as well... The other problem I've fased with my personal site, when APEX got upgraded. As APEXLIB is so tightly integrated, it can be possible that something won't work in the next version.

So to conclude, I'm not against using the tools, they give you a lot functionality that is not yet in APEX, but be careful.

Dimitri

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hello Anonymous,

www.apexblogs.info works for me?

Sometimes it can be slow (during an update of the rss feeds), but it should come up.

Dimitri

Anonymous said...

NO IT IZ STILL DWN, APEXBLOGS IS DOWN

Anonymous said...

STILL DOWN...PLZ FIX

Anonymous said...

STILL DOWN....IZ THERE A NO I CAN CALL U?

ITS UREGNT, PLZ FIX

Anonymous said...

IT IS BK NOW

U SHD CHK IT NOT FAIR TO BE DWN AND U NOT AROUND

Anonymous said...

STLL NO ANSER?

U DO NOT SUPORT UR APPS?!?!!

DIZ IS BAD!!!

Johannes de Jong said...

Anonymous it works for me. Have you tried refreshing your browsers cache

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hello "Anonymous",

I replied to you already. Apparently you had problems for 30 minutes with apexblogs, I'm sorry for that.

You said yourself it was back up for you, so what do you want me to reply?

Thanks,
Dimitri

PS: the use of capitals means you're shouting, not sure you intended it that way.

Anonymous said...

sry 4 shouting.

i want u to say hw u support ur app, iz it 24x7? if nt u shud tell us so we know wat it iz.

its nt fare to give app an den nt b der 2 supp it.

Anonymous said...

STL NO REPLY?

CANT BELIVE IT!!!!!

U NOT BOTHERED UR PROGRAMS NOT WORK?

WOWOWOWOWOW!!!!!

Johannes de Jong said...

With all respect Anonymous, it works for everybody but you, surely the error is on your side. Have you even bothered to clear your cache?

Anonymous said...

anonymous, shut up!
this is a free application, so why do you expect 24/7 support within 20 minutes?? think realisitic

Johannes de Jong said...

Tx for saying what I was thinking Horst :-)

Anonymous said...

>Tx for saying what I was thinking Horst :-)

DO U 2 LIVE 2GETHER?

U GET SEXY SEXY WITH eACH UTHER!!!!

YAY U DO!

Anonymous said...

turn off anonymous comments dimitri.

stp thee looza'z hoo cant spul veri wel... innit!