OOW08 - work, demo grounds, APEX Meetup

In the morning I had to do some work for our customers, so I missed the Benelux event at San Francisco. I guess I can go to Oracle HQ and do some sailing next time too. Client is king ;-)

I didn't go to that many sessions, instead I went to the demo grounds to talk to the APEX and SQL Developer developers. I was particular interested in seeing more new features of the upcoming APEX 4.0 release. I saw the dynamic components, which allow to declarative hide or show an item for ex. It means you don't need to write that much javascript anymore in APEX 4.0. Another nice upcoming feature is the APEX listener. I'll do a dedicated blog post about it once I'm back as it's something really new. The screenshot shows you the new login screen. You'll see the possibility to login to the Websheets part.


Another area I was interested in was the new SQL Developer Modeling tool. Apparently the tool will also be released as a seperate product. Basically Oracle bought Ikan's software, CWD4ALL. I know some people at Ikan as it's a Belgian company. It was always nice to see them on events, so now some of them work for Oracle was a nice surprise. The romours are that the modeling tool will be a paid option for SQL Developer or you can buy it as a seperate product. The demo I saw was quite impressive. Thanks Rene!


In the afternoon I saw a presentation of Patrick Wolf, The Power of the Oracle Application Express Repository. I really liked this presentation as he touched different areas of the APEX repository. Patrick compared the APEX repository with the Garden of Eden and played some nice relaxing music with that thought.


Tuesday evening was fairly busy as I had two parties at the same time. I first went to the Benelux evening, had some drinks, food and nice chats with people from Belgium and the Netherlands.

Then I had to run to the next event, the APEX Meetup. Around 30 people joined us during the evening and we had talks about APEX and other things. It's nice to also know more about their situation at home, family, region they live in etc.

Tough night, but worth it...