APEX @ UKOUG

I'm running behind with my blog posts!

On Monday I went to see David Peake's presentation about APEX now and in the future. Although I already saw this presentation multiple times it was nice to see it again and see the reaction of the public. And to be honest, I should do a new post about APEX 3.2 (Forms migration) as the screens change every time he does the presentation ;-)


That session was also the start to meet all the other APEX enthusiasts.

Later that afternoon I went to Tom Kyte's keynote about The Best Way. I always like to hear Tom speaking. Basically he said that it depends circumstances what "the best way" is and that "the best way" can change over time, which is ofcourse, very true.

After the opening party we organized a little APEX Meetup. We had some nice drinks and went to a pizza place with 8 people. We had some great fun! From left to (back to) right: Joao, Roel, Anthony, John, myself, Simon, David and Paulo. Thanks guys for the lovely evening and special thanks to Simon and David to get us a round. The pictures says all...


On Tuesday it was John Scott's turn to talk about APEX Best Practices. Especially after Tom Kyte's presentation this was a great presentation ;-) To be serious, the best practices, or hints and tips that John talked about I don't think will change that quick over time. To name some of his best practices: not everybody need to login as an admin, use bind variables, use page comments and locking etc. So great things to follow I would say.


Later that afternoon I went to see Marco Gralike with his presentation about XMLDB. Marco is very knowledgeable about XMLDB and I strongly believe APEX and XMLDB can work nicely together. For ex some of the techniques are used in DG Tournament or the APEX Blog Aggregator.

Later that day there was a Tools debat about APEX, JDEV and Forms. The product managers of Oracle were in the panel: David Peake for APEX, Duncan Mills for JDEV and Grant Ronald for Forms. It was a relaxed chat about the different products and to be honest I'm not against any of the products. I think they all fit in an environment and can even work nicely together. One of the messages was that Forms is supported till 2017! So why would you migrate if Forms is still doing everything you need? But if you are looking for something else you can migrate to APEX or JDEV. We (Apex Evangelists) don't tend to do a full blown migration at once, but a softer approach where both environments work together for some time. So far that works well for our clients. I'm not sure you knew, but in the past I also developed in BC4J (around 2003) and I must say things in JDEV land have changed quickly. At that time I found it hard to decide which UI to choice (BC4J, UIX etc), but today it seems JSF is the way to go.
I found the talk very interesting and definitely something that would fit in every conference.

Later that afternoon I went to Steven Fueurstein's Weird PL/SQL. If you didn't have a change yet to see Steven, try to attend one of his sessions. They are always nice to follow. He basically talked about the "strange" decisions/things in PL/SQL. If you go to the I Love PLSQL site you can see these things and send Bryn Llewellyn a mail and ask to change it. (btw that site is created in APEX)

My last session of the day was from Sue Harper about Developing with SQL Developer. This was more one of an introduction where she covered a lot of different things you can find in SQL Developer. But I promised myself to do another post about that and the nice integration with APEX.

I'm going to try to do another post about the other sessions tomorrow.