Extend your charts with Google Visualization Charts

As already a lot of you know, I'm a heavy supporter of the Anychart charting engine, but there are other nice charting solutions as well...

A few weeks ago a customer of us requested a chart which you can replay. My first thought was "hmm that can be tricky", because I didn't know a standard feature of Anychart to do that. I could think about an AJAX solution where we refresh the chart so you could have kind of replay in time of your chart. When we asked the customer the exact requirements he pointed us to Google Visualization and the Motion Charts as what he wanted. When I first saw that I was impressed.


If you speak about timing... Roel blogged a few days ago with his showcase application of Google Visualizations. He made a nice application which shows a lot of the possibilities the Google Visualizations has. Louis-Guillaume also blogged about his implementation of the Google Visualization Organizational tree and Maps some time ago.

For me personally I'll still use Anychart for the normal kind of Charts, Dashboards and Gantt charts, but I would use Google's for Motion and the Organizational charts.


If you look at how Google Visualizations works; it needs some code to tell it what it needs to render and it needs data in a specific format (e.g. JSON). When I talked to Roel about it he said he made a PL/SQL package that creates the JSON string (in Google format) by passing in a select statement. We wondered if his package could be called by anyone on apex.oracle.com, so we did a quick test where my APEX app calls Roel's PL/SQL package and it worked out nicely.
We had to make some small changes because if you want to call packages from other schemas you want it to run with the data in your schema and not necessarily from where the package is compiled into. You can read more about the Definer and Invokers rights model here, but basically you need to use the AUTHID CURRENT_USER to let it work e.g.

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE runddl (ddl_in in VARCHAR2)
AUTHID CURRENT_USER

I think the visualization industry is very interesting and it seems more and more people are using graphical representations of their data...

APEX 3.2.1 Patch set available - Free Gantts and Maps

Oracle released APEX 3.2.1 patch set. You can download it from the APEX website.

It will do a lot of fixes as you can read in the patch set notes, some of my favorites are:

• Unable to use greater than character (>) in expression in CASE statement of computed column.
• Unable to import SQL script using SQL Workshop, SQL Scripts, Import utility.
• Degraded performance using interactive reports over time.

But another good reason for you to upgrade is because you get AnyGantt and AnyMap for free with it. Until APEX 4.0 comes out you need to write the xml yourself to generate the chart.
I've already some examples about Gantts and Maps on our Anychart Integration Kit website, but I'm working on releasing some more.

European APEX Training Days back in Belgium

Two years after our first "European APEX Training Days" we are coming back to Belgium to do another one. This one will be held in Leuven (the town I live in) from 26th till 28th of October 2009.

The format will remain the same; 3 days immersed in APEX with all APEX minded people and taught by two of the best known advocates of Oracle Application Express :-)

We have new topics for these training days and hope that next to the things you'll learn, you'll also have fun and feel the passion for APEX like we do.

Our Agenda (*) looks like this:

Monday

• Best Practices
• Working with Tabular Forms & Collections
• Real World Apex Dictionary Uses
• Webservice Integration

Tuesday

• Javascript, AJAX & JQuery
• Hands-on AJAX & JQuery
• Mastering Charts and Gantts
• Debugging APEX Applications

Wednesday

• Themes & Templates
• Hands-on Themes & Templates
• Writing Secure Applications
• Error Management

(*) We reserve the right to change content. In the event of any changes you will be given advance notice where possible.

Next to the predefined topics we are also available to answer all your other APEX questions at breaks and after hours. As before, on the second day we also planned something fun!

You can register for the training here.

Hope to see you in October,
Dimitri

Interview in Oracle Magazine

In the September/October edition of Oracle Magazine you find a part of the interview I had with one of the writers. I had to answer some questions and then the magazine selected three of them. You find it in the Peer-to-Peer section.

You can subscribe for free for the Oracle Magazine. I always enjoy reading the articles especially the ones of Tom Kyte, Sue Harper, David Peake and Steven Feuerstein.

APEX for Sales People

You, as a developer, are really convinced about Oracle Application Express (APEX) but that is not enough...

If your company doesn't follow you, or you don't have projects, you can't really do APEX projects right?

The problem is that you need to convince your manager, the sales guy or your customer in another way.
But the typical arguments why to use APEX, in a developer points of view are not the same as what they want to hear!

Most of the conversations by Sales guys or managers are about costs (decreasing IT costs/budgets), increasing margin and revenue, doing more with less people and to get the solution for a given problem in a fast way.
(And if it wasn't difficult enough you might be in front of not only a manager but also an IT person who's not that open for a change ;-))

One of our client's problem for ex. is how to react more quickly to business needs? That is a valid question no? What if the business wants to launch a new campaign but the software/IT organization is not ready for it yet? In a typical waterfall model type of project it can take several weeks or months to get a solution. Maybe a RAD-tool might be a good fit in that case. Especially if you work in modules or an Agile way where you have more releases, more often.

It's not easy to speak those people's language if you are not used to it. I also think it depends the person you have in front of you, as some are more open for new ideas than others. I can't really give you a bullet point of "If he says this Than say that" (although I'm sure some sales people got such training), but I'm convinced that if you can help the people in front of you to full-fill THEIR goals and you speak with confident about your ideas, you already made a good start.

It depends a bit the customer, but in a lot of the cases APEX can decrease costs and get a solution faster which enables them to get more revenue. A demo is in most of the time also a good way of proving your word. But always remember it's not always the cheapest solution that is the best at the end.

There's a Solution Kit for APEX available that can help you to convince other people too.

Using Keystrokes in a Web Application

There was an interesting question in the APEX Forum of somebody wanting to use the keyboard to control the screen.

Controlling your screen with the keyboard is a challenge when you are in a web environment as you can be on different platforms and have different browsers that are not always acting the same way.

I created a quick APEX page and included some javascript to enable that page to know what keys are typed from the keyboard. During testing I thought about what would happen with a text item and you want to type something in there... you don't want that something happens then (e.g. submitting the page when you hit S). Luckily in javascript you can control that as well.

<script type="text/javascript">
function checkKeyPress(evt) {
  // get events
  var evt = (evt) ? evt : ((event) ? event : null);
  if (!evt) return true;
  // get where you are on the page
  var node = (evt.target) ? evt.target : ((evt.srcElement) ? evt.srcElement : null);
  // if you are in a text item show this alert otherwise another
  if (node.type == "text") 
     alert('in item:' + evt.keyCode + ': ' + String.fromCharCode(evt.keyCode));
  else
     alert(evt.keyCode + ': ' + String.fromCharCode(evt.keyCode));
}

// on every Key Down, run the function to check which key was hit
document.onkeydown = checkKeyPress;

</script>

New animation in APEX charts

Lately I've been playing with the different animation types in Anychart 5.

It's pretty cool as you can define animation on the appearance of the chart and/or on the different types (bar, line, ...) of chart itself.

I build a little demo chart where you can select the animation you want for the different components. Just change the select list to the animation you want and you see immediately what it does.

Spline chart with Multiple Axes in APEX

I got a message a few days ago of somebody wanting a Spline chart with multiple Y-axes as the lines had different scaling.

Here's a way to get what you want.

1. Follow the wizards in APEX to create a normal line chart.
2. Standard in APEX you have Anychart 3.3, but that doesn't allow multiple Y-axes and a Spline chart, so you need a higher version of Anychart for that. APEX Evangelists made it easy to upgrade to Anychart 5 with the Anychart Integration kit for APEX.
3. Change the SELECT list of your serie to include a special alias e.g. "{n:Computer;t:Spline;y:ex}"
   That allows the integration kit to know that it needs to display the Spline type chart, with the name of Computer and it need to go on another Y-axe.
4. Run your chart again and that should give you the new chart.

On the picture is a Spline chart with different Y-axes for Video and Computer.

Optional;

If you want a nicer looking chart you might want to change your xml to Custom XML and add some specific Anychart 5 tags (e.g. for animation). The above example you find here with the source I used.

Important;

Apparently some people think I work for Anychart, which is not true. I work for APEX Evangelists (AE), a company 100% focussed on Oracle Application Express. APEX Evangelists offers training, development and consultancy services for APEX.
However it is true that I work(ed) closely with Anychart to create the Anychart integration kit for APEX and enhance it in time. APEX Evangelists is also the main partner of Anychart to deal with the APEX related questions and consultancy assignments (e.g. if you need help with creating your charts, maps, dashboards, ... or you want training in that area you can contact AE).

APEX 4.0 Highlights and Video

If you didn't see the video or ppt of Mike Hichwa's APEX 4.0 presentation at ODTUG, you should definitely have a look at it, so you know what is coming.

I decided to take notes during the video to remember myself about the highlights and decided to share them in this blog post. So here you go...

History of Oracle Application Express

I didn't know that Mike Hichwa got inspired by an ATM machine to create APEX.
Basically an ATM is very simple;
- You authenticate
- You need to select what you want through a menu
- You enter things in a Form
- Validations cick in to check if you do the right things
- Finally the process is run
- You can get your transaction as a printed report
This is exactly what we have in APEX, no? Why make it complex if things can be simple ;-)

Oracle Shop

The APEX Development team created a more sophistic APEX application which is the Oracle Shop where you can basically order Oracle software.
The application has some nice features like:
- it integrates with Oracle Apps in the backend
- it uses webservices to check your credit card
- it has some nice integration with javascript

The Oracle Shop is already live, you see it here.

Seven demonstrations of APEX 4.0

1. Websheets (start at minute 25)
Business people are able to create an application very fast with a lot of features. You can see this as a very rich web 2.0 Interactive Report with collaboration features build-in.
But also for experienced APEX people this is a good thing as you can transform it into a real APEX app. I included a screenshot with the main differences between APEX and Websheets.

2. Dynamic Actions
This basically allows developers to write more AJAX applications without needing to write javascript.
E.g. if you want to show an item dynamically based on a value of a previous item

3. Upgrade of Anychart 3.3 to Anychart 5.1
Not only will you get nicer looking charts, you will also get more types of charts.
I also find it usefull the wizard got improved, so directly you see which type of chart you are going to get.
If you wanted to have the Anychart 5.1 charts already in APEX 3.x you had to use the Anychart Integration Kit for APEX.


4. REST Web Services
It will make things easier to integrate with other sites and applications
In the video you see the integration with Yahoo Maps, Flickr, Picasa and Amazon.
Jason also mentioned that APEX Collections will get stored in an XMLType column, so it will be preparsed and the query will run a lot faster.


5. Plug-Ins (in the Shared Components section)
APEX 4.0 will allow people to extend the built-in functionalities. So we would be able to create our own widgets (item types, region types).
These plugins you can find on a specific site where people can share them. You would create these plugins in PL/SQL.
E.g. the video talks about a plugin to get a video region, or a star-rating item


6. Improved Interactive Reports
E.g. create your own where clauses inside your IR, be able to notify people when a specific report gets changed, be able to provide saved reports (as a developer and not like now that the end-user needs to save the report), share reports, download the IR as a searchable html etc.

7. Improved Application Builder
E.g. make the most important button yellow, very cool search functionalities with regular expressions


APEX 4.0 features that did not get demoed, but are things to look forward to:

- Declarative Tabular Forms
- AJAX Client-Side Validations
- Improved Error Handling
- Improved Tree Controls
- JQuery and JQuery UI
- Item Attributes
- Javascript Date pickers
- Editable combo-box
- APEX Listener is faster and has bigger possibilities than mod_plsql. It will also be able to have native access to the filesystem by using the APEX Listener.
- This will help a lot if you store your javascript files, etc on the filesystem. It will also simplify printing as FOP will be burned in.
- Thight integration with SQL Developer Data Modeler.
- In APEX 4.0 the wizards are also a lot shorter and more intuitive.
- Better integration with Subversion (more declarative).

A release date got also mentioned of APEX 4.0: planned for early 2010.
Just a reminder; APEX 4.0 will only run on Oracle Database 10gR2 and higher. That is another reason for people to upgrade their database...

The APEX Dev-team also showed a new packaged application with higher quality and ready to see web 2.0 features. E.g. "APEX Teamspace"; which allow team collaboration. It's a nice example of a Web 2.0 application. This would also run in APEX 3.2.

If you want to see it live, you have a chance to see it again on Oracle Open World!

Stacked Bar chart with negative values in APEX

Today I saw an interesting question in the APEX Forum: "Is it possible to create a stacked verticle bar chart that can display a negative value below the bottom line?"

I tried an example with this query in the Chart Series:

select null as link, value as label, rownum*-1+3 as value, rownum*-1+5 value2
from bar_order_vw

The bar_order_vw is defined as:

create view bar_order_vw (value) as
select sysdate + level as value
from dual connect by level < 10

The result when you use the standard Flash charts in APEX (based on Anychart 3.3) looks like this:


That is not really a nice chart I would say. It's very hard to see what the values are. Basically you see two values for a date. Value 1 is blue, value 2 is red. But some values are negative.
I already tried to play with the settings of the chart, but it doesn't really help to make it a bit nicer.

Next I wanted to know how this chart would look like with Anychart 5, so I used the Anychart integration kit for APEX. I just changed the source of the swf file to point to the integration kit so the chart would render with Anychart 5. This is what I got:


I think it looks a lot cleaner, don't you?

My guess is that in APEX 4.0 it will look fine without having to change anything as there you already have Anychart 5 integrated. For now you can use the integration kit for Anychart 5 or integrate with a charting engine manually.

Edit: Here you find the example in real-time.

OOW 2009 APEX Sessions

After a short break I'm back to business.

What they say is true: "having one baby is some work, having two babies is not double the work, but more like 4 times the work" ;-) It's nice to spend time with family, but I also enjoy starting to work again. Some people might not understand that, but I guess I'm lucky I enjoy the things I do. Find the right balance is the real challenge for me.


Oracle Open World (OOW) 2009 is not far off and just as previous years there will be many APEX sessions. I'm sure David Peake will list them all in his APEX Conference Session application soon.

On the Sunday there will be a special APEX day. It will be a joint user group event (IOUG and ODTUG). Scott Spendolini and myself are hosting it. The theme we came up with is "Migrations to APEX" where we have some nice case studies from people migrating from different platforms to Oracle Application Express. At the end of the day we also have the "Ask the Experts" panel.

Next to the Sunday I'll do two other presentations:

• Mastering an Oracle Application Express Page (11-OCT-09 11:45 - 12:45 Hilton Hotel)
  
• Impress Your Clients with Interactive Dashboards in Oracle Application Express (12-OCT-09 10:15 - 11:15 Hilton Hotel)
  

I look forward to OOW already as it will be nice to see the people I missed at ODTUG. I also wonder what Larry has to announce this time.

See you at San Francisco.

Emmeline: "Hello World"

We had to wait for some time, but yesterday she finally agreed to come out of the save environment of mummies tummy and have a look at this world.

Emmeline got born on the 16th of July at 17.40h. She's a bit smaller than her brother; her weight is 2755 gram and she has a length of 47 cm.

On the picture you see mummy, our son Matthias and our few hours old daughter Emmeline.


Mummy and Emmeline are doing great. For Matthias everything is a bit strange but he's handling it very well so far.

A proud father.

Mac OSX Software I like

Sometimes I get the question which Mac OSX software I use. So here's a list of programs I've installed. Some I use often others less often. If you use other nice software, feel free to add!

Standard Mac Software:

• Address Book
• AppleScript
• Automator
• Calculator
• Dashboard
• Dictionary
• Expose
• Font Book
• Image Capture
• TextEdit
• Unison
• Utilities
• Spaces
• iCal
• iSync
• Stickies
• Server - because we also have Mac OSX Server

Office:

• iWork
• iLife

Internet Applications:

• Adium - chat
• iChat - chat
• Colloquy - irc (not used that much)
• Cyberduck - ftp client
• DynDNS Updater - link a hostname to an ip
• Dropbox - online storage
• Firefox with different plugins (YSlow, LiveHTTPHeaders, Firebug, ColorPicker, ...)
• Safari - standard browser on OSX
• GoToMeeting - to do remote support and meetings
• SSH Tunnel Manager - ssh
• Meerkat - ssh
• Cisco VPNClient - vpn
• Viscosity - vpn
• Skype
• Mail
• Twitterrific - twitter reader
• Reader Notifier - get rss updates
• Yuuguu - connect to others
• Transmission - download files

Graphical Software:

• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• Adobe Flash CS3
• Adobe Illustrator CS3
• Adobe InDesign CS3
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• PDFpenPro - edit pdf
• Paintbrush
• OmniGraffle Professional 5 - make schemes
• iWeb - make websites

Games:

• Chess
• Quinn - tetris like
• MasterMind - dashboard plugin
  

Entertainment:

• DVD Player
• DivX Converter
• DivX Player
• EyeTV - makes it able to watch tv on my mac
• Flip4Mac - be able to play wmv
• GarageBand - audio
• Front Row - menu to all entertainment
• iDVD
• iMovie
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• ScreenFlow - record video
• Photo Booth
• VLC - play video
• QuickTime Broadcaster
• QuickTime Player
• VisualHub - convert video (not updated anymore)
• Spotify - play any song (only works when I'm in the UK)
• BookSmart - online creation of you photo albums
• WorldRadio widget - listen to radio as dashboard app
  

Local/External storage:

• ExpanDrive - Mount drives even through ftp etc
• Macfusion - extend to other filesystems
• SuperDuper! - backup your Mac

Phone:

• Missing Sync for Windows Mobile - I've an HTC and not an iPhone, so need extra software to sync agenda, contacts etc
• TomTom HOME - on my phone I have also GPS and navigation software

Oracle related:

• Oracle SQL DataModeler - SQL Modeler
• Power*Architect - SQL Modeler
• SQLEditor - SQL Modeler
• SQLDeveloper - my day to day tool to talk to the Oracle database
• Versions - SubVersion client
• VMware Fusion - to get access to my remote machines

Project Management:

• Merlin - allows to estimate the work and breakdown in pieces
• Mindjet MindManager - read MindMaps
• OmniFocus - to do list which is able to sync as well

Text Editor:

• SubEthaEdit - allows to work on a text with more persons, real time editing
• TextMate - favorite text editor

OSX Tools:

• OmniDazzle - mouse focus and effects
• Quicksilver - lunch commands fast
• StuffIt Expander - zip like
• 1Password - store passwords in a secure way
• Wallet - store passwords in a secure way
• World Clock Deluxe - to keep an eye when my clients get awake
• iBank - trying that, MS Money type app
• Caffeine - let your Mac never go in sleep mode
• Time Machine - automated backups
• iStat Pro widget - shows a lot of information about your Mac (ip, temperature etc)
• AccuWeather widget
• SysTran translation widget
• Currency converter widget
  

For the people who want to work faster, here's a good list of shortcuts for OSX.

SQL Modeler for Mac OSX (Part 2)

Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard commented on my previous post about SQL Modeler for Mac OSX, that I had to check out a tool called Power*Architect.

So I thought to give it a go. The steps to get it running:

• Go to the SQL Power website and download Power*Architect
• As most OSX applications you install by dragging the application in your Applications folder
• So now I wanted to get an ERD of some tables, so you run Power*Architect and select from which Data Source you want to capture.
• I had to download the Oracle 10g JDBC driver first (apparently 11g is not yet foreseen in Power*Architect)
• In the User Preferences you can tell where the driver can be found
• Next I dragged-dropped from the interface the tables I wanted to the right hand side, but the tables where not nicely ordered
• Luckily there is a button "Automatic Layout" which I pushed and that gave me the below result

As far as I've tested Power*Architect, it looks very promising. It's definitely a tool I will try a bit more in the future.

SQL Modeler for Mac OSX

On the first of July Oracle's SQL Developer Data Modeler got a production release. You have the choice between a full version and a Viewer only version.

I installed the full version on my Mac to see how it is like. These are the steps I followed to get it working on my MacBook Pro:

1. Download the zip file from OTN
2. Unzip the file in my Applications folder
3. You'll see a folder called "datamodeler"
4. I ran a Terminal session to call this command: sh datamodeler.sh
5. The first time SQL Developer Data Modeler asks you to enter the full pathname of a J2SE installation. For me the path is:
   /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home
6. Next SQL Developer Data Modeler opens and you are good to go
7. I tried to generate a relational and logical datamodel and it worked great (see below screenshot of the DG Tournament schema
   
   
   

As expected Oracle didn't make the tool for free. I hoped differently, but apparently Larry decided against it. The latest Oracle pricelist shows under the Tools section the price of SQL Developer Data Modeler. The first year you pay USD 3,000 + USD 660 (support and upgrade), from the second year onwards it's 660, but that gives you the right to install all updates. I definitely think the product can justify the price, but maybe not for everybody or in every project as you might not want to use all the features.

One of the most important parts for me is viewing the ERD in a graphical way. I tend to use the ERD to explain clients how we see the application. Or if we come in when the application already exist, to quickly know what is going on behind the scenes. Till now I used SQLEditor of MalcolmHardie Solutions. It allows me to connect to a database and get the ERD for a schema or certain tables. It can do a lot more like adding tables, columns etc and you can see the sql statements in different formats. Below is a screenshot of the same schema as the picture before.


Most of the time I have to rearrange the tables so it's more logic and more understandable. Personally I think Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler looks a bit better and it has more features and I had to not rearrange that much as with SQLEditor. But then I guess that explains the difference in price ;-) SQLEditor costs $79.

I still have a lot to learn of the functionalities of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, but what I saw at the conferences and what I could do so far, I definitely think it's worth for you to give it a try.

Thank you for the award

Next to the two APEX surprises yesterday I got a personal surprise from the ODTUG front today. It made me happy, proud, smile ...

I got the "Best Speaker Award" for content and topic.

I knew I was nominated and somewhere in the top 5, but I didn't dream of winning it! Of course I would like to thank the whole APEX community, ODTUG and all the people at the conference.


The twitter stream at the ODTUG conference is going well. I'm now following two APEX presentations at the same time as people in both rooms twitter ;-) I really wish I could see Scott Spadafore do his security presentation. "He's the man", as Carl would have said.

Two APEX surprises at ODTUG

Although I'm not phisycally at ODTUG, I'm following it closely with the blogs, the twitter feeds and my friends who keep me up-to-date.

As said earlier, ODTUG will host the biggest number of APEX sessions at a conference so far. But it looks like the numbers of attendees in the APEX sessions will also break a record (over 200 people).

On Sunday there was the APEX Symposium. Clients talked about their experience with APEX and showed some Case Studies. Last week in the Netherlands I saw Olivier Dupont's session about APEX at Brussels Airport. That was a good example how APEX can be used on "terminals" (pc's without mouse and where no software can be installed).
Martin Giffy D'Souza also talked about some applications they created and use at Cognera. We worked close with Cognera on an application they are providing to their clients (SaaS model). They did some nice things with APEX.

There were also two surprises, as David Peake announced on his blog.

People in the room got the first ever Oracle Application Express t-shirts! John got also one for me, so I look forward to see them. Maybe the people at the APEX Meetup (Monday night) can all wear that t-shirt? And then take a picture... that would be awesome!

The other surprise was the announcement of Oracle Application Express Developer Competition 2009. You find more information on David Peake's blog and on OTN.
It will be nice to see what APEX applications people come up with... and you don't have to do it for free! You can win a trip to Oracle Open World. If you don't know what it is or never have been there, that is definitely something you want to see as it's the biggest Oracle conference of the world. Good luck with the competition!

Web development with Safari 4

I'm really a "Firefox with Firebug" fan if we are talking about Web development.

I wouldn't know what to do without Firebug as it allows me to investigate my page, run and debug my javascript code, change the styles on the fly, see which files are missing and much more.

But as you probably know, the biggest challenge in web development is being browser compliant. Typically I develop my APEX applications in Firefox, test it there and run another test in Safari (I'm developing on Mac). Having two browsers open is also handy to test session state and what is happening when multiple users are in the application.

I always dreamed of having Firebug also on Safari as sometimes something was working in Firefox but not in Safari. There is a Firebug lite, but I never liked it that much.
A few days ago I upgraded to Safari 4 and enabled the Develop toolbar (Preferences - Advanced).



You get a new Develop menu with a lot of options, just like in Firebug. I like it very much and the Web Inspector is also very impressive. I would definitely recommend to have a look at it, if you have a Mac and are doing web development.



In Safari 3 you could enable Web Inspector as well, but you had to run the following command in a Terminal window: "defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true"

If I test my applications in IE, I use the Web Developer toolbar.

Improve your charts in APEX without coding

I just added another video to the Anychart integration kit for APEX website which shows you in three and a half minutes how to get nicer charts in APEX without having to change a single line of code in your application.

In the previous video we extended the charts in APEX with the new charts so they can both be used, but this time we want that all existing and future charts are using the new charts from the integration kit.

The advantage:

• If you have a lot of charts already created in your APEX application they will get replaced by the new charts without having to change anything. All your charts will look new.
  
• Another advantage is that in the wizards of APEX the new version will be shown directly.

To do this, we take the files of the integration kit (Anychart 5.1) and will overwrite the existing Anychart 3.3 files in APEX. You can see exactly how it works in the below video.



If you prefer to download the video and play in your favorite media player (e.g. QuickTime) you can do that here.

ODTUG Sneak Preview and Meetup

As the tradition wants, AMIS is organizing another ODTUG Sneak Preview on June 15. Two weeks before the real ODTUG conference the Dutch and Belgian speakers try-out their presentation. It's not only nice for the speakers to get feedback, but also for the people who can't go to ODTUG they can see some presentations. Although I had to cancel my trip to the States, I'll still do one of my planned ODTUG presentation at AMIS. The event is free, but you have to register here (site in Dutch).

At ODTUG there is also another APEX Meetup. It's always great fun to meet others and have some beers together. This time John is organizing it. You find all details here. Enjoy!

ODTUG is also encouraging people to Twitter and Blog, which I think is great, so people who can't join can get a feeling of the conference.