Last day Early bird Registration ODTUG Kscope11

Just a quick reminder to everybody who wants to go to ODTUG Kscope11 and didn't register yet... do it today! You can save 300 USD today as it's the last day for early bird registration.

If you are reading this post after Friday, 25th of March... use "APEX" as the discount code and you get 100 USD off.

If you want to know what I find about the conference... read this post where Mike Riley, president of ODTUG, interviewed me. The post includes also tips for sight seeing, food and shopping!

See you there...

APEXposed 2010 Brussels

It's only 4 weeks away, then there is APEXposed! It's a two day (October 27-28) Seriously Practical Training. This conference is special as it's actual two conferences in one. People registering for APEXposed can also attend the sessions from OPP (the PL/SQL conference in the same hotel, same date, with Steven Feuerstein).

It's the first time ODTUG is coming to Europe and they want to make it a success. They teamed up with the local European Oracle User Groups. As it's in Belgium there's a strong collaboration with OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group). With the OBUG APEX SIG we already had a first event in June, so APEXposed will be the second event where the OBUG APEX SIG will be present.

If you look at the agenda for APEXposed in Brussels, it's unbelievable... the best speakers and most known names in Europe will present. A big part of the APEX Development will be there as well.

But that is not all... if you are a member of OBUG, you get $100 off the already low price! (You'll have to use the OBUG discount code)

Space is limited, so I recommend registering as soon as possible. If you need to spend the night, click here to reserve your room. ODTUG has reserved a block of rooms at a special conference rate.

Mike for President (ODTUG)

This is a post to help my friend Mike Riley to be reelected as the President of ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools User Group). It's not so much because I like him, it's because I think he deserves it.

During the last two years Mike made ODTUG even more successful than they were before. With his kindness, his easiness to communicate and always with a smile on his face he makes us all feel really appreciated and welcome at ODTUG and the Kaleidoscope conference.
In the last years, Mike was a real believer in APEX and made sure we had a dedicated track for that. Obviously it was not him alone doing all the work, there were many other people, but it's under his president ship the tracks really grew to what they are now (the most APEX presentations and highest quality of any conference).

I included a picture we took at OOW a week ago (thanks Joel for taking it!), so you can see for yourself how he looks like if you didn't know him yet (Mike's on the right) ;-)


This year there are 14 people trying to get elected and there are only 4 places!
So, if you still need to vote for the ODTUG Board Elections, don't forget Mike...

ODTUG comes to Europe in October! Registration open!

As announced on the latest OBUG APEX SIG, we will participate in the first ever ODTUG event in Europe!

It's a two day conference focused on PL/SQL and APEX, with two full tracks for each.

If you look at the Agenda you will see the presenters are well known in the APEX community and amongst the best in their field. On the PL/SQL side you have ofcourse Steven Feuerstein and a lot of other big names.

Registration is open now, so don't wait to register, places are limited!

ODTUG 2010 - Back in DC after 4 years

In 2006 I went to ODTUG Kaleidoscope for the first time... it was also in Washington DC and in the exact same hotel! It was also my first visit to the US, so it's a memory I'll never forget.
I already blogged in 2006, so it's nice to see what I had to say at that time ;-) (and the World Cup was also going on!)

Now we are four years later and I'm back where my "Oracle Conferences journey" started.


Time goes so fast... four years ago I was a visitor/participant. Now I've a booth with my company and am presenting almost every day...

Get me a Suite at ODTUG!

If you are going to ODTUG this year and you want me to do a favor... Put in my name "Dimitri Gielis" in "How did you hear about the conference?" when you register.

The person who has the most "referrals" gets a Suite at the Marriott Wardman Park!

I'm not sure about the size of that Suite, but if it's big enough and I win, I'll give a party in the suite and everybody is invited to come! We could even start the "APEX Meetup" in the Suite and have already a couple of drinks before we go further!
Hopefully the mini bar is big enough and has enough drinks, if not there are other ways to get drinks in that room I guess :-)

LOL

Anyway APEX will be big at ODTUG again... in fact it will be the biggest APEX event this year! Not to miss especially with the upcoming 4.0 release. See you there...

APEX @ ODTUG...

The ODTUG conference will be held in Washington DC again this year. Washington is one of my favorite places and my first ODTUG was in Washington as well... I liked it so much.

So what about APEX at ODTUG? APEX will be huge again... 30+ APEX presentations, the Oracle APEX Development team will be there, all "names" in APEX world will attend... in short a conference not to miss.

Early bird is there till 24th of March and now there is a special too. You can only subscribe for the Sunday Symposium. On Sunday you can watch some of the most well-respected Oracle APEX experts work as a team and demonstrate how to build an application from the ground up! We'll start with a set of requirements, design and build a data model, then build, secure, tune, enhance, and translate a working Oracle APEX 4.0 application right before your eyes!

Next to all the APEX things there are other development tools as well ;-)

And as like the other years, also this time there is a community service again. You find more information 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.

APEX training/sessions in the US - ODTUG

Although I won't be able to go to ODTUG myself next month, I can recommend the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 conference.

Especially this year, if you search for some APEX training in the US or you just want to speak to other people doing APEX or hear their experience with this fantastic development tool, this will be a good opportunity. It will be the biggest (most sessions) APEX event so far.

I'll follow the conference remotely as it's difficult for me to leave home and not being able to get back in a few hours. I asked a lot of people to keep me up-to-date and the more people going, the more people blogging about it, the easier it will be for me to keep up-to-date ;-)

The advance registration deadline is set for June 2nd, so there are 10 days for anyone to sign up and still not pay the full conference price (thus saving $200).

Enjoy the conference!

My participation in ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009

John Scott, Scott Spendolini, Patrick Wolf and myself prepared a really good APEX agenda for Kaleidoscope 2009. It will be the biggest APEX event so far! If you are quick you can still profit from the early bird registration.

The plan was I would also do a couple of presentations and some Panel discussions, but with pain in the heart I need to announce now I won't be able to join you for ODTUG 2009 in Monterey. I tried to postpone the decision as long as I could but it's not realistic to wait longer...

My wife is giving birth in the beginning of July and the risk to miss that is too high, especially because Belgium is so far away. Next to that it would be too hard for my wife to stay alone with our son.

So I'm a bit sad I'll miss ODTUG this year especially as I love ODTUG and APEX so much! I always like to meet all the people I meet on the internet. But I comfort myself I'll meet some of you at IOUG Collaborate in May or Oracle Open World in October this year... and I'm sure ODTUG next year will work further on the success of this year!

To be honest it was a really hard decision for me, but when I saw the below picture I knew there was only one right decision... I hope you understand.

new ODTUG blog

Mike Riley, President of ODTUG, started a new blog yesterday.

If you want to know more about him, the working behind the scenes of ODTUG or other news about the ODTUG conference, keep an eye on his blog.

I also want to congratulate Mike to become President for 2009. I know him as a very motivated person with a great personality. I'm sure he'll be doing great...

Welcome to cyberspace Mike!

Preview Oracle (APEX) Websheets - the next coolest thing

As I blogged yesterday, Mike Hichwa gave an insight in the future of Oracle Application Express. One of the things he showed were Oracle Websheets, the coolest thing I've ever seen and the next killer feature of APEX!

You can see Oracle Websheets as "Rocket APEX" or "RAD Extreme".

Websheets allow you to create a working application in no time. So it allows you to create applications in a very user friendly way. People can upload spreadsheets, extend it on the fly (even the underlaying data model for ex. adding a column), get web 2.0 features out of the box etc. So it makes APEX even more useful for "non-programmers" and it takes the declarative approach to the next level!

But that's not all, we APEX developers can also benefit from this nice piece of code as we would be able to reuse all the building blocks of websheets in our own applications or even just include a websheet in our APEX application. The best way to look at Websheets are Interactive Reports combines with tabular forms which you can edit, but with a side node it's completely web 2.0 and you've so much more features we have ever dreamed of.

Of course I could write a lot more about it, but screen shots are so much more fun!

So let's start...

First a disclaimer that Oracle has in it's presentations...


1. After you login in Websheets, you'll see a screen to create a websheet.
Just as in APEX you have different starting points. In this case we'll do the famous Excel conversion to something you have never seen before ;-)

2. We go to Excel where we have some data and copy all that


3. The wizards is really nice, after you copied it in the text box, you hit the submit button and bamm, there you go, your Oracle Websheets!


4. It looks like an Interactive Report in APEX, right? It's partially that, but I would like to see it as an "Interactive Report on Steroids"!


5. If you look at the "Wheel of Magic" you get so much more options than with Interactive Reports: add and remove columns, create LOVs, send notification mails, see the history of a record and much more. The below screenshot is to add a column Country, which exists out of a list of values.


7. The result looks like this, an additional column which you can change directly by selecting another value from the lov.

8. If you click on the edit link you can do a lot more: adding attachments, notes, links and tags.

9. Just like in Interactive Reports you can change the display of the columns on the fly


10. The result in the next screen. The Attachments column is included and you see that for a specific record there's an attachment.


11. And to keep the best for last... editing an Interactive Report, just like a tabular form!


So what do you think about that? ... I just love it!

The nicest APEX app/features

I'm in the airport waiting for my flight to ODTUG Kaleidoscope at the moment.
It will be a long flight, from Brussels (BE) to London (UK) to Miami to finally arrive in New Orleans!

I'm doing quiet a lot of presentations this time:
- Sunday: Presentation of Use Case with one of our customers
- Tuesday: I'm in the APEX Experts Panel, trying to answer your questions
- Wednesday: My presentation of Charts in Oracle Application Express
- Thursday: APEX vs ADF Shoot-out, together with Lucas Jellema

The last presentation Lucas and I did last year in the Netherlands. We decided to change some things in the presentation. One of them is to include "the nicest app or features in both environments".

So, I thought to ask the community what they think I should show.

Currently the list I thought to chose of:

• Out of the box in APEX: from raw Data to Application and Interactive Reports
• "Web 2.0" extensions in APEX: for ex. ExtJS and Dhtmlx
• Integration with Webservices, Fusion and SOA
  
• Extending E-business suite with APEX
  (although I don't have the Oracle Applications Suite running on my laptop, so it will be hard to show)
  
• Integration with SQL Developer

I've about 15 mins to show the coolest, nicest features or application around, build in APEX. So it's not necessary to show things in dept or explain how to do them.

What features do YOU think make APEX incredible? Feel free to send me some screenshots or even nicer: real demo sites or an application export I can show.

I know a lot of the applications we build are "internal" only, but if you could make a subset of it to just show the cool feature, that's already fine. If you just want to share what you think would be cool to show, just add a comment ... there might be a chance I already did some testing with it.

Thanks... and see you in New Orleans!

For the European people at ODTUG

Are you a football fan and don't want to miss anything about the Euro 2008?
But as a true Oracle believer you also go to ODTUG Kaleidoscope in New Orleans?

The timezones are different! So it's very hard to know what time they play the game.

Here's the date and time of New Orleans:



Here's the date and time of Austria and Switzerland (= also my timezone):



You still have to work out the difference in time? Don't worry, in DG Tournament I gave everybody the option to change the Timezone they are in. I created a special ODTUG entry, if you select it, the date and times will change in the New Orleans timezone.


Don't forget to bed on the games! It's all fun. If you had problems or don't know how to do it, I wrote a little FAQ for DG Tournament.

Oh... if you're worried where to see the games in the States... This is the reply of the hotel we're staying in: "Yes, we can get the European Championship Football Game. However, please keep in mind that the NBA Championship and College Baseball World Series will also be on – we can work around the events."

I hope the time difference plays in our favor. I asked to play the games of especially the 17th: Netherlands - Romania and France - Italy. They should be really good matches!

A lot of APEX at ODTUG and Sneak Preview

It's not that long anymore before Kaleidoscope is starting.

It looks like Oracle Application Express (APEX) is getting a lot of attention! Rumors are we might see some nice new things...

On Sunday there is a full day Case Studies, titled: "The Seasoning of Application Express – Must Hear Success Stories". Together with one of our clients we present "Oracle Application Express: Power to the People ", a non-technical presentation, but it will show how people adopt APEX in one of the biggest biotechnology company.

From Monday till Wednesday there are a lot (18!) APEX sessions:

• Building the New Stuff: AJAX , JSON, and APEX 3.1 by Carl Backstrom
• Advanced Oracle Application Express Tips and Techniques by Chris Ostrowski
  
• APEX Cheat Sheet 3 by Karen Cannell
• Creating Advanced Charts in Oracle Application Express by Dimitri Gielis
  
• APEX Development: Watch It Live by Bill Holtzman
• Creating Dynamite Applications with Application Express that Deliver by Kathy Hunsicker
• Explore and Benefit the APEX Repository by Michiel Jonkers
• Go Global with Oracle Application Express by Joel Kallman
• Writing a Custom Authentication Scheme for Application Express: A Case Study by Raj Mattamal
• Migrating from Access to Oracle Application Express by Josh Millinger
• How to Hack an Oracle Application Express Application by Anton Nielsen
• Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 3.1 by David Peake
• Application Express in Support of Institutional Strategic Planning by Tanya Podchiyska
• APEX Hints, Tips and Best Practices by John Scott
• You Can't Do THAT in a Browser! Extending Oracle APEX with Third Party Components by Scott Spendolini
• Use the Power of APEX Dictionary Views to Increase the Quality of Your APEX Applications by Karen Van Hellemont and Jan Huyzentruyt
• Increase Your Oracle APEX Development Productivity with Open Source Tools by Patrick Wolf
• Building Advanced Tabular Forms by Marcie Young

On Thursday I'm also on stage for the APEX vs. ADF Shootout.
Together with my friend, Lucas Jellema, we'll try to show you both environments and talk when to use what. When we did this talk in the Netherlands in December it was really fun. The public at ODTUG will be very different, so I'm curious to see how it will go.
But some people warned me! I got told I will be in the ring with an opponent that is heavily prepared and is getting help from some smart people. Like in boxing, I guess in the ring friends don't count anymore... I see it as I don't have anything to lose. Everybody expect the ADF monster will eat APEX, right? I hope they will show mercy with such a tiny boy ;-)

As a lot of European people might not have the opportunity to fly to the States, my friends at AMIS are organizing an ODTUG Sneak Preview. This event is completely free, but you'll have to register for it. Some of the presentations that will be at ODTUG, will be hold on the event. As you can see in the agenda, I'm also doing one of my presentations.

Some people asked when I would be in the Netherlands, so you might catch me there. Or you can come to our European APEX Training Days in Utrecht in September.

ODTUG's first podcast

I got a mail of Mike Riley, Vice President of ODTUG, who mentioned their first podcast.

I listened with great amusement. It was a nice newsflash, which started with some sound I didn't expect, which came back between the talks. Nicely done Marc.

Kathleen was "the guide" and talked with an unbelievable enthusiasm. She talked about ODTUG and presented the other speakers. I think I heard John Jeunette, President of ODTUG, who presented the board. Then Dale Lowery talked about the coming Kaleidoscope 2008 Oracle conference. I couldn't believe my ears when I heard my name! I feel a bit embarrassed to be named next to people like Tom Kyte, Steven Feuerstein, Paul Dorsey and some other big names in Oracle space. For APEX they also mentioned Scott Spendoline, Patrick Wolf and John Scott.

APEX got a lot of attention during the podcast, which I think is great.

Mike Riley also talked about the SIGs (one of them is APEX). I believe it's a nice first podcost... looking forward to the next one.

ODTUG - Last Day to Submit Your Abstract

Just got a mail that it's the last day to submit your presentation for the Kaleidoscope 2008 conference of ODTUG.

Title: Evolution of the Developer: Middleware and Beyond
Date: June 15-19, 2008
Venue: Sheraton New Orleans, Louisiana

There's also a new APEX Symposium the Sunday before the conference with some APEX Case Studies...

Groups @ Oracle Open World Connect

If you go to the Oracle Open World Connect site (= real-time community), you'll see some groups. Some of the most interesting groups (in my area of interest), I described below.

	ODTUGgers (created by Mike Riley, VP – Oracle Development Tools User Group) Group to spearhead some discussions about sessions to see, places to eat, arrange meet-ups, etc. Mike also told me you are free to join that group without actually being an ODTUG member. The more people, the better the discussions will be!
	Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) (created by David Peake, Product Manager - Oracle Application Express) Meet with others in the Oracle APEX Community. The reason Oracle APEX has become such a popular tool is because of the very strong community. Come and join in for enlightened discussion and information. In the past I organized the APEX Meetup's through an APEX application and my blog, but this year we'll probably announce it through this group.
	Oracle Bloggers (created by Eddie Awad) Group for bloggers who have a blog aggregated by http://orana.info/ or http://blogs.oracle.com/. This is also the group who will participate in the Bloggers Meetup organised in the past by Mark Rittman.

There are some other groups which could be useful, so it might be interesting to look on the site. I suppose other groups will be created too... November is still far away ;-)