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!

European APEX Training Days - April

After our highly successful Utrecht and London Oracle APEX Training Days (not to mention our original Brussels Training), Apex Evangelists have just opened registration for our 4th Oracle Application Express 3-Day training course. This time it will be held in the nice Midland Hotel in Manchester, UK, from the 20th-22nd of April.

So, what are these training days? Well, we host a lot of on-site training for clients, however we also hold ‘open training’ days, where anyone can sign up, come along and get training by people who know the product inside-out. We believe that our training provides the highest quality training for superb value for money.

The current agenda (subject to change) covers a variety of topics, but it doesn’t just stop there. We don’t believe in just a 9-5 training schedule and one of our core beliefs with these training events is to provide an open format where you can also raise any other (APEX related!) problems/questions you might have, particularly during some of our ‘out of hours’ relaxed sessions.

If you have been on one of our previous training events then you’ll notice the agenda has changed and even if the topic description might look the same the contents may have been modified, so if you’ve been to a previous event there is still value in attending this one (we’re proud to say that on every course so far we have always had someone who attended a previous event!).

Following the previous training, we expect interest to be high (and places are strictly limited, so please don’t delay to register).

You can find more information on exact location, pricing and signing up at http://www.apex-evangelists.com/training

European APEX Training Days in the Netherlands

It's starting to become a tradition... After our successful Oracle Application Express training days in Brussels (September 2007) and London (March 2008) it's time to announce our third European APEX Training Days. This time it will be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The environment will be a bit different. We didn't go for the Plaza hotel, instead we went for a green "theme". The setting and architecture of the Mitland hotel make you feel as if you’re in the middle of the countryside! Nevertheless, it's only 5 minutes from the city of Utrecht.

Below you find the agenda. Depending feedback we might change some topics, but these are the topics we believe will bring you to the "next" level APEX developer.


You find more information about the training days at the website of Apex Evangelists.

Hope to see you there.

First days in LA

The first days in LA were nice. The weather is excellent, especially when I read it's such a bad weather in Belgium!

The first days I had some meetings with the customer. As I'm living in Europe we have most of the time conference calls with customers in the States. Meeting them in real life gave me a visual image from the voice I heard before. Also seeing the environment they are working in in real life helps. The meetings are very intense as we're trying to cover a lot in a short time frame. Together with the meetings and seeing a lot of new people, the jetlag makes me "crash" in the evenings.

Yesterday we also started with a "get-up-to-speed" Oracle Application Express training.

This kind of training I didn't do that much before. Normally I'm in front of one kind of persons: business people or beginners or people who already have more experience in APEX.


But this time they are all together in one room! Next to that, at the same time we run the training as a conference. That means my laptop is connected to a web conference tool, so people from around the world see my screen. Next to that we've a voice line open for the whole day. I'm talking to a room of 30 people, but at the other end of the line there are more. I've been talking to people from Puerto Rico, Colorado , the UK and a lot others.
You also need to be careful with drawing on the board as the people on the other side of the line don't see it. To bypass that there's an online white board functionality to use. Amazing what technology can do!

The evenings are quickly over. Grabbing something to eat, prepare for the next day and have an early sleep as I get awake at 4.30 AM.

During one of the evenings I went together with Rich and his family to a famous Fish&Chips place not far from the harbor. There're some nice spots in LA, but I'll see more of it during the weekend. I plan to visit Universal Studios, Holywood, Malibu beach.

Oracle APEX 3.1 Training for Europe

In two weeks time our European APEX Training Days will take place in London (UK).

As blogged before, on Friday APEX 3.1 went live under a big applause! If you would like to get one of the first trainings covering APEX 3.1 New Features, you can't miss our training ;-)

We still have some places left, but be quick as time flies! The training is from March, 18th till 20th in the heart of London. An awesome place! And a message to people not coming from the UK; the exchange rate has dropped... so you pay "less" compared to a few months ago!

Of course, if you're from the UK you don't have that exchange rate advantage, but we also provide group discounts.

Hope to see you soon at our event or maybe I'll speak you in the States at Collaborate or Kaleidoscope.

Thanks,
Dimitri

What should you say to students when teaching Oracle?

A few weeks ago I teached a group of students some parts of the Oracle Database.

When talking about new features and the things of Oracle I think are really good, I started to talk about Oracle Application Express. On the fly I did a demo of APEX and talked about Rapid Application Development. The students were really attentive and sometimes I heard an "ohhh" ;-)

The demo was the start of a very interesting discussion. The students have a course called "Rapid Application Development", it's not APEX, it's .NET. When I heard that, I thought "fine", how do they call APEX then: "High Speed Application Development", "Rapid Application Development times 10", "Application Development at Warp Speed", ... ?

But that wasn't the most interesting part yet! Apparently the students had to do a project: their development a part in Java and a part in .NET on an underlying Oracle database.
The students thought it a good idea to create packages and put the logic inside the database. They showed their teachers and they gave this feedback: "The database is for your data, the logic you put inside your application (middleware/java/.net)"... I'm not sure about you, but I disagree with that statement!

I prefer to have as much logic/validations/business rules etc as close to my data, in other words, if I can do it in the database, I will do it. For me it doesn't make sense to only use the database as a data store. What changes the most? I would think the front-end! Do I always need to recreate all the logic again? If today I use Java, at the same time I use APEX, C# and Flex on the same data, I need to write my logic four times? And will the implementation be exactly the same? I come from the DBA side and in general DBA's prefer to know what you're doing. If the same package/procedure/function in the database is called by all development environments we know exactly what's happening. It can be tuned appropriately, statistics can be kept, auditing etc. I even didn't talk about data consistency...

One of the arguments was "performance": if you always need to go back to your database server, too many round trips... Ha! What about the performance of putting everything in recordsets and treating these recordsets? Maybe I can do the same in one SQL statement by using analytical functions? Why not using materialized views? Who does best to handle the data in the most performant way?
Of course I also use some client side things to check if a field is filled in, so I avoid a server roundtrip, but it's not true for data/logic etc.

There're so many great features in the Oracle database that people using the Oracle database as just a data store are not knowing and not using. It's a pity.

Nevertheless, we had a lovely discussion about this topic, but afterwards I thought I was maybe too hard for the teachers. It's a fact there're two groups of people out there. In my experience a lot of JAVA developers are doing it the "put logic in your middleware/app" approach, where as people coming from the database prefer to have their logic as close to their data.

My question... What should you do when you get such a question (logic inside the database or not)?

Announcement: 2nd European Apex Training Days (EATD)

Following the success of our recent European Application Express training days in Brussels, we have set the date and location for our next APEX Evangelists European Training Days Event.

The event will be a 3-day advanced Application Express course (agenda coming soon) and like our previous event will rely heavily on lots of live demos and real world examples and scenarios.

We will need to limit numbers, since once the audience size grows beyond a certain point it becomes more time-consuming to respond to questions and we cannot be as ‘interactive’ as we like to be (which from the feedback from the previous even was one of the things that people felt set us apart from other training events they’d attended).

So, if you’re looking for some advanced Application express training, from people who *really* use it day-in day-out and can help to answer those real-world questions you have, then sign up!

Note that, whilst we are only doing a few of these ‘open’ trainings a year, we are of course able to perform on-site training specifically for your company. So feel free to contact us via the APEX Evangelists site.

You can register directly for the London 2008 training by using this link.

EATD: Day 3 - Presentations, Goodbye and Feedback

As we went out on Wednesday we started the last day a bit later then planned (as some people requested that). Probably we'll change our agenda in the future, but then keep to the predefined schedule.

I had the honor to start on the last day ;-) (see previous post about the diner and the wine, that's why this smiley). We planned three presentations and a longer Q&A at the end.

The first presentation was about the integration of APEX and BI Publisher. (I'll also give a short version of that presentation at OOW and UKOUG.)
In APEX 3.0 you get PDF printing out of the box (if you integrate it with FOP, Cocoon, BIP, ...).
I wanted to show how powerful and easy it is to create some nice looking pdf's. The slides went fine...
More than 25 successful demos, but then my pc abandoned me! Although the day before everything worked still fine, now my BIP Word plugin didn't popup. For my last presentation (see further) I installed some other (extra) XLIFF editors, which needed some JVM's (v1.6). Maybe the other JVM's broke my system or even more stupid, during the morning Windows updated itself with some patches (automated updates). A lesson I learned! For OOW I'll probably use some VM's (vmware images) so I'm guaranteed that something else will not break my system.

Till today I still find it a pity that my last demo didn't work straightaway like before, as it spoiled half the message I wanted to give.
Some people might now think the integration with BI Publisher is difficult, but it isn't. But it is true, if you really want to get the full potential of the integration of APEX and BI Publisher, you have to know both environments. BI Publisher can do a lot of advanced things, but knowing all these will take some time to learn.

During the break I reinstalled BI Publisher, so I finally could show it working. Nevertheless I got afraid my system would blow up again!

Let's see if I can convince you about the integration of APEX and BI Publisher at OOW or UKOUG ;-)

The second presentation was again for John. He talked about Network Services. I'm sure John will blog more about that...

The last presentation of the European Apex Training Days was about Localization. We thought in Europe this topic would be hugh, but when asking the attendees how much they already did with Globalization/Localization the response was fairly low.
I didn't only talk how to make your APEX application multilingual (follow the six steps in APEX), but I stretched it out to the database requirements, different XLIFF editors and that you need to think about a lot more then just the translations.


After my last presentation we answered the questions of the people.
The first day we installed a whiteboard in the back of the room where everybody could write down a question, from the session or even questions they had about APEX we didn't talk about. The picture shows you some of the questions we got.


At the end of the day we thanked everybody, asked to fill out our evaluation/feedback forms and took a group picture in front of the room. They can all be proud and say: "We followed the first open European APEX Training Days!" ;-)

After going through the feedback and catching up with (urgent) mails of the last days, we closed our laptops for the night and decided to go and celebrate the successful three day training.

We had some nice lobster in the famous Rue des Bouchers in Brussels.

What does a man want more? ;-)


We also made a little video of the training days, which you find on our Apex Evangelists site.

This is the end of my postings about the first European Application Express Training Days. I would like to thank all participants which made it an unbelievable experience. I hope you all enjoyed these trainings as much as I did.

As a final note I would like to give my special thanks to my business partner and friend, John Scott, for the great support and the way we worked together. I found it so much more fun doing it with you! Thanks John...

EATD: Day 2 - Presentations, Exercise and Special Evening

The second day we started a bit earlier because we had some big topics and wanted to let the people do something!

In the morning John started with the AJAX & Javascript presentation.
I'm sure John will go into more detail about that on his blog.
There were again a lot of live demo's into this presentation. Most people were really interested in this area, which is not so surprisingly. AJAX is *hot* these days and it allows you to have a real web 2.0 app.
That's why we foresee for this presentation a longer time (over 2 hours).


After this session we had our "special" mystery guest speaker: Carl Backstrom.
If there were no problems with his flight, Carl would have been "live" in Belgium, which would have been awesome... as he couldn't make it, he recorded an exclusive video message about AJAX and APEx 4.0.
Thanks Carl! You did a great job!
The room was so silent during the video and I saw some peoples mouth falling open... Just to say the people really enjoyed it.
For us it was also an honor that we could show some more after my "sneak preview" blog post of some weeks ago.


Then it was time for the people to do something themselves. They are all addicted to pc's, so they were really eager to show their potential. The AJAX exercise went really well for most of the people. I also did a little contest, as we put a "bug" into the application... the first who corrected it got a little Oracle gadget. Bart won... but then there were other people who found some other "improvements" to our AJAX code! Of course they also got something ;-)
AJAX and Javascript are very browser dependent, so testing everything in different browsers is really necessary! It was a lot of fun.

After lunch I presented 3rd party integration. There're so many 3rd party products, all in different areas. For ex. I showed some AJAX/Javascript implementations like the Yahoo User Interface Library and highslide. In another area I touched for ex. the ApexLib framework.
Should you use 3rd party integration? Yes and no. You've some pros and cons. But there're some really cool things in "wonderland" or other additions that make your life much easier.

The last presentation of the day was about the Apex Dictionary. John showed some advanced features you can use in APEX by using the APEX Dictionary. I think this is one of the topics most people are underestimating... A meta data-driven framework as APEX can be really powerful. It's unbelievable what you can get out of the dictionary.

In the evening we organized a special "AE-diner". We invited everybody to join us to an exclusive restaurant, La Vierge Noire, in Brussels. I also would like to thank IBM and Oracle for their sponsorship. With their help we could do "that bit" more.
I really liked that evening. Talking with people offline, with a nice wine and some excellent food.
Also, for John and me it was special... we both gave a little speech and toasted on our first open APEX training days.

The pictures speak for them ;-)

The day after it would be a lot harder to present (or to keep listening) ;-)
But about the last day, I'll tell you everything tomorrow...

EATD: Day 1 - Welcome and presentations

Tuesday morning (September 4), first day of our "European Oracle Application Express Training Days"...

Some people arrived already on Monday evening, where others left home very early the same day to be on time (one of them left at 4 am!).

From 8 till 9 o'clock we planned registration. While people were waiting for the other attendees they could enjoy a little breakfast.
It's not evident to be on time the first day in a country you don't know, so it's a good idea to have a time slot to arrive. It's also a nice time to talk to the people.
Some I knew from their blog, so it was a pleasure to meet them in real life. Some of the Oracle blogging people who attended our training; "Jornica", Patrick and Michiel of AMIS and Douwe, Bart and Menno from Caesar.

We printed a name tag for everybody and put a folder with the agenda on their desks. I also want to thank Kristel Geukens, my wife and owner of G&G Design, a company specialized in graphical and conceptual design, for the great support. She made the name tags and all layout and graphics.

The format of our training days was fairly simple:
90 minutes session - 15 minutes break - 90 minutes session
- Lunch (1 hour) -
90 minutes session - 15 minutes break - 90 minutes session

So, basically we had four sessions a day which we tried to build up logically.

For the first day we gave following sessions:

• Themes & Templates
  
  I spoke about how to make a "waaaw"-site, how we (AE) make a new design (there's a lot more than just APEX) and how to really create a theme and templates in APEX.
  Did you for ex. know that there're two main choices in creating the layout of your website/application? I call it the choice between "table" layout and div/css layout.
  Although the 18 themes that come out of the box with APEX are mainly build as a "table" layout (or another example; the DG Tournament site), there exists something else. An example of the div/css layout is our Apex Evangelists website.
  Another question I could ask you: Do you know "Subscriptions" and the different "Tokens"? If not, you definitely have to see my Themes & Templates presentation ;-)
  
  
• Authentication
  
  John covered this big topic. When we were discussing this topic before and John told me what he wanted to cover, I even didn't realize all that was in!
  Not for nothing we have another presentation only covering SSO. John concentrated on APEX users and Custom Authentication. I think a lot of people didn't realize you could do so much with the APEX (or cookie) users.
  Did you know about the authentication functions in APEX_UTIL? Or did you ever want to lock some accounts? John showed it live!
  
  
• Reports & Charts
  
  I already blogged about it before, if it's useful and advanced enough (or not) for an Advanced APEX training?
  I still believe this is a good topic to get people on the same level. For our training we had some people just starting with APEX where others already developed for over 2 years.
  
  Do you know for example the difference in a "SQL report" and a "Wizard report"? I didn't limit the presentation to "only" APEX, but also talked about SQL Developer, Explain plan, SQL injection, bind variables etc.
  This is a really good topic to include all that... it's also a topic which requires a lot of demoing, what I really like to do ;-)
  When doing this presentation, it's sure people start asking questions. As APEX is such a rapid application development tool, in 9 out of 10 I can demo it right away.
  
  Have you ever looked at all possibilities you had with reports? You can't show it on one page!
  
  Somebody knows the difference in an "Updateable Report" and a "Tabular Form"?
  Or already tried the Customizations link?
  
  The Charts section is also nice to do. I suppose everybody knows you shouldn't use SVG charts anymore (desupported by Adobe)? But have you ever tried the asynchronous update? Flash charts can really give you a web 2.0 feeling...
  
  You can link so much else with this topic: Authorization, Conditions, Caching, Build Options...
  
  I always like to do this topic as people sometimes think they already know all that, until I show them one thing they didn't know ;-)
  Nevertheless, if I know the audience is really experienced I'll probably change some things and show for ex. drill down reports.
  
  
• Performance Tips & Techniques
  
  This is really Johns corner. John has so much experience due to the APEX hosting he provides and talked about his top 4 performance tips.
  He's not only talking about that, John also proofs what he says. I won't tell you his 4 tips, that's something you should ask him ;-) But, I'm pretty sure there are not that many persons using all that.
  

So far the sessions of day 1...

At the end of the day we also planned some Q&A time. Although we got a lot of questions during the presentations, I think the people appreciated we had some time for them after the sessions with their day-by-day difficulties.


During the evenings John and I had some food, talked about the day and prepared for the next day. We were the only persons sitting in the bar with a laptop, but the waiters got used to it and were very understanding.


You may also read how John (Scott) experienced our training days on his blog (day 0, day 1).

EATD: Day 0 - Preparation

A few months ago John and I decided to organize some Oracle Application Express trainings.

First you've an idea and slowly it grows till the moment you announce it, but even then the preparation is not yet over. We wanted to do something special, give an "AE-experience" to our participants.

Second, we had to rent a place to do the trainings and chose for the exclusive Plaza hotel in Brussels.
As we call it the "European APEX Training Days", we thought Brussels would be a good place to start, as it's the capital of Europe.

Depending the number of people you need to find a room. Not to big, not to small. Although we had no idea how many would be interested to attend, we planned to have around 25 people and limit the numbers to that.

The size of the (training) room depends on the format of your sessions. Are you only "teaching" or also discussing with each other? We finally chose for the most interactive form, a U-format, in the nice "Versaille" room.

It's amazing to see how the sign ups went. You get some in the beginning, then it's quiet for a while, it starts again and at the end you get some more. Even the last week we got some new sign ups. The other side of the medal is also true, we also had some late sign offs, which was really difficult for us, as we had to pay a lot in advance.
So, if you want to organize something, unless they paid, it's not sure they will come after all.

The place to give the training is one of the things you need to prepare. Another one is where to stay, as we would have people flying in from other countries. Because we booked an hotel for the training, having the nights there was most appropriate. Nevertheless you need to pre-book some rooms. As it was an exclusive hotel, the prices weren't that cheap (although we negotiated a special price), so we also offered an alternative list of hotels.

The logistics like place, hotel, flight, beamer, handouts, food, special evening, invoicing etc. are only one side of the preparation, I didn't talk about another important part yet ;-)

The preparation of the training material! As we already talked at OOW, IOUG and ODTUG we knew it takes some time to prepare a presentation. Doing a 3-day course isn't different!
We like to do a lot of live (!) demos and have some interactivity between both of us and the participants, but all that asks for a good (and long) preparation...

This post was just to give you an idea about the preparation of such an event. You only know what it means until you really do it yourself ;-)

Tomorrow I'll blog about the first day...

Catching up after our EATD...

The last weeks were very busy...

Preparing our first "European Oracle Apex Training Days" (EATD) was a lot of work. There is so much you need to look at and until you effectively do it yourself, you don't really know what to expect.
It's unbelievable how OOW, ODTUG and IOUG are doing these events ;-)

In the next days I'll blog in more detail about the preparation, the content of our three day course and how I experienced our European Oracle Application Express Training Days (with pictures!) and the days after.

Some people who attended our APEX training already blogged about their impressions:
- First impressions of the European Application Express Training by Michiel Jonkers of AMIS
- AE Advanced Apex Training Day's by Douwe Pieter van den Bos of Caesar (in Dutch)

I already want to thank everybody who attended our first open APEX training days... you all made it an unbelievable experience!