Ruby loves me too much

The last couple of weeks I got quiet a lot of comments on my blog from one or multiple Ruby developers. Although my sites and blog are Oracle and APEX related and I more than once said that I'm not into Ruby, I keep getting these messages.

With the update of the Euro 2008 in DG Tournament it got even worse. Somebody posted in the shoutbox some "Rby Rox!" messages and other none for public material. I don't mind people saying they love Ruby as I do the same for APEX, but there are limits. I've never been on a Ruby site to say that APEX rocks, although it does ;-) To be fair I don't visit these sites as I'm not interested in developing with Ruby. I even don't mind people trying to convince me that another technology would be a lot better, if they give valid arguments. Posting 100 times that Ruby Rocks, is not convincing I would say. If there would be messages that Ruby is x times more secure because of ... or it's easier to learn... or it's more scalable and some figures around it, that's more convincing.

So I'm writing this blog post as these persons can now comment on this post instead of commenting on my other posts.

People are getting clever, they take your identity and do some posts... these days it's easy to create a login somewhere with the firstname and lastname of for ex. Pamela Anderson. The problem start when they start posting or mailing people with that identity. Are there still ethics?

So more about Ruby:
- There's a nice song which really describes these people:

And the text:

- Kaiser Chiefs Lyrics
- Another post I found about Ruby which got a lot of attention. To be fair I didn't read it completely, but one sentence is true: "There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts."
Of course it wouldn't be fair to generalize it for all Ruby lovers.

I'm an APEX lover and as long as I can do whatever I want with my favorite tool, I'm not likely to change...

Using Subversion in SQL Developer... Easy?

I find doing database development with Subversion a challenge. Maybe I'm not using it correctly, but at the moment I don't like the way it's working in SQL Developer.

For an APEX developer, SQL Developer is a real blessing, especially when you're on a Mac like me and there are not that many choices in this kind of software. The integration with Oracle Application Express is really nice, but that's probably worth another post.

Why would you use Subversion? If you're with more people on the same project, how do you control who's changing what? In Apex you can lock a page you're working on, but how about PL/SQL packages? Subversion can help you to keep versions of the code and have a control of who changed what and when.

I wanted to blog about the way I'm working with Subversion and really wonder if there's not a better way of doing things.

To start, what you need is a Subversion repository where you can connect to.
The connection wizard is working well. A screenshot of the Versioning Navigator, the Subversion tree and the properties of my subversion connection:


If everything is working you'll get a tree of directories and files which you can navigate.

So I've access to my repository of files. Let's start coding...

You can view the files by clicking on it in the tree of Versioning Navigator, but you can't edit them. You first need to check them out to a local directory and then Open your local files. I was really surprised you can't check out a file, you need to check out the entire directory! Once you know it, you get used to it and maybe it isn't that bad anyway.
It would have been nice if I double clicked on the repository, that it would give me the option to load the local copy, but that's not the case, you need to do it the hard way and open it by searching for it yourself in your local copy.

Once your local file is open, you've some possibilities like Lock, Update, Commit etc. the typical things I would say. First I do an update as I want to be sure I've the latest version.
A nice thing about Subversion is that it can merge files/changes. So when somebody else changed something while I was also changing it, after doing an update both changes got merged.

I'm changing my loaded package from my local file system and want to compile it into the database, but that's another difficulty with the current implementation in SQL Developer. You can compile your package, but the log window is not available, so you don't know if you've errors or not. That's very annoying... So you need to go to another window in SQL Dev to compile it properly.

When I'm happy with the changes in my package I update again and finally do a commit in Subversion.

The flow is not "flowing" enough for me...

Following changes in the implementation would help me:

• Get a visual indicator that somebody is working on a file from the subversion tree or in the database tree itself.
• Be able to do a compile and see the log window
• When double clicking on a package in the database or in the versioning tree have the option to load the local copy (linked to subversion). Automatically an Update is done, so I'm sure I'm working on the latest version.

How do you work with Subversion? Do you have some tips and tricks for me?

Sorry ...

Apparently my procedure for sending mails is not working like it should.

Yesterday I updated DG Tournament with the Euro 2008 fixtures. Today I used a screen in my admin module to send out a mail to announce it to the people who played with the World Cup 2006 app. The initial program, created in 2006, supported one tournament. At the end of 2006 it got rewritten to support multiple tournaments.

Apparently I missed in my mail procedure a parameter to only send mails for the current tournament (more technically in the WHERE clause).

I want to deeply apologize for the "spam" some of you may have had.

I will never forget a quote of Tom Kyte: "It ain't so much the things we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's the things you know, that just ain't so or just ain't so anymore or just ain't always so."

I thought my procedure of 2006 would still work ;-)

Have fun with Euro 2008 and bet

If you're a football enthusiast like me, June 7 will be marked in your agenda!
The start of the EURO 2008 tournament is coming closer. My country (Belgium) is not making part of the participating teams. I find it also a pity that England won't be there as I'm a huge fan of David Beckham. Some people don't like him, but have a look at this video from this weekend!



Although my favorite teams won't play, Euro 2008 will still be worth to follow! One of the matches I really look forward to is the Netherlands against Italy.

Do you remember the World Cup 2006? At that time I created an APEX application to keep track of the scores. It got extended so you could also bet on the games and that was so much more fun. Some people asked me to do it again in for Euro 2008, so here we are. A few weeks before the start of the tournament, I'm happy to say DG Tournament is open for you to play again!


I think it's an excellent chance to bet with your colleagues, family, friends or enemies ;-) You can bet on the games for free, it's just for fun. As this application was also created to promote Oracle Application Express, we give the person who wins the bet a free ticket for our European Apex Training Days in September in the Netherlands. But as the application is also open for others we also give you the choice for an iPod Shuffle.

If there are other people or companies wanting to sponsor, feel free to write me a mail or add a comment on this post. The initial goal is to have a lot of fun again, but if we can win something it's always nice too.

Good luck!

Local APEX patched successfully

This morning I patched my local Application Express installations to 3.1.1.

I went to Metalink to download the patch. The full APEX 3.1.1 installation is also available now.

Unzip the file and read the Patch notes. Basically I had to login as SYS on my 11g database and run apxpatch.sql. After 4:36 minutes my APEX 3.1 was patched to 3.1.1. The only thing left to do was to copy the images directory. This is different if you run Apache or the Embedded PLSQL Gateway. A few seconds later I was done.

Starting my listener and going to APEX in my browser and seeing it worked ;-)

Nice if everything is going so smoothly! Thanks APEX-team.

APEX 3.1.1 Patch set released

Joel Kallman just blogged that the Oracle Application Express 3.1.1 patch is released on Metalink.

As it's already night in Belgium, I'll have a look at it tomorrow. The full version will hopefully be available by then too.

There are no new features, just bug fixes. Time to update our servers ;-)

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.

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.

Vote for APEX, somebody gets worried

OracleNerd, aka Chet Justice, wrote a blogpost that his poll about "Have you used Oracle Application Express" doesn't have that many votes for APEX.

I believe he's getting a bit worried, so I decided to call the tight APEX community to vote for APEX on his survey.

Maybe the APEX users don't read his blog or the people who voted just didn't know about APEX... Even without the big Oracle marketing machine, I can't believe that APEX is still not that known. Application Express is getting more and more adopted, especially with Oracle 11g it's taking off. So, I don't worry that much, otherwise I wouldn't have founded a company only doing APEX ;-)

Lets give OracleNerd a warm APEX vote, so he also feels a bit better!

Sometimes you love you chose Oracle

The last days it's really hot in Belgium. Working when it's hot is not good for our brains and the computers as they get overheated.

Some people are distracted as they think about the pool all the time, some others get grumphy and some others make mistakes...

In the last couple of days I had to use the flashback feature of the Oracle database more than the last 6 months together. When you get a mail like: "I had to change something, but accidentally deleted the whole text. Can you please put it back?"

At that time you're so glad you use an Oracle database! Can you do something like this in MySQL or MS SQL Server?

SELECT *
FROM my_table AS OF TIMESTAMP TO_TIMESTAMP('2008-05-12 08:00:00', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS');

Another command I had to use for myself, when I dropped a table in development, but forget to look at the logic of an existing trigger of that dropped table:

FLASHBACK TABLE my_table TO BEFORE DROP;

I guess everybody already knew about flashback in Oracle (if not, Tim Hall wrote a nice compact page about flashback), but then I wonder sometimes why people ask me if APEX also runs with other databases... Oracle has to many nice features buildin, so some want to use another database I guess ;-)

I'm happy the sun is shining and I'm using an Oracle database during these days.

ApexBlogs.info updated

I updated apexblogs.info with a Blog Roll on the right side, so next to clicking on the arrow after Blog Selection, which would slide down and show you the aggregated blogs too, you have a link to all APEX blogs.

I also added support for Windows Live blogs. So if you've a blog like Jason Aughenbaugh, you can get aggregated too.

If you're also blogging about Oracle Application Express (APEX), but don't find yourself in the list, please put a comment on this entry and I'll add you.

If you don't have a blog yourself, but want to do a blog post with somebody or just share your ideas, that's also possible. Login to the site (if you don't have a login, create one for free) and go to Your Posts. In there you can write your blog post and it will be shown in the aggregated blogs screen.

Posting HTML items in an APEX environment

Ever got a nasty HTTP 404 error message in APEX? Or your url stays at /pls/apex/wwv_flow.accept and it doesn't do anything?

I had one on apexblogs.info, but not all the time, only occasionally. I couldn't understand what was going on.

What I normally do is having a look insight my page in Application Express to see what's going on. If I don't see it directly, I try some debugging techniques to investigate further, but I didn't find anything special in APEX or SQL Developer.
With Screen Sharing on my Mac I can easily show it to others too. Especially with XP programming it's useful, so also this time I showed John Scott, my partner at Apex Evangelists. His reaction is always to look into the Apache logs and most of the time that's where you find more information, but even then...

This is what was in the Apache log when I got a 404 error on apexblogs.info:

Tue Apr 22 09:02:54 2008] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] [ecid: 1208851374:a.b.c.d:29454:0:667,0] mod_plsql: /pls/apex/wwv_flow.accept HTTP-404 \nwwv_flow.accept: SIGNATURE (parameter names) MISMATCH\nVARIABLES IN FORM NOT IN PROCEDURE: CODE\nNON-DEFAULT VARIABLES IN PROCEDURE NOT IN FORM: \n 11:44 MISMATCH\nVARIABLES IN FORM NOT IN PROCEDURE: CODE

I was pretty sure my variables where correct... John spotted it. Some posts included html items which APEX interpreted not correctly. Well, APEX shouldn't interpret it neither, so the fix was to escape the items. I couldn't escape the whole message (or data I get from the rss feeds) as I want to reproduce the post as accurate as possible.

I hope the problems with apexblogs.info are fixed now. Time to develop further and in the meanwhile, if you find another error, please tell me.

APEX SIG meeting - latest news

As I posted earlier, we had an APEX SIG (Oracle Application Express Special Interest Group) meeting at Collaborate 08.

David Peake, product manager of Application Express, gave some unofficial insights in what's coming... David just wrote an article on his blog about the Oracle Application Express New Features (> 3.1) 

I guess everybody knew the next release of APEX would be 3.1.1 which includes some fixes for the 3.1 release.

Other things we (as APEX community) requested for a while:  improved Tabular Forms and Error handling, 3.1 updated packaged applications, new white papers... They are logical next steps for post 3.1 (maybe not yet 3.1.1, but 3.2 or 4.0)

The biggest announcement however was the migration of Oracle Forms to Application Express. There were already some rumors about it, but it was never really said. I believe this migration tool and that APEX comes with 11g out-of-the-box, will be the big break-through for APEX.

In December, during the APEX vs ADF shootout, a lot of Forms people were in the room. Before (and still) Oracle marketing is pushing these Forms people to the Java stack, but in my opinion, migrating from Forms to APEX is the most logical step. Will migrating to APEX be a fit in 100% of the cases? Probably not, but the experience of the Forms people is more in line with APEX than with Java.

I'm curious to see how the APEX vs ADF shootout will be at ODTUG. I'm expecting to get a lively discussion in New Orleans as  there will be a lot of passionate and knowledgeable people in the room for both technologies! But I feel confident that the other "APEX-names" will back me up! I posted before APEX vs ADF: Round 2, that picture might become reality. When "they" catch me, Carl, John, Patrick etc will get into the ring ;-) It will be great fun!

RIP orablogs, welcome apexblogs.info

There's already somewhat written about the death of the orablogs site. That site was one of my main sites, especially a few years ago. It's a pity it's out of air.

I more often read some posts that their blog disappeared, got hacked or got corrupted. I wanted to backup my blog, so I build something to do that in APEX. Later I extended it to include all blogs covering Oracle Application Express. It's not only easy to see what's new in APEX land, but it also allows me to search through the blogs even when they are off line.

For people not having a blog, the site also allows you to create a blog post. You require to login to the site (for free) to do that, but once logged in you can also do other things like rate the articles.

The website I created is called "Apex Blog Aggregator" or "Apex Blogs" which you find at http://www.apexblogs.info. There are still some things that don't work like I wish, but feel free to comment on this post to make it better...

Collaborate 08 - Thursday

Today is packing day. I liked the conference, but I look forward to go home and see my family. Especially it will be nice to see my little son again. I see him when we have our video chats, but he doesn't understand it yet. He laughs when he hears and sees me, but then he turns to mammy to ask what's happening.

My first session of the day was "Housewife meets HTMLDB" by Nimmi Vempati.
Just the title alone took my attention. Her story was really nice. She's effectively a housewife who started with APEX. This session was very good for starting people. Nimmi spoke from her experience when she started with APEX. She talked about how APEX works and where to find information.

At the same time there was another APEX session going on. Karen Cannell talked about Debugging APEX applications. As Nimmi's session didn't take the whole time, I sneaked into Karen's session to see the last 20 minutes of her presentation. She touched how to debug APEX applications from within SQL Developer. A side note on that, David Peake wrote a paper in Oracle Magazine which describes how to do it too. Other useful tools I heard here speaking about were Firebug and the Web Developer Tool Bar, which I think every APEX developer should have.

I'll grab some lunch and head off to the airport. The sun is back again, but it's still cold.

Bye, bye Denver.

Collaborate 08 - Snow in Denver

My presentation on Wednesday was the last of the day. When we went back to the hotel, we couldn't believe our eyes! The day before it was over 20°C and now there was snow! At a moment there was a heavy wind and some people said snow was coming, but I wouldn't believe that. But a few hours later, it was true, unbelievable... I told you Denver is a strange place!


Yesterday night there was the Collaborate Party. As you can expect for a party; lots of food, drinks and music.

During the party I met somebody from Belgium. Nothing special? If you know there are more than 8000 people at Collaborate...
We were together at school, but didn't have that much contact. We both started to work for Oracle in 2000, without knowing from each other. So we met again at Oracle. We worked in different departments, so we didn't see each other that much, until we were together on the same project (after 4 years).
At a moment we both quit Oracle and we didn't see each other anymore. After 4 years we meet again in Denver! It was nice to see him again. It shows how small the world is or how strange it can be.

Collaborate 08 - Wednesday

The jet lag is getting worse. I didn't wake up at 5 AM anymore, but I felt so tired in the morning. After a shower it always get better...

After having a quick breakfast I went to the first session of the day "Creating Visual Impact with Custom APEX Templates and Themes" David Scott.
It was interesting to see this presentation as I also gave a Templates presentation at our European Apex Training Days. Same topic, but a totally different presentation, although a lot of content was in one or another form there. David also gave a lot of nice tips to get a good design (or how you can avoid a bad design). Although this session was a less technical one, I really enjoyed his presentation.

I took a break after David's session to do some work. John went to "Add Style to Your APEX Apps Using .css" by Tony Jedlinski and apparently the people liked the session.

After lunch I went to the extended version of Debra's presentation of Monday, "Apex, LDAP and Active Directory". On the APEX site of things I knew most of it. Creating an Authentication Scheme and hook it up with LDAP.

My next session was "APEX Under the Covers" by Karen Cannell.
Karen talked about how she learned APEX and discovered some jewels. It's a good tip to learn from APEX itself. Application Express is written in APEX, so whatever you see in the development tool, you can also do it in your project. Just look how the APEX Development team did it. Karen showed one of her applications and some features she implemented in it. She also discussed what you need to know to become a better APEX developer.

Right after that session it was my turn. This time I talked about "Creating advanced charts in Oracle Application Express". I could have renamed my title to "Understanding Flash charts in Application Express" or "How to get a raise" or ...
I was talking about:
- Why do charting
- How to create and customize a chart in APEX
- Insights into APEX charts
- Charting beyond APEX

I really like demos, so most of my time I spend on "showing" the people. Sometimes I think to go completely into the "no-slide-zone", but then I think it's useful to keep the minimal powerpoint (keynote) to show the structure of the presentation.
I presented in one of the bigger rooms (see picture, taken 10 minutes before my presentation), Ballroom 2A. That room gets recorded, so you might hear me presenting online soon. It's a pity they didn't tape the presentation as I guess it will be hard to follow the presentation when I'm demoing things, but you can't see it. I look forward to hear myself, although it will be scary to hear your own voice. I enjoyed doing this presentation and I got some nice questions out of the public. David Scott challenged me with his question: "Can you dynamically scale your chart based on the data?" I always say, don't believe me on my word, so most of the time I show them the proof. Oh and the answer to his question: Yes you can.

I'll probably do this presentation on our next APEX training days in the Netherlands, which we'll announce soon!

Collaborate 08 - Tuesday

On Tuesday there were less APEX sessions.

The first session of the day was "Application Express Best Practices" by John Scott.
We already gave this presentation at our European APEX Training days, so it was not completely new for me. Nevertheless John changed quite a bit in the presentation. - Edit -
One of Johns best presentations is "Debugging in APEX", but this presentation must come close...

For my next session I went to Steven Feuerstein talk about "Collect Yourself: Optimize PL/SQL Code with Collections".
I always enjoy presentations by Steven, but this time he talked really fast! He tried to fit in 1 hour a 2 hour session ;-) I believe collections are very underutilized in a lot of development projects. Maybe you don't know collections, but have heard of PL/SQL tables, which is the old naming. Click on the link for more information about PL/SQL Collections.

In the afternoon I went to David Scott's "Using External Tables with Application Express".
He talked about his data warehouse environment and how external tables helped him to load and display data. As a starting point he used the packaged application which he changed for his needs.

At 6 PM we had the APEX SIG meeting. At the same moment there were free "shots" (drinks) served in the Exhibition Hall. There was also a little mess-up with the agenda, so there weren't that many people for our meeting. But having said that, we had a lively discussion for over an hour!

The people in the room could ask any (APEX) question to the panel. My panel existed out of:
- Tony Jedlinski, Director of Konoso and Apex Developer of the year 2005
- John Scott, my partner and co-founder of Apex Evangelists and Apex Developer of the year 2006
- Doug Gault, Director of Product Development (R&D) at Hotsos and a very knowledgeble person
- David Peake, Product Manager of Application Express at Oracle

There were a lot of interesting questions and comments, especially David Peake gave some nice insights in the future of APEX. I'll do another post dedicated to it as I think there were some important messages and insights in the future of APEX.

After the meeting a nice guy called Michael stopped us for some questions and to have a picture with him. Apparently he did a bet or a challenge at his company to get a picture taken with John and me and appear on the blog. So here you go Michael, the picture...


After the SIG meeting we went to the Rock Bottom bar/restaurant to have some food, drinks and fun. On the picture from left to right: John Scott, myself, David Peake, Doug Gault and Tony Jedlinski.

I already said, in the States everything is big, but that pie... was huge!

Thanks guys! It was a fun night, but I had to leverage what I did as on Wednesday I have my presentation!

Collaborate 08 - Monday

On Sunday evening I went to the SIG reception. It was nice to already meet some of the regular faces, but the real welcome reception was planned for Monday.

Today, Collaborate started at full speed... breakfast in a hall, packed with people, a lot of sessions, people running everywhere, the normal conference stuff ;-)

There are a lot of people, but it's unbelievable that you bump into people you know. In the morning, while I was updating the online APEX schedule to fit on an handheld, we met Bill Ferguson. Bill is also doing a lot of APEX. It was really nice to meet him in real life.


My first session was "Extend your existing Business Solution with Application Express developed functions" by Wolfgang Scherrer.
Wolfgang talked about how he extended his cobol application with Oracle Application Express. The first modules were developed on an Oracle XE database with APEX 2.1. The connection between APEX and the (old) cobol application was first through ODBC and later through Oracle Heterogeneous Services. He finished by saying he's planning to look into APEX 3.1 and take over more modules of the cobol application.

My second session was "The UPs and DOWNS of Loading External Data via APEX" by Tony Jedlinski.
Tony is a well known person in IOUG. He's a member of the IOUG board and a long time member. Tony was also Apex Developer of the Year 2005. Tony talked about different features in APEX all related to data. The standard upload of excel files, pdf support, upload of your own files etc. APEX has a lot of possibilities out of the box.


The third session I followed was something I'm not that familiar with; "Oracle, LDAP and AD (Active Directory) Integrating the Three Together" by Debra Addeo.
Debra talked about the general concepts of LDAP and how Microsoft implemented LDAP in Active Directory. She briefly touched the integration with APEX, but a more detailed presentation about that integration is planned for later this week.

Lunch was served in a big hall. It's quite impressive to see so many people having lunch.


The next session I followed was "Taking APEX Applications to the Next Level" by Todd Arave.
Todd talked about his experience in APEX applications and how you can benefit from using features like Shared Components when you are developing multiple applications. I also believe it's a good idea to have a Master application where others subscribe too (for ex. for LOVs, templates, Authentication schemes etc).

My last APEX session of the day was "APEX Cheat Sheet" by Karen Cannell.
I already know Karen for some time and I always like to listen to her view on things. This presentation is a very good starting point for people when they played with APEX for some days. All the difficulties Karen discovered while she was working with APEX, she wrote down in this presentation. The f?p syntax, when to use which syntax &ITEM., :ITEM, v('ITEM') are only a few examples of all the goodies she talked about.

At 3.30 PM I planned to meet Steven Feuerstein to talk about life and some updates on iloveplsqland.net. We decided to pick one last session of the day before we would work a bit.

So my last session of the day was "All about Autonomous transactions" by Michael Rosenblum.
Michael discussed when to use Autonomous transactions in triggers and procedures (PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION). He was very funny at times as he talked what could go wrong or when you would get unexpected behavior. For these kinds of features it's best that you know a bit of the Oracle database.

At 6 PM the Exhibition Hall opened where we got some food. I had a quick chat with David Peake and David Gambino at the APEX booth.

In the evening there was a Welcome Party, but I was too tired to stay long at it. I decided to go into the hot tub and have an early nap. The jet lag is getting stronger...

Geeky: APEX sessions@Collab08 on handheld

On the sig reception at Collaborate 08 yesterday, some people asked about the APEX sessions. We printed a paper which shows the agenda of the sessions, but I told them I also created a little app which holds all that data.

They liked that! Immediately the handhelds were fired up!
John tried the app on his Iphone and the normal app worked nicely (even the interactive reports!). Jason tried it on his HP handheld and it worked but he had to scroll a bit (and the interactive reports didn't work).

As we're a bit geeky, I copied the app and changed the theme to the Mobile one (new in APEX 3.1).

So for the people on the conference:
- The "normal" Application (theme 20): http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=COLLAB08F
- The "mobile" Application (theme 19): http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=COLLAB08H

The mobile app should be faster to load and better to see (less scrolling).

It's 6 AM now, I woke up early as I'm still jet lagged. I should get ready for the first real day at Collab08. Write you tomorrow!