APEX 3.1.2 patch applied successfully

If you didn't hear about it yet, you must only read this blog and no others ;-)

Yesterday a new Patch came out for Oracle Application Express. If you look at the number of fixes I think it's worthwhile to apply the patch. Depending the version of APEX you're running you need to install the full patch or get the patch from Metalink (patch number 7313609).


I applied the patch today to some of my systems and it went like a charm. Don't forget to read the Patch Notes before you apply the patch. Two commands to run: "SQL>@apxpatch.sql" and "SQL>@apxldimg.sql /tmp/patch" (if you run with XMLDB) or copying the images directory (if you run with Apache).

The patch took just over 3 minutes to finish.


John Scott did an excellent post about Bug Number 7298389. He proves that the patch does what it needs to do to minimise the redirects, which hopefully improves our Google ranking of our APEX sites.

Updated Oracle Forums - time to get into again

I just noticed that the Oracle Forums changed again to the new version.
Justin Kestelyn gives more information about the upgrade here.

There's a new pointing system going on, so people like Scott and John who were top posters in the APEX Forum can start again to get to that position ;-)

The new forum soft looks better than last time when it got upgraded (see my blog post about that upgrade here). It's a lot faster for me know, so that's already good. I did a reply to a question and everything went fine so far.

APEX for 55+ people - The first steps

This article is following some previous articles:
- The concept (the idea)
- The landscape (more info about 55+ person and the environment)

So how do you start with a 55+ year old person to explain what APEX is, what it can do and how to use it?

We started with a meeting. I didn't use a ppt, just my laptop and my Apex instance.

I started with something he knew: Excel. I asked him an Excel file he uses a lot. Weeks before, we already discussed why APEX would be better in his case, so no time on that at this stage.
Before we turned the Excel into an Oracle technology, I started to explain more about the concept of an Oracle database and how it works. I believe it was important to explain the relationship between database - scheme / user - tables - relationships.

Next to do, getting an APEX account on apex.oracle.com and turning his Excel file into an APEX application. It's important to explain what's happening. Once the application was created and he understood what had been going on we played around with this app.

Next we agreed he had to read and try things in APEX himself:
- I told him to follow the Getting Started with Oracle Application Express guide
- Read documentation about APEX and its architecture.
- Run some demonstration Application which was showing more of the possibilities
- Send me mails and call if things were not clear

Now he knew more about it, but it wasn't as easy as I write here. It took some time to get familiar with it (so don't give up if you find the doc to difficult in the beginning!)
The theory is not everything, it's important that he tried things himself. So we started with the 2 Day + Application Express Developer’s Guide.
The problem with this guide however is that you already need to know quiet a bit about Oracle (especially SQL) to understand fully what's happening. Everything is well explained how to create the application, but his feedback was that it was not clear to him what all the SQL (and others) meant he had to type/do or what was going on at the different points in time.

He had the reflex to search himself for some things in the Application Express User’s Guide, but how to get rid of a table for ex isn't well explained. It's funny, all the steps are clearly in the guide, but if you don't know that "to delete" a table in Oracle is called "drop" you're in trouble. So most of the first questions I got were not about APEX itself, but more about the Oracle terminology.

At this time he had made several applications in APEX (from Excel and from the guide) and seen other examples.

We met again and discussed his evolution and what to learn next. I explained more about APEX and gave him his next exercise, which was one we use in our APEX beginners training.

After that he felt confident to do other exercises, so he tried more exercises related to his job.
But then we hit another problem. Knowing Oracle and how to create a good ERD (table design, relationships etc) are key for an APEX application. So we had to go over that as well...

Next post, next week: the good, the bad and the ugly!

APEX Experts Panel at OOW on Sunday

On Sunday the two big Oracle user groups are organizing an APEX session.

Sunday, from 10.00-11.30, I'm hosting the Oracle Application Express SIG: Ask the Experts session for IOUG. Just like the last two years this will be your chance to ask questions to a panel of APEX experts.
I'm very pleased to announce this time my panel exists out of:
- Denes Kubicek, known for his famous APEX Demo Application and frequently poster in the APEX Forum
- Anton Nielsen, has an excellent knowledge of APEX, especially in the security area
- David Peake, Product Manager of Oracle Application Express
- John Scott, Oracle ACE and a well known contributor in the APEX Forum (posts as JES)
- Scott Spendolini, known name in the APEX community, and host of the ODTUG APEX Symposiums

Sunday, in the afternoon, Scott Spendolini is hosting the ODTUG Oracle Application Express Symposium session. Just as at Kaleidoscope different people come to talk about their APEX case studies. Apex Evangelists will also be in stage with one of our customers, AMGEN. We are 5th I believe and we'll talk about "Oracle Application Express--Power to the People". Most of the time Rich Mutell of Amgen will do the talking, but John and I will be there to do the intro and answer the more technical questions.

There'll be a lot of APEX sessions at Oracle Open World this year, as due to the large number some sessions overlap eachother, so you would need to make a choice which one you want to see! I might post my session schedule later, but it was a difficult choice to pick the sessions!

See you at OOW...

APEX for 55+ people - The landscape

After a short holiday it's time to start blogging again.

I already blogged about the idea of teaching APEX to people older than 55. So let's see how my pilot person looked like.

It's a Belgian man, born in 1949, so almost 60 years old. His children are out the door, but he's still working as a mathematics teacher. His first experience with computers was at university where he worked with a punchcard machine. After that he worked with an Apple II, IBM pc's and now he does his computer activities on a regular Wintel platform.

In the early days he played around with Apple Works, WordPerfect and he even developed a bit with FileMaker Pro. Nowadays he's mainly working with Word and Excel and also communicates with his students with mail and through the internet. In his school he also needs to work with a planning tool, a Blackboard tool (online student system) and some other little programs.

This person has always been trying to find ways to improve the quality of the lessons and other ways to help the students, the teachers and the school.

So I would describe this person as a motivated 55+ year old working person, who has already some knowledge about pc's and knows Word and Excel well.

When I was talking to him about Oracle Application Express and showed him some things he could use for his students and colleagues (for ex. to do follow-up or to plan classes) he was very interested to investigate more. Instead of me doing the application, we agreed to give it a try to get himself up-to-speed with APEX, so he could develop things himself. The timing was ideal as he had holidays. So we started in the beginning of July with this pilot program... APEX for 55+ (year old) people!

He has his own desk with a Windows pc (not the newest one), Office, an anti-virus program and some other small software. He only knows Oracle from the stocks and some articles in magazines. He knows a tiny little bit of SQL, but doesn't know anything about webdevelopment, the Oracle database, PLSQL and APEX.

In Part 2 I'll write about his first steps with APEX.

APEX news: APEX 3.2, Forms migration, new blogs, OOW, Metalink

During the holidays the number of blog posts I write is significantly less. If you follow the other blogs or watch on apexblogs.info you've seen most of the latest news.

Nevertheless I thought it was a good idea to do a combined post of the APEX news of the last weeks.

The Statement of Direction got updated. APEX 3.2 will be released "soon". In this version mainly the Forms Migration toolkit will be included. To get good input and do extensive testing, Oracle is searching for sample data and beta testers. If you want to help making the FORMS2APEX tool a success, read the full story on David Peake's blog.

Every month I get a few requests to include new APEX blogs on the APEX Blog Aggregator. On ApexBlogs there are about 50 blogs aggregated, but not all of them are active (= still updated). The active blogs you should be able to see on the right hand site or in the slider of "Blog Selection" on the front page (if you click on it, it will slide down and show you all the APEX blogs). After a request of Noel Portugal, I've done some tests to provide you with a twitter feed of ApexBlogs. It seems to work, but I still need to do some code clean-up and make it nicer. I plan to provide you with this functionality in September. I'm using twitter more often myself now too, if you want you can follow me there as well (I'm logged as "dgielis").

In the past I used Metalink often as one of the references for a scalable APEX solution. It looks like in the future we can't do that anymore. Oracle changed direction and is trying to eat their own "dog-food". So to be clear, it's NOT because APEX has problems... Joel Kallman explains it on his blog.

At Oracle Open World a record on APEX sessions will be held. Normally I create a conference scheduler for the APEX sessions, but this time David beat me and created it first. The app gives you a good overview about all APEX sessions and it's a nice example of an Interactive Report in APEX. I'll do another post later about the sessions I'll do and follow at OOW.

There's also a survey going on about the integration of APEX with E-business Suite. So if you're using APEX in such environment and didn't fill in the survey, take some time to do it, I'm sure Oracle will love it and be able to provide you with "more" in the future.

We're hosting another open European APEX Training Days, this time in the Netherlands. It's only a couple of weeks away and it looks like we'll have a good number of attendees. All information about that event can be found here.

And not APEX related... the Olympics have started and the athletes are incredible. Not to speak about the unbelievable opening show!

APEX for 55+ people - The concept

The last weeks I've been doing some interesting things.

Normally I'm asked to train or coach people when they already have some experience in the IT-field, or know some things about Oracle SQL, PLSQL and APEX. Or I need to train youngsters who already know a lot about the internet and web development.

But what about people who have no real IT experience and are 55+ old? Is it possible to let these people know something about web development and get them up to speed with Oracle Application Express?

The reason I found it an interesting idea, are multiple:

• if you can teach people from that generation a "web 2.0" solution, everybody should be able to learn it
• 55+ people have time, their children are already older, their career is probably in a direction
• motivated 55+ people are searching for a challenge and want something new
• some managers seem to think their 55+ staff can only do "old" stuff, which I don't agree with
  
• it's a challenge to teach normal people (= non-programmers) development skills and you'll probably need to explain more and better so they can really understand

So I started a pilot project with one 55+ person to see how it goes. We're a couple of weeks further and I thought it's time to do a series of blog posts with the outcome.

I thought to seperate the posts in

• Part 1: The landscape (more info about 55+ person and the environment)
• Part 2: The first steps (the start)
  
• Part 3: The positive points and challenges
• Part 4: The first APEX application
• Part 5: The next steps
• Part 6: Conclusion

If you have some specific questions I should handle, feel free to leave a comment.

Installing a Java app is so easy

I'm currently trying to install a java program and it's a nightmare.

The steps you need to make to just be able to install it, is unbelievable.
I'm running Oracle Linux and the program I'm trying to install needs jdk 1.5, which I don't have. No worries, go to the Sun site and you can download it there. I first tried to download the jdk with Sun's download manager. It never worked on my Mac! It took me 15 minutes to figure out there's also a direct link to get the download.

I didn't even touch the application, I'm just preparing my system to get another java app running. To get my system ready (investigating and installing) it took me about an hour.

Next to do: install a webserver. You can go for JBoss, Tomcat or others, but these two are in the documentation and well explained, so I went for Tomcat. I just hope it all doesn't interfere with my current system. I'm not sure you noticed, but I'm still not starting the install of the real app I want to test.

Finally I can install the java app itself. Of course all decends apps also need a database, so most of the java apps I know recommend to use MySQL, but as I'm against that and only want to use Oracle, I'm going for that. It's supported so it should work.

I tried to run the app and got a nice java error. I probably need to do some more investigation, but I don't find it strait forward to have a java app running in a short time.

With the upgrade of the app, I'll probably need another version of java and the nightmare starts again.

The world of Java is so nice. You just take one file and install it in your environment and there you go, right?!

When you've too much time...

On the way back to the hotel I recorded a little video with my camera. As I'm away from family I played around with iMovie (a great product which you get with OSX).

I put some music on it and tried to get it on YouTube. It's a matter of a click in iMovie. I didn't do any fancy thing, but as I found the video funny, I decided to keep it there.

So nothing educational or APEX related, just a man on his Vespa.

The title of the video: "My friend - Rich aka "the Fonz"

Show Blob of other table in APEX Form

A few weeks ago I got a mail with this question:
--
I read your answer in the forum on a problem regarding : display BLOB in Apex.

My question is if it is possible (and HOW) to display an image on a form page based on table A but the image is in table B (and table A contains the values to read the blob(s) from table B).

I guess I have to add an (file browse) item in the form but what's next ??
--

It's not that difficult to get around this problem with the standard functionality in APEX 3.0 and up, if we use the BLOB support that the APEX team developed for us.

Our test case:
* Database level

CREATE TABLE ex_A
(
id            NUMBER(6)   ,
name          VARCHAR2(50),
picture_label VARCHAR2(30),
picture_id    NUMBER      ,
CONSTRAINT EX_A_PK PRIMARY KEY (ID)
);
CREATE TABLE ex_B
(
picture_id NUMBER             ,
picture BLOB                  ,
picture_filename VARCHAR2(100),
picture_mimetype VARCHAR2(100),
CONSTRAINT EX_B_PK PRIMARY KEY (PICTURE_ID)
);

* APEX level

Create a new application with a Form based on table ex_A and a Form based on table ex_B by following the wizard.

We adapt Page 2 - Form based on table ex_B - and change the item P2_PICTURE to


(On Page 2 and Page 1 I also made the Hidden and Protected item - the pk - visible as I don't have a trigger to populate it, so I just give a unique id in myself.)

So now the answer to the question... How do you display the blob from ex_B table on the form that is based on table ex_A?

Add a new item: Display as Text (does not save state) and in the Source (PL/SQL Function Body) you specify:


As you can see we use the APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC function. It will look at page 2 for the format of the blob and will pass the picture_id to it.

If you upload a file on Page 2 and after wards in Page 1 you reference the picture_id, it should get displayed.

You can try to upload a picture yourself here. Click first the Ex_B tab and upload a picture, next go to Ex_A tab and create a reference and add the same id as for the one you used for the picture.

The export of the application can be found here (save as blob_support.sql).

Hope that answer the question.

APEX at OOW '08 - Sunday

From September 21-25, Oracle Open World (OOW) 2008 will take place in San Francisco. OOW is the biggest event of the year.

There will be a lot of Oracle Application Express (APEX) sessions. The complete schedule is not yet defined, as you can still vote on some sessions in the Oracle Mix.

On the Sunday we plan an "APEX Day" with the two biggest User Groups.

Before noon, IOUG will host a two hour "Ask the Experts Panel". It will be an excellent time to ask all your questions to a panel of leading experts in the APEX domain.

In the afternoon ODTUG will host "the little APEX Symposium with Case Studies". If you were at ODTUG Kaleidoscope before, I heard a lot of good feedback about these sessions as they provide real world examples of APEX implementations.

During the week there are already over 20 APEX sessions planned! You can find them at the Content Catalog.

Once the agenda at OOW is finalized, we'll also plan another APEX Meetup to meet eachother in a more fun, relaxed environment ;-)

More information to come... but it will be worth going!

APEX is getting popular

On Tuesday I was in the Netherlands to give a presentation about "The Future of APEX".

The location was astonishing! The place is called Media Plaza and is located at the "Jaarbeurs" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It's definitely an innovative place where you get lots of ideas, so a very good place to talk about Oracle Application Express.

There were 135 people subscribed for this free seminar, so we can definitely say that APEX is gaining a lot of interest. I did a poll about who was in the audience and everybody already heard about APEX! Not everyone worked with it yet and I was surprised there were so little on the latest version of APEX. But that turned out great, as I could show them some cool new features ;-)


We split the evening in two parts. In the first part I briefly talked about my way to APEX, gave an introduction in APEX, but for the most part I did a demo with hints & tips. I like to show things and I think APEX is really good for that.

I created a completely new application and included some of the nicest features in APEX: of course Interactive Reports, but also how easy it is to include images (Blob support), do PDF printing and adhoc changes.

I liked the interactivity with the public very much! For ex. I gave an example where I created a new column in the Interactive Report, called "new list price", basically the list price of a product increased with 10%. At one time a nice lady asked me if the new value is physically stored in the database (which isn't) and how to get the changes in then. I first started to explain how you could do it, but as APEX is extremely RAD, I just decided to do it in front of 135 people. Live demo's is always a risk, but if it works, the public loves it! Doing these little things shows the real power of APEX.


In the second part I talked about the future of APEX or what we may expect in the coming releases. I briefly touched custom item types, new versions of 3rd party products, declarative ajax, improved error handling etc. but most of the time I spend on the Forms migration to APEX tool the Apex Development team is working on (I recorded David Peake's presentation at ODTUG ;-)), the Data Modeling capabilities that will be in SQL Developer and of course Websheets!

Looking at the many questions I got, the feedback afterwards and that people started to be enthusiastic with each other about our lovely development tool, I believe this evening was a success. I definitely enjoyed doing it!

New OTN Forums - not great yet

This weekend the OTN Forums got updated.

The forums went down for some time and when they finally got up again I got a lot of errors.
I cleared the cache of my browser and that helped at first sight, but after a while the problems were back again. Although there are some new features (tag, rich editor, new icons, ...), I wonder if it really needs to be like that.

For me a forum needs to be fast, reliable and searchable, but that's absolutely not the case! It's down a lot and it's even slower than before. I guess it's because they just released this version.

Some other people already blogged about it too:
- Dietrich Schroff (with some nice screenshots)
- Amardeep Sidhu
- Paulo Vale
- Asif Momen

First Semi-Final at Euro 2008

Today Germany and Turkey play against each other for a place in the finals at Euro 2008. I think it will be a good match although I wished Portugal was still in.

For the people betting on the games in DG Tournament, don't forget to bet on the semi-finals!
I had a look at the rank and it seems that the first 30 people still make a good chance to win the bet.


That the best may win...

Oracle Application Express at OOW - Vote now!

Last week at ODTUG there were 18 Oracle Application Express sessions.

At Oracle Open World there will be even more! Currently there are 23 APEX sessions listed (including mine - search for application express), but there's still a voting going on. You can vote for your favorite APEX sessions at Oracle Mix.

Anton Nielsen and Raj Mattamal's presentations I saw at ODTUG and I liked them very much. I'm sure the others will be nice to follow as well... so, vote!

Great to see so many APEX candidates!

APEX talk in the Netherlands

I'm recovering from the States, but not too long. My next presentations will be in the Netherlands.

From September 2-4 we have our European APEX Training Days. John Scott and myself will provide an open training on various topics (see the agenda in the above link). The last two trainings (in London and Brussels) went well. The only requirement to attend the training is to register and to have a little bit experience with APEX. We start from a knowledge based on the 2-day development guide.

If you want already a taste what APEX can do for you or you just want to have some fun, you can attend a FREE seminar on the 1st of July. In the evening I'll give a talk for Ordina Netherlands.

I'll start with a demo of APEX and depending the level of the audience, talk about Best Practices. After the break I'll talk about the latest and greatest of APEX. If you want to attend register here.

From the Ordina NL website (in Dutch):
--
De toekomst voor APEX?

Dimitri Gielis laat het je zien!

Waarschijnlijk ben je wel bekend met HTML-DB en de opvolger APEX. Het lijkt misschien leuk voor kleine en eenvoudige applicaties. Maar wij bij Ordina Oracle Solutions denken dat we meer kunnen met APEX en willen dat graag met jou delen.

Dimitri Gielis van Apex Evangelists laat je deze avond zien hoe de toekomst van APEX eruit ziet. Met het laatste nieuws van de ODTUG Kaleidoscoop erin verwerkt. Dimitri Gielis is een internationale expert op het gebied van APEX. Ook op de ODTUG in New Orleans zal hij spreken over APEX en in discussie gaan met experts op het gebied van Oracle ADF.

Dimitri zal een korte inleiding en demo geven en daarna dieper in gaan op de best practices op zijn eigen unieke manier. In het tweede deel een vooruitblik op wat gaat komen op het gebied van APEX. Gaat java de hete adem van APEX in de nek voelen?

Wij bieden jullie de gelegenheid om deze sessie GRATIS bij te wonen!

Deze unieke kennissessie vindt plaats op 1 juli vanaf 17:30 uur in de Media Plaza te Utrecht. Het programma duurt tot 21.00 uur. Wij zorgen voor het buffet. Inschrijven kan op de aanmeld pagina.
--

See you there or maybe on our training!

Specify the same width of a column chart in APEX

During my presentation of "Advanced Charting in APEX" during ODTUG I got a question how to specify always the same width of a column chart in APEX.

I had a look into this, but couldn't find an easy way to do it in Anychart 3 (the current version in APEX).

If you look at the Anychart 3 documentation then you'll find this section:

There's not really a width you can specify for every bar. Like I said during the presentation, it would be extremely difficult to do that for Anychart, as it doesn't know how many data it will need to show. The only option I see at the moment is to dynamically set the column_space and block_space, depending on the number of values you have. Like I gave in my example the dynamic scaling (maximum of the chart); you create an hidden item and give it a value. You use the hidden item in your Custom XML to define the left_space, right_space, column_space and block_space.

If somebody else already did it another way, feel free to add a comment.

ODTUG08 - Thursday

The last day... the most difficult one for me. Meeting all the people at the conference and listening to all sessions in the previous days is very nice but also very demanding and intense. The tiredness, the jetlag and all those expressions you start to feel.

So giving a presentation on the last day is a challenge. From early in the morning Lucas and I were on stage for the APEX vs ADF shootout. Some people said there were 300 people in the room, but others counted around 150, so let's say we had a lot of people ;-)


I like to be on stage with Lucas, he's a very knowledgeable person and amazingly objective about the tools. Whereas I'm the very *pro* APEX one ;-) Some ADF people told me I need to balance more, which I might do in the future as there are also some nice features in ADF. Not that I'll use ADF in the future, but it's not bad to know more about it.

In the Netherlands we did the presentation a little bit different. We had more time so we had more time to do Q&A. This time I spent quiet a lot of time on Interactive Reports as I thought it's one of the nicest features and less time explaining how I build the complete application. After the session I got some questions how I did things in the Survey app. I'll try to blog about the survey application in the next weeks.

In the Netherlands I went first, but this time Lucas presented first. I changed my style a bit so I followed the same steps as Lucas. I started from scratch and at one time I thought to just build the whole application in 30 minutes, but then I got an error. I didn't use triggers in the app I created in December, but when I followed the wizards during the demo, I forgot about that and said to APEX to use a trigger. Of course the trigger didn't exist. After I created it, the first demo worked. Of course, my second demo didn't work anymore. I normally don't create a trigger and just use the sequence, but as I created the trigger in the first demo, I overwrote the value.
I got a bit nervous when I got the error as I didn't know what was happening (although the errors where clear and related to the data model). Of course I blamed Lucas for the error ;-)
I could fix it and the demo worked, but only in the evening I knew exactly why it went wrong. In the morning everything still worked, but because I changed the order of my demo's (first creation of app from scratch of showing the app I created in December) it didn't work from the first time. It's always a risk to do live demos, but I like it so much, so not doing it is not an option for me ;-) You find the application here (here my blog post after the shootout in December).

I felt better after my presentation in the Netherlands. I think I should have done it more like when I did it in December and do it a bit different, but it's always after the presentation you know it. I wonder what the people thought about it.

Literaly after the session the adrenaline went away and I started to feel the tiredness even more. I went with some friends to a nice restaurant next to the Mississipi river. There were some great pictures taken... I hope I'll see them on some other blogs! Afterwards we walked a bit around and went back to the hotel. In the evening I crashed and had a nice sleep.

The next morning I flew back to Belgium over Chicago. Coincidence, but Marcie, who's doing the OBE's of APEX on OTN was on the same flight!

ODTUG08 - Wednesday

In the morning I prepared for my presentation, downloaded Firefox 3 and did some tests with that. It seems to work fine with APEX, although sometimes there're some strange things going on. I'm not sure it's due to Firefox or it's just my connection with the internet in the hotel...

I missed the first session and a part of the second session about "Building Advanced Tabular Forms" by Marcie Young. A lot of people have problems with the tabular forms or want to see it extended, which I also believe is necessary. Marcie explained how you can create "better" tabular forms by bypassing the wizard and create it yourself. I believe the use of collections is the way to go, especially if you need to do validations as well.

Then it was my turn. I presented "Creating Advanced Charts in Oracle Application Express". I tried to make it as interactive as possible, which I think succeeded. I talked about how to create charts, how it works and how to get more out of it.

Next it was Patrick Wolf's turn for "Increasing Your Oracle APEX development productivity with Open Source Tools". Although I already use most of the software he mentioned, like Firebug, the Webdeveloper Toolbar and some of the tools he created: the Apex Builder Plugin, the Apexlib Framework and Apex Essentials. The software I didn't use yet are YSlow and Live HTTP Headers. I liked his presentation as I also believe people can definitely improve their productivity by using some more tools, especially Firefox and Firebug.

The whole Wednesday there were some excellent APEX sessions I looked forward too.
For ex. Anton Nielsen's "How to Hack an Oracle APEX application". I loved Anton's presentation. His style, his content, the topic... very good. I will probably also need to verify some of my applications, but one lesson you should know: go to APEX 3.1.1.
With Anton and Marcie on the picture.


The last session of the day was "Building the New Stuff: AJAX, JSON and APEX 3.1" by Carl Backstrom. This session was more an advanced one. Carl is "THE" guy about AJAX in APEX, so he could tell a lot of things about all of the above. He showed some new techniques to do things in APEX, basically what the backend is of Interactive Reports. You should check his examples site out for all the examples in an APEX 3.1 jacket.

In the evening we had a party with nice food, drinks and people. I didn't stay that long as I have to prepare for the next day...

ODTUG08 - Tuesday

The tireness is starting. Although I still get up early, I feel I'm getting tired. On Tuesday I started my day with blogging about Oracle Websheets.

The first session I went to was "You can't do THAT in a browser! Extending Oracle APEX with 3rd party components" by Scott Spendolini. This was version 2 of his presentation. Last year he spook about Ajax select list, Ajax memory tree, plpdf and the fck editor. He did a quick recap of that and included following new things: MS Outlook integration, dhtmlXTree and Fusion Gadgets & Fusion Maps. It was a nice presentation to show how to get "more" in an APEX application.

My second presentation was one of Joel Kallman about "Go Global with Oracle Application Express". I did that presentation also on our European APEX Training Days and when we looked at the feedback forms, it seemed the topic wasn't that popular. I don't really understand why people don't find it important? So also in Joel's session there weren't that many people. But at the same time there was another APEX presentation, which maybe explains the number of people also a bit. I liked his presentation a lot. APEX is very good in going global and he explained the different options in APEX.

In the afternoon I was in the APEX Experts Panel together with Patrick Wolf, John Scott, Karen Cannell, David Peake and Scott Spendolini. The people in the audience asked us questions. The typical questions where there: is APEX scalable? how to compare it with Portal? what about Fusion? etc.

My last two presentations of the day where "Writing a customized Authentication Scheme for APEX" by Raj Mattamal and "Explore and Benefit the APEX repository" by Michiel Jonkers.

Raj showed in his presentation how to create your own little Single Sign On solution in APEX. Having a login application, which links further to other applications, even in different workspaces and databases. Using the cookie was one of his techniques and a bunch of PLSQL code to get it all working. Raj is a very energetic boy, I like his presentation.

Michiel talked about the APEX Repository and how he dealed with that. He went on a journey to figure out what the APEX repository was providing and how to get something out of it. Michiel used some jokes in his presentation which was nice, especially at the end of the day, so it was easier to follow (and stay awake). I must say his presentation was finished before I knew.
He showed the build in screens to show the dictionary views, the views and tables in the database itself and by using the export file you can get more information how APEX does certain things.

I also want to thank the girls of the registration desk. They are such nice people: they need to start very early to make everything ready for the participants, they are always laughing, say hello to me every day... Rich learned me an English word; apparently they are my "groupies". I hope it's not a bad word!

As I blog about the highlights of the day, they let me smile and they let me feel welcome... Here are the nicest girls at ODTUG: Veronica, Lauren and Crystal. Thanks and keep up the good work!


In the evening we had the APEX Meetup. We went with 15 people to a bar to have some drinks and food and watch how the LA Lakers were losing against Boston... Carl wasn't happy with that, but he survived ;-) It was a fun evening with other APEX lovers. Here's the picture

After the food we went back to the hotel and watched the remaining of the game and had some more drinks. When the guys decided to go further, I had to pass as I need to present on Wednesday and Thursday and I'm already tired. I'm curious if I'll see them in my session, they were going to drink some "Grenades", which is even worse than the "Huricane" I had the other day, I was told!