APEX-Challenge.com

A few months ago we (APEX Evangelists) launched the APEX Challenge, a weekly quiz where you get a question about Oracle Application Express. Next to the fun of answering the questions and see your rank, you will hopefully learn something.

To make it a bit easier for the APEX community, to find the site, we looked at a specific url for the APEX Challenge.

Before you always had to go to the PL/SQL Challenge and take the APEX quiz from there, which you can still do, but now we enabled http://www.apex-challenge.com too.

We also have the apexquiz.com domain, so my question now is: which domain do you like most?

• stay at plsqlchallenge.com
• go to apex-challenge.com
• go to apexquiz.com

Tell us what you like... In a few weeks we will redirect the domain permanently.

If you have suggestions to make the APEX challenge/quiz better, please share with us too.

Thanks so much.

OBUG Benelux Connect 2012

On April 24, 2012 the Oracle Benelux User Group (OBUG) is organizing for the 5th time in succession, and in close collaboration with Oracle, OBUG Benelux Connect.

Possibly you attended in the past and you wish to present your customer case at the upcoming OBUG Benelux Connect 2012 conference. OBUG offers you the ultimate possibility to share your personal experience with other Oracle customers within the Benelux.

OBUG Benelux 2012 will be held at the MECC in Maastricht, the Netherlands. This is an excellent venue that provides its guests with the very latest amenities in a strikingly professional ambiance. The MECC is located in Maastricht, 10 minutes from Maastricht Central Station with train connections to Amsterdam and Brussels and a 3 minute walk from the train station Maastricht-Randwyck. Maastricht is a very popular destination for congress visitors, because it is such an intimate place and the city has much to offer.

“Extend your Horizon”

Extend your Horizon is the theme for OBUG Benelux Connect 2012.

The strength of OBUG Benelux Connect is the customer cases presented by our members and other Oracle customers: Learn from peers to maximize the value of your business-critical applications and technology. In over 40 sessions, speakers will share their experiences and business solutions with delegates in different streams, which gives them the possibility to investigate other products, extending their horizon. There are streams for Applications (Oracle eBS, Peoplesoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Primavera), Technology (DBMS, JDeveloper/ADF, APEX, ...), Middleware (BPEL, SOA, EAS, ...) and Intelligence (Hyperion, OBI, GRC, ...).

The crowning touch is that the Oracle user experience team will fly in from the USA again to conduct several onsite User Experience Sessions, where delegates have the ability to contribute to and influence product direction and design for Oracle’s next-generation products.

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

OBUG is looking for end-users, project leaders, implementers, IT and functional managers, CIO's to share their experience with Oracle products in a 45-minute presentation – (slides in English, presentations preferably in English).

If you can make a valuable contribution to the success of our conference, please complete the online submission form on the OBUG website before December 9th, 2011.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Coolen, Executive Director Oracle Benelux User Group, as soon as possible by e-mail or by phone +31620677597.

The organization will make a selection from all contributions based on main criteria such as quality and diversity. Also membership of the OBUG, user or partner, will be taken into account.

Speakers will receive a notification of our decision in week 2, 2012.

Hope to see you there.

Vote for Martin @ODTUG board

Last Oracle Open World Martin (Giffy D'Souza, left on the picture) told me he was running for the ODTUG board and without a doubt, I told him I would support him.

I know Martin for some time now; we first met in 2008 when we did a project for the company he worked for at that time. From the very first moment I appreciated his personality and technical skills. Over the years Martin became more active in the APEX community; on his blog he shares his experiences, he helps people in the forum and presents at different Oracle conferences.

In the beginning of the year I nominated him to become an Oracle ACE which was accepted. He not only got that recognition, he also got the best presentation award at ODTUG's conference this year. Hopefully 2011 will bring him one more award... a place in the ODTUG board.

I hope the whole APEX community shares my feelings when I say: "Vote for Martin and get him in the board!". Being APEX as one of the main tracks at ODTUG I think it only makes sense to have an APEX representative in the board and I can't think of a better person than Martin. His personality makes the difference!

You can read more about Martin's campaign and his reasons running for the board on his blog.

All the best Martin! I hope you make it.

APEX Meet-up OOW 2011

On Tuesday we had our 6th APEX Meet-up at Oracle Open World (OOW).

It was another great time to have some fun and chats with other people developing and using Oracle Application Express applications.

This is just one of the picture, you find more pictures here.

As there were so many people we didn't have one picture with all of us. Some also came in later... it started with grabbing two tables, but at the end we filled half of the bar :-)

If you were at the APEX Meet-up and have some other pictures, please send them to me and I'll add them to the album.

Special thanks to OTN, ODTUG and the APEX Development team to sponsor the meet-up. Although we were with many people, the costs for drinks and appetisers where covered by the sponsorship! Thanks again.

APEX in the Cloud

With today's announcement of the Oracle Database Cloud, it also means Oracle gives a strong message towards the APEX community.

Oracle Application Express (APEX) will be included in the Database Cloud. If you look at the features of the Database Cloud, for development it's all APEX and web services (through the APEX listener).

Before we had (and still have) apex.oracle.com where you could try APEX for free, but couldn't install any production applications on it. Now with the Oracle Database Cloud you have a paid alternative for all production applications. You can obviously use it for development and test too.

The other interesting thing is that there are productivity apps available... it's some kind of an APEX app place which you can install for free.

It looks like in the future also partners can offer their apps on there.

Probably in the next days and weeks we hear more about all the Oracle cloud... one piece that is missing it looks like is pricing.

Live from the OOW11 Keynote

I'm writing this post while the keynote is going on... I'll update this post while we go on.

This will be a special keynote for ... :-) You can also follow me on twitter.

15 mins before the start, room is now filling up quickly

Mark Hurt on stage announcing Infosys, Larry comes later... won't blog much about Infosys, waiting for Larry.

Sting came on stage to tell he looks forward to sing for us at the Appreciation event later today.

There you go, Larry comes on stage... now it will start to be interesting.

Fusion Applications run in the cloud and on-premise. Important, cloud security: separate VM & database for each customer (no multi-tenancy). Larry mentions APEX for the first time; people use it in the cloud to build custom applications, some people use it to extend Fusion Apps (or e-business suite).

Larry announcing the Oracle Public Cloud

Key difference with other clouds, Oracle Cloud build on standards, can link to anything.

Different services, first to start with Database Server Cloud... (screenshot is not ideal, but there is a first screenshot of APEX)

Great jokes of Larry about "False Clouds". Something like "you check data in, but you can't check it out!", "you take the plane and are in the clouds, but can't get out the plane/cloud anymore".

Larry is in great shape ;-)

Hacking a lot on Salesforce.com... now Larry is comparing the Oracle cloud vs others (false clouds).

Larry announcing the Oracle Social Network

Larry shows a "live" demo of the Oracle Fusion Applications together with the Oracle Social Networking. The demo lasts a bit long, but it is nice to see all the nice features in Fusion Apps.

*** sad news coming in *** Steve Jobs of Apple passed away ...

Demo done, show over... seems like a strange end to the keynote.

Not sure it was intended like that or it had to do with the news of Steve Jobs. They say Larry is a good friend of Steve Jobs...

So no pricing, no demo of the database cloud... Rumours where different... Database in the cloud = APEX in the cloud. The Oracle cloud is live now, you can find it at http://cloud.oracle.com

What you see is also an APEX app...

I guess the presentations tomorrow will go in more debt about the Oracle Database Cloud.

Press (and bloggers) got an invite to a 5PM meeting to Cloud Technical Deep Dive... not sure I'll go there.

Downloading Oracle software from linux server with wget

When I need to install software on a linux server, I locate all the software I need and start downloading it.

Downloading it first to your laptop and moving it then to the server is one option, which works ok if you are on the same network as the server. However with having a lot in the cloud it would be far easier to download the software directly on the server (as the server is already connected to the internet).

If I was running a graphical interface on the server, which I'm not, I could have used a browser. I could also have used lynx, a text based browser. My experience with lynx isn't that great, for example when I had to login and the site used javascript things got messed up or were not working. Probably I did something wrong or didn't have enough experience using it.

The way I download for example Oracle software straight into the server is by using wget.

As you can only download Oracle software after you are logged in, I had to do an additional step to get wget working.

These are the steps I followed:

- Open Firefox and install the Expert Cookies add-on. That tool allows you to download the cookies of your pc into a text file.

- Clear all cookies (Tools - Clear Recent History... - Select Cookies and click the Clear now button)

- In your browser on your pc login to the Oracle website and/or depending the software you need on edelivery.oracle.com. Logging in will set a cookie.

- With the Expert Cookies add-on you can now download the cookies of your pc (Tools - Export Cookies ...) and save the file to your filesystem

- Upload that file to your server

- Now you can run the wget command from the server to download the software you want :-)

For example to download Apache the command looks like:

wget --load-cookies=cookies.txt http://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/ias/101350/ias_linux_x86_ccd_101350_disk1_1of3.zip

Updates on APEXBlogs

Some of you might have seen that APEXBlogs wasn't updated with twitter messages anymore for some time. Since last week blog posts were not taken anymore either.

I only found a little time today to look a bit closer into these issues and am happy to share with you what is going on.

The reason for not updating the blog posts was that my package produced this error:

ORA-31011: XML parsing failed
ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing
LPX-00217: invalid character 160 (U+00A0)
Error at line 1

Although the Oracle database is running in UTF-8 and Google is sending the posts as UTF-8, it looks like it's not doing that with the blog names. The name "João Oliveira" has some bad characters which Oracle didn't understand. After changing this name in Google Reader the procedure didn't produce the error anymore and Oracle could parse the xml again.

Concerning twitter... that is a different story. It looks like the APEXBlogs is banned to use the Twitter API. As I didn't take out the twitter api calls from the hourly sync, we stayed banned and it got worse I guess.

Although I thought I followed the guidelines of using the API, I'll change the syncing of twitter message to do it less frequently so we aren't blacklisted again in the future. The syncing worked for many months, so Twitter must have changed their policies.

Today I asked Twitter to remove APEXBlogs.info from the blacklist so hopefully the twitter syncing will work again in a few days.

APEX Meetup @ OOW 2011

It's an annual tradition that the APEX developers get together at Oracle Open World to have some drinks and meet each other and tell great stories.

This year it's the 5th year we do this! (update: 6th year!) The first APEX Meetup was in 2006, this is the picture that was taken at that time.

You recognise the people? It's funny to see that picture again, it shows how fast life goes and that we don't stay young ;-)

Where in 2006 APEX had still everything to proof, the stories were about "will APEX stay?" and "how can I convince my manager/customer that APEX is really good?"... now, APEX has proven it's value many times and almost every customer using Oracle knows about it or uses APEX. Things change... and the life of APEX isn't over yet... there is more to come.

So what about the meet up this year?

As the tradition wants, the APEX Meetup will be at the 4th Street Bar & Deli on the Tuesday (7.30 PM) during Oracle Open World. Everybody is welcome! OTN (thanks Lillian!) is sponsoring this year again too, so the first round is already paid for :-)

Hope to see you there...

Upgraded to APEX 4.1 successfully

Yesterday APEX 4.1 hit production and is now available for everybody to download.

Joel Kallman of the APEX development team did a nice post about this new release here.

He not only mentions some of the new features that come with APEX 4.1, but also explains that jQuery Mobile will come shortly after this release.

I played with the Early Adopter release of APEX 4.1 for some time and liked it very much. I also tried some of my applications and they ran without that many issues. You might want to read on the changed behaviour documentation of APEX 4.1 first.

As the production release is now available, I upgraded one of my APEX 4.0 instance to APEX 4.1 without any issues today (if you need to rerun the ACL privileges, read this). It took less than 15 minutes to do that.

I don't tend to wait too long before I upgrade to the latest release of APEX as with every release you get so many more enhancements and new features, it makes it really worthwhile.

I like the new UI of the Builder very much too and look forward to use APEX 4.1 day in and day out.

Google Apps desupport "old" browsers

I just get an email of Google which was interesting to say the least... and I wish I could tell the people we develop Oracle APEX apps for the same! Developing web applications that are browser compliant (especially older browsers) is just taking so much time! It would be really nice if it was common to only need to support the last 3 versions.

Here is the email:

Beginning on August 1, 2011, Google Apps support for the following browsers versions will be DISCONTINUED:

- Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

- Mozilla Firefox 3.5

- Apple Safari 3

After August 1, you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites with these older browsers, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

WHY THE CHANGE?

To give users the best experience with Google Apps, we need the capabilities of modern browsers to deliver features such as desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs.

For this reason, beginning August 1, 2011, Google Apps will support the current and previous major releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

I couldn't agree more ;-)

Ready for the Weekly APEX QUIZ?

With the growing popularity and usage of Oracle Application Express, we are very excited to announce a new weekly Oracle APEX quiz launching on Saturday, 18th June. Weekly quizzes start on Saturday and end on Friday at midnight (UTC).

We have been deeply involved in the development (and success!) of the PL/SQL Challenge from the very beginning... and we have now taken the next logical step:

APEX Evangelists is now sponsoring a weekly APEX quiz, so you can now look forward to APEX Evangelists challenging you with some interesting quizzes. If you’re already a seasoned APEX developer or you are only just beginning your journey with APEX, then this is the perfect time to start competing in the APEX Quiz to help to deepen and broaden your knowledge about one of Oracle’s most exciting application development tools.

To play the APEX quiz starting 18 June, simply visit http://www.plsqlchallenge.com and choose the quiz in the Play a Quiz table. We also encourage you to submit your own ideas for APEX quizzes – and to volunteer as a reviewer (which you can do through the Feedback page).

We made a bet with Steven Feuerstein that more developers will be playing the APEX quiz than the daily PL/SQL quiz in no time! So help us spread the word! Let your friends co-workers know about the APEX quiz and start playing now!

APEX 4.1 EA2 available: drag/drop calendar, data load

The Oracle Application Express (APEX) development team hit the ball out the park again with some of the new features you find in APEX 4.1 Early Adopter 2!

tryapexnow.com got updated last night with a new version of APEX and I just played a little bit with it. Two new features caught my eye: the data load wizard and the drag/drop in the calendar.

Drag/Drop in Calendar

I followed the wizard to create a new page of type Calendar and it now asks if you want to enable Drag and Drop.

The drag and drop features uses an On Demand Page Process which you have to select in the Calendar Attributes. If you click on the Process label you see an example how such a Process needs to look like.

Data Loading Pages (wizard)

You want to allow people to upload data in your application (using copy/paste or a csv file)? Now you just have to follow the Data Loading wizard and it does everything for you. It even includes a mechanism that detects if it needs to do an update or an insert, it allows you to add data transformations and validations and it just flows well.

When you finish the wizard the page in you application looks like this

Many features that come with this wizard, really nice. And it's just an APEX page, so you can still customise it like you want.

If you didn't try APEX 4.1 yet, give it a go, it's worth to see what's coming... and remember to use the Feedback link to give the APEX development team feedback.

APEX rocks wallpaper

If you like to have a special wallpaper on your Desktop, Galaxy tablet, iPad or iPhone you can check out the APEX rocks wallpapers.

Red Gate created in conjunction with APEX Evangelists the APEX Rocks set especially for the APEX community. There are other sets available from the Red Gate website.

The APEX Rocks set wallpapers can be downloaded from APEXBlogs. On the right hand side under Useful Tools you find the link.

APEX 4.1 - Chart improvements

Although they are not specifically listed in the New Features overview, Oracle APEX 4.1 seems to include some charts enhancements and bug fixes.

Here's an overview of the improvements I found on 4.1.0.00.03 compared to 4.0.2.00.07.

1) Although the Font Settings was there in APEX 4.0, there was not a region display selector for it. That got added now.

2) In the Font Settings the Grid Label was removed. This setting was a carry over of APEX 3.x but became obsolete in APEX 4.0 (more info in this blog post's comment).

3) The Marker select list only becomes visible for Line and Pie charts, for other chart types the marker disappeared. (more info in this blog post's comment)

4) Two new features for Bar and Column charts: Overlay Y-Axis and Sorted Overlay Y-Axis which allows to see the Series behind each other instead of next to each other.

Normal behaviour of a 3D Column chart with three series.

If the Overlay Y-Axis is checked the Series go behind each other.

The Sorted Overlay Y-Axis is especially useful in a 2D Column chart, as if you wouldn't do it one column/bar might be over the other one and you wouldn't see it. If it's sorted the smallest are in front and the biggest columns are at the back. In the above example the green (Womens Series) is behind the red (Mens Series), but as they are a bit transparent and 3D you still see it. If you prefer to see it better you should use the Sorted Overlay Y-Axis too.

5) The overall feel of the Application Builder was improved in APEX 4.1. The Axes Settings for example now disable some fields depending other selections on the page. Also only the features that are useful for the chart you selected should be visible.

6) Issues from APEX 4.0 seem to be all resolved in APEX 4.1: Build Query button, Axes, Gradient, Multiple Series

7) You can now position the label of a Pie or Doughnut chart to be either outside (default) or inside. Lengthy labels made the size of the chart smaller as the label was on the outside. If you put your label on the inside you don't have this anymore.

The chart with the Label Position to Outside:

The chart with the Label Position to Inside:

It's these small tweaks that make APEX even better than it was before and makes it a great development environment.

APEX 4.1 and more

10 days ago the APEX Development team announced an early adopter version of APEX 4.1.

A (bigger) release of a new version of APEX happened in the past in three steps:

1) Beta (Early Adopter) on tryapexnow.com (possibly with some refreshes)

2) Upgrade of apex.oracle.com

3) Download new version of APEX on OTN

Depending the feedback the time between the steps might vary and sometimes some unexpected things pop-up, but I would expect the release of APEX 4.1 around the summer holidays. (note; this is just my personal guess!)

Although APEX 4.1 is not as big of a release as 4.0 was, it will definitely be worthwhile to upgrade once it becomes available. A list of the new features you find here.

All improvements and new features are very useful and make a lot of sense, but if I had to list my top 4 at this stage, these would be:

- Nicer and updated look and feel of the Application Builder: flow got improved, new icons, bug fixes ...

- Tabular Form improvements: validations, processes ...

- Plug-Ins improvements: authorization schemes, increased number of attributes ...

- Better Error Handling feature

I've seen a demo of the upcoming Mobile Support before and if that was already in this build of APEX 4.1 it would have been in my top list as well. Another powerful feature mentioned in the SOD will be Data Upload, that enables end-users to upload data into an existing table.

One feature that was rumoured to be in APEX 4.1, but seems not to have made it in time, is non-flash charts. (on a side note; I don't mind that, as we (APEX Evangelists) offer a non-flash chart plugin for APEX :-)).

Definitely give APEX 4.1 a try yourself and give as much feedback as possible to the APEX Development team (from the APP Builder there is a link to the Feedback app).

If you want to read more about the new Error Handling features in APEX, Patrick Wolf did two blog posts which give more detail: part 1 and part 2.

If you are interested in reading about the new Authorization scheme plugin, check out the post of Christian Neumueller, another member of the APEX Development team who started to blog recently.

OBUG APEX SIG - May 24th, Belgium

Oracle and OBUG APEX SIG are glad to invite you to a free full day APEX seminar. The agenda has been completely filled and we have some of the most recognized APEX people presenting!

View the full Agenda and Register

Reminder - FREE Webinar Wednesday - How APEXBlogs was built

Just a quick reminder that I'm doing a FREE Webinar on Wednesday how the new APEXBlogs website was built.

I'll start with what I didn't like about the old APEXBlogs site and why I wanted to do the redesign of back-end and front-end. Next I'll go over the development process and how things work behind the scenes. I'll conclude with the deployment which includes going from our server in the datacenter to our server in the cloud (Amazon). You'll also have the chance to ask me questions about this project and APEX in general.

Currently there are over 200 people registered... if you want to join us register here.

If you can't make it, but liked to have seen it... register too. The webinar gets recorded and the link will be sent to all registered people, so you can still see it whenever suits you.

New APEX Book - Expert Oracle Application Express

Soon a new Oracle Application Express (APEX) book will be available... and it will be one you definitely want to have!

John Scott came up with the idea to do a special APEX book in memory of our passed away friends Carl Backstrom and Scott Spadafore, two members of the APEX Development team. John gives more details on his blog, so definitely read that too.

Next to the emotional value of the book, the content is unique and is not found anywhere else!

Thirteen different chapters, written by thirteen of the worlds best known Oracle APEX experts! The names are: Dietmar Aust, Doug Gault, Dimitri Gielis (myself), Roel Hartman, Michael Hichwa, Sharon Kennedy, Denes Kubicek, Francis Mignault, Anton Nielsen, Raj Mattamal, Daniel McGhan, John Scott and Martin D’Souza.

We all had one mission: share our passion, pass on all our knowledge, give you content you don't find anywhere else and go that extra mile to make this book, *the* APEX book.

Personal Experience with Writing

Although I already wrote articles before and was a technical reviewer on other APEX books, it was the first time I actually wrote a complete chapter for a book. It was quite an experience to say the least... I did enjoy the writing and even more focussing on the technical side of things and doing the research and testing etc. but I didn't realise it would take up so much time. Therefor I would like to thank my wife, my kids and my family for their support and to give me that time during the weekends and evenings.

Also special thanks to Hilary Farrell from the APEX Development team to review my chapter, even with her own tight deadlines.

About My Chapter

There wasn't a real rule about which topic which author took, but it all kinda spook for itself. I guess if you look at the names, you probably know that Anton wrote about security, Dan about Plugins, Francis about Globalization, ... I don't want to give all topics away yet... I'm sure the other authors will tell you soon :-)

The title of my chapter is "APEX 4.0 Charts Inside Out"... and there is a lot to tell about these charts! Apress (the publisher) told me to stop when I hit 80 pages, otherwise I think I was still writing! When you are passionate about something...

I hope that after reading my chapter you really understand how charts work, what they can give you and how you can create any chart you like. And remember... start to include charts in your APEX application (if you are not already doing) as they might trigger your manager to give you a salary increase! Managers love visuals!

Here are the sections of the chapter:

Overview	2
HTML Charts	2
Using the HTML Charts Wizard	2
The Result	3
Debug and Performance	4
Behind the Scenes	4
Other Opportunities linked to HTML Charts	5
Flash Charts	8
Background Flash Charts	8
Creating a Flash Chart	8
The Result	14
Understanding the Chart Region	16
Understanding the Chart Attributes	19
Adding Multiple Series and Combined Charts	28
Different Flash Chart Types	33
Behind the Scenes	35
Debug and Performance	40
Upgrading Oracle APEX 3.x Flash and SVG Charts	44
Screen Reader Mode and Charts	46
Extending Flash Charts	48
Customizing Charts by using Custom XML	48
Customizing Charts by using Custom XML, Dynamic Actions and JavaScript	51
Creating Charts Manually	54
Drill-down Charts, Dashboards and Interactivity	60
Simple Dashboard with Submit	60
Simple Dashboard with JavaScript	63
Complex Dashboard with Actions	67
Most Common Issues	76
Specific feature	76
Invalid #HOST# with Reverse Proxy or HTTPS	76
Flash Security Error	77
Charts in the Future	77
Caution	78
Resources	79
Summary	80

Hope you like the above!

The topics that didn't make it into the chapter were some more examples of the most asked requests in the APEX Forum and all the information about Gantt charts and Maps.

The way of working of Gantts and Maps are very similar to the "normal" charts, they just use a different Flash file and XML. But normally by the time you finish this chapter, you'll be able to answer all your questions you have yourself.

It might be that I'll publish an ebook about Gantts and Maps later in the year if I see many people would benefit from it.

AND NOW... (PRE-)ORDER THE BOOK! :-)

Last day Early bird Registration ODTUG Kscope11

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

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

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

See you there...