APEX 4.0 Highlights and Video

If you didn't see the video or ppt of Mike Hichwa's APEX 4.0 presentation at ODTUG, you should definitely have a look at it, so you know what is coming.

I decided to take notes during the video to remember myself about the highlights and decided to share them in this blog post. So here you go...

History of Oracle Application Express

I didn't know that Mike Hichwa got inspired by an ATM machine to create APEX.
Basically an ATM is very simple;
- You authenticate
- You need to select what you want through a menu
- You enter things in a Form
- Validations cick in to check if you do the right things
- Finally the process is run
- You can get your transaction as a printed report
This is exactly what we have in APEX, no? Why make it complex if things can be simple ;-)

Oracle Shop

The APEX Development team created a more sophistic APEX application which is the Oracle Shop where you can basically order Oracle software.
The application has some nice features like:
- it integrates with Oracle Apps in the backend
- it uses webservices to check your credit card
- it has some nice integration with javascript

The Oracle Shop is already live, you see it here.

Seven demonstrations of APEX 4.0

1. Websheets (start at minute 25)
Business people are able to create an application very fast with a lot of features. You can see this as a very rich web 2.0 Interactive Report with collaboration features build-in.
But also for experienced APEX people this is a good thing as you can transform it into a real APEX app. I included a screenshot with the main differences between APEX and Websheets.

2. Dynamic Actions
This basically allows developers to write more AJAX applications without needing to write javascript.
E.g. if you want to show an item dynamically based on a value of a previous item

3. Upgrade of Anychart 3.3 to Anychart 5.1
Not only will you get nicer looking charts, you will also get more types of charts.
I also find it usefull the wizard got improved, so directly you see which type of chart you are going to get.
If you wanted to have the Anychart 5.1 charts already in APEX 3.x you had to use the Anychart Integration Kit for APEX.


4. REST Web Services
It will make things easier to integrate with other sites and applications
In the video you see the integration with Yahoo Maps, Flickr, Picasa and Amazon.
Jason also mentioned that APEX Collections will get stored in an XMLType column, so it will be preparsed and the query will run a lot faster.


5. Plug-Ins (in the Shared Components section)
APEX 4.0 will allow people to extend the built-in functionalities. So we would be able to create our own widgets (item types, region types).
These plugins you can find on a specific site where people can share them. You would create these plugins in PL/SQL.
E.g. the video talks about a plugin to get a video region, or a star-rating item


6. Improved Interactive Reports
E.g. create your own where clauses inside your IR, be able to notify people when a specific report gets changed, be able to provide saved reports (as a developer and not like now that the end-user needs to save the report), share reports, download the IR as a searchable html etc.

7. Improved Application Builder
E.g. make the most important button yellow, very cool search functionalities with regular expressions


APEX 4.0 features that did not get demoed, but are things to look forward to:

- Declarative Tabular Forms
- AJAX Client-Side Validations
- Improved Error Handling
- Improved Tree Controls
- JQuery and JQuery UI
- Item Attributes
- Javascript Date pickers
- Editable combo-box
- APEX Listener is faster and has bigger possibilities than mod_plsql. It will also be able to have native access to the filesystem by using the APEX Listener.
- This will help a lot if you store your javascript files, etc on the filesystem. It will also simplify printing as FOP will be burned in.
- Thight integration with SQL Developer Data Modeler.
- In APEX 4.0 the wizards are also a lot shorter and more intuitive.
- Better integration with Subversion (more declarative).

A release date got also mentioned of APEX 4.0: planned for early 2010.
Just a reminder; APEX 4.0 will only run on Oracle Database 10gR2 and higher. That is another reason for people to upgrade their database...

The APEX Dev-team also showed a new packaged application with higher quality and ready to see web 2.0 features. E.g. "APEX Teamspace"; which allow team collaboration. It's a nice example of a Web 2.0 application. This would also run in APEX 3.2.

If you want to see it live, you have a chance to see it again on Oracle Open World!

Stacked Bar chart with negative values in APEX

Today I saw an interesting question in the APEX Forum: "Is it possible to create a stacked verticle bar chart that can display a negative value below the bottom line?"

I tried an example with this query in the Chart Series:

select null as link, value as label, rownum*-1+3 as value, rownum*-1+5 value2
from bar_order_vw

The bar_order_vw is defined as:

create view bar_order_vw (value) as
select sysdate + level as value
from dual connect by level < 10

The result when you use the standard Flash charts in APEX (based on Anychart 3.3) looks like this:


That is not really a nice chart I would say. It's very hard to see what the values are. Basically you see two values for a date. Value 1 is blue, value 2 is red. But some values are negative.
I already tried to play with the settings of the chart, but it doesn't really help to make it a bit nicer.

Next I wanted to know how this chart would look like with Anychart 5, so I used the Anychart integration kit for APEX. I just changed the source of the swf file to point to the integration kit so the chart would render with Anychart 5. This is what I got:


I think it looks a lot cleaner, don't you?

My guess is that in APEX 4.0 it will look fine without having to change anything as there you already have Anychart 5 integrated. For now you can use the integration kit for Anychart 5 or integrate with a charting engine manually.

Edit: Here you find the example in real-time.

OOW 2009 APEX Sessions

After a short break I'm back to business.

What they say is true: "having one baby is some work, having two babies is not double the work, but more like 4 times the work" ;-) It's nice to spend time with family, but I also enjoy starting to work again. Some people might not understand that, but I guess I'm lucky I enjoy the things I do. Find the right balance is the real challenge for me.


Oracle Open World (OOW) 2009 is not far off and just as previous years there will be many APEX sessions. I'm sure David Peake will list them all in his APEX Conference Session application soon.

On the Sunday there will be a special APEX day. It will be a joint user group event (IOUG and ODTUG). Scott Spendolini and myself are hosting it. The theme we came up with is "Migrations to APEX" where we have some nice case studies from people migrating from different platforms to Oracle Application Express. At the end of the day we also have the "Ask the Experts" panel.

Next to the Sunday I'll do two other presentations:

• Mastering an Oracle Application Express Page (11-OCT-09 11:45 - 12:45 Hilton Hotel)
  
• Impress Your Clients with Interactive Dashboards in Oracle Application Express (12-OCT-09 10:15 - 11:15 Hilton Hotel)
  

I look forward to OOW already as it will be nice to see the people I missed at ODTUG. I also wonder what Larry has to announce this time.

See you at San Francisco.

Emmeline: "Hello World"

We had to wait for some time, but yesterday she finally agreed to come out of the save environment of mummies tummy and have a look at this world.

Emmeline got born on the 16th of July at 17.40h. She's a bit smaller than her brother; her weight is 2755 gram and she has a length of 47 cm.

On the picture you see mummy, our son Matthias and our few hours old daughter Emmeline.


Mummy and Emmeline are doing great. For Matthias everything is a bit strange but he's handling it very well so far.

A proud father.

Mac OSX Software I like

Sometimes I get the question which Mac OSX software I use. So here's a list of programs I've installed. Some I use often others less often. If you use other nice software, feel free to add!

Standard Mac Software:

• Address Book
• AppleScript
• Automator
• Calculator
• Dashboard
• Dictionary
• Expose
• Font Book
• Image Capture
• TextEdit
• Unison
• Utilities
• Spaces
• iCal
• iSync
• Stickies
• Server - because we also have Mac OSX Server

Office:

• iWork
• iLife

Internet Applications:

• Adium - chat
• iChat - chat
• Colloquy - irc (not used that much)
• Cyberduck - ftp client
• DynDNS Updater - link a hostname to an ip
• Dropbox - online storage
• Firefox with different plugins (YSlow, LiveHTTPHeaders, Firebug, ColorPicker, ...)
• Safari - standard browser on OSX
• GoToMeeting - to do remote support and meetings
• SSH Tunnel Manager - ssh
• Meerkat - ssh
• Cisco VPNClient - vpn
• Viscosity - vpn
• Skype
• Mail
• Twitterrific - twitter reader
• Reader Notifier - get rss updates
• Yuuguu - connect to others
• Transmission - download files

Graphical Software:

• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• Adobe Flash CS3
• Adobe Illustrator CS3
• Adobe InDesign CS3
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• PDFpenPro - edit pdf
• Paintbrush
• OmniGraffle Professional 5 - make schemes
• iWeb - make websites

Games:

• Chess
• Quinn - tetris like
• MasterMind - dashboard plugin
  

Entertainment:

• DVD Player
• DivX Converter
• DivX Player
• EyeTV - makes it able to watch tv on my mac
• Flip4Mac - be able to play wmv
• GarageBand - audio
• Front Row - menu to all entertainment
• iDVD
• iMovie
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• ScreenFlow - record video
• Photo Booth
• VLC - play video
• QuickTime Broadcaster
• QuickTime Player
• VisualHub - convert video (not updated anymore)
• Spotify - play any song (only works when I'm in the UK)
• BookSmart - online creation of you photo albums
• WorldRadio widget - listen to radio as dashboard app
  

Local/External storage:

• ExpanDrive - Mount drives even through ftp etc
• Macfusion - extend to other filesystems
• SuperDuper! - backup your Mac

Phone:

• Missing Sync for Windows Mobile - I've an HTC and not an iPhone, so need extra software to sync agenda, contacts etc
• TomTom HOME - on my phone I have also GPS and navigation software

Oracle related:

• Oracle SQL DataModeler - SQL Modeler
• Power*Architect - SQL Modeler
• SQLEditor - SQL Modeler
• SQLDeveloper - my day to day tool to talk to the Oracle database
• Versions - SubVersion client
• VMware Fusion - to get access to my remote machines

Project Management:

• Merlin - allows to estimate the work and breakdown in pieces
• Mindjet MindManager - read MindMaps
• OmniFocus - to do list which is able to sync as well

Text Editor:

• SubEthaEdit - allows to work on a text with more persons, real time editing
• TextMate - favorite text editor

OSX Tools:

• OmniDazzle - mouse focus and effects
• Quicksilver - lunch commands fast
• StuffIt Expander - zip like
• 1Password - store passwords in a secure way
• Wallet - store passwords in a secure way
• World Clock Deluxe - to keep an eye when my clients get awake
• iBank - trying that, MS Money type app
• Caffeine - let your Mac never go in sleep mode
• Time Machine - automated backups
• iStat Pro widget - shows a lot of information about your Mac (ip, temperature etc)
• AccuWeather widget
• SysTran translation widget
• Currency converter widget
  

For the people who want to work faster, here's a good list of shortcuts for OSX.

SQL Modeler for Mac OSX (Part 2)

Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard commented on my previous post about SQL Modeler for Mac OSX, that I had to check out a tool called Power*Architect.

So I thought to give it a go. The steps to get it running:

• Go to the SQL Power website and download Power*Architect
• As most OSX applications you install by dragging the application in your Applications folder
• So now I wanted to get an ERD of some tables, so you run Power*Architect and select from which Data Source you want to capture.
• I had to download the Oracle 10g JDBC driver first (apparently 11g is not yet foreseen in Power*Architect)
• In the User Preferences you can tell where the driver can be found
• Next I dragged-dropped from the interface the tables I wanted to the right hand side, but the tables where not nicely ordered
• Luckily there is a button "Automatic Layout" which I pushed and that gave me the below result

As far as I've tested Power*Architect, it looks very promising. It's definitely a tool I will try a bit more in the future.

SQL Modeler for Mac OSX

On the first of July Oracle's SQL Developer Data Modeler got a production release. You have the choice between a full version and a Viewer only version.

I installed the full version on my Mac to see how it is like. These are the steps I followed to get it working on my MacBook Pro:

1. Download the zip file from OTN
2. Unzip the file in my Applications folder
3. You'll see a folder called "datamodeler"
4. I ran a Terminal session to call this command: sh datamodeler.sh
5. The first time SQL Developer Data Modeler asks you to enter the full pathname of a J2SE installation. For me the path is:
   /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home
6. Next SQL Developer Data Modeler opens and you are good to go
7. I tried to generate a relational and logical datamodel and it worked great (see below screenshot of the DG Tournament schema
   
   
   

As expected Oracle didn't make the tool for free. I hoped differently, but apparently Larry decided against it. The latest Oracle pricelist shows under the Tools section the price of SQL Developer Data Modeler. The first year you pay USD 3,000 + USD 660 (support and upgrade), from the second year onwards it's 660, but that gives you the right to install all updates. I definitely think the product can justify the price, but maybe not for everybody or in every project as you might not want to use all the features.

One of the most important parts for me is viewing the ERD in a graphical way. I tend to use the ERD to explain clients how we see the application. Or if we come in when the application already exist, to quickly know what is going on behind the scenes. Till now I used SQLEditor of MalcolmHardie Solutions. It allows me to connect to a database and get the ERD for a schema or certain tables. It can do a lot more like adding tables, columns etc and you can see the sql statements in different formats. Below is a screenshot of the same schema as the picture before.


Most of the time I have to rearrange the tables so it's more logic and more understandable. Personally I think Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler looks a bit better and it has more features and I had to not rearrange that much as with SQLEditor. But then I guess that explains the difference in price ;-) SQLEditor costs $79.

I still have a lot to learn of the functionalities of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, but what I saw at the conferences and what I could do so far, I definitely think it's worth for you to give it a try.

Thank you for the award

Next to the two APEX surprises yesterday I got a personal surprise from the ODTUG front today. It made me happy, proud, smile ...

I got the "Best Speaker Award" for content and topic.

I knew I was nominated and somewhere in the top 5, but I didn't dream of winning it! Of course I would like to thank the whole APEX community, ODTUG and all the people at the conference.


The twitter stream at the ODTUG conference is going well. I'm now following two APEX presentations at the same time as people in both rooms twitter ;-) I really wish I could see Scott Spadafore do his security presentation. "He's the man", as Carl would have said.

Two APEX surprises at ODTUG

Although I'm not phisycally at ODTUG, I'm following it closely with the blogs, the twitter feeds and my friends who keep me up-to-date.

As said earlier, ODTUG will host the biggest number of APEX sessions at a conference so far. But it looks like the numbers of attendees in the APEX sessions will also break a record (over 200 people).

On Sunday there was the APEX Symposium. Clients talked about their experience with APEX and showed some Case Studies. Last week in the Netherlands I saw Olivier Dupont's session about APEX at Brussels Airport. That was a good example how APEX can be used on "terminals" (pc's without mouse and where no software can be installed).
Martin Giffy D'Souza also talked about some applications they created and use at Cognera. We worked close with Cognera on an application they are providing to their clients (SaaS model). They did some nice things with APEX.

There were also two surprises, as David Peake announced on his blog.

People in the room got the first ever Oracle Application Express t-shirts! John got also one for me, so I look forward to see them. Maybe the people at the APEX Meetup (Monday night) can all wear that t-shirt? And then take a picture... that would be awesome!

The other surprise was the announcement of Oracle Application Express Developer Competition 2009. You find more information on David Peake's blog and on OTN.
It will be nice to see what APEX applications people come up with... and you don't have to do it for free! You can win a trip to Oracle Open World. If you don't know what it is or never have been there, that is definitely something you want to see as it's the biggest Oracle conference of the world. Good luck with the competition!

Web development with Safari 4

I'm really a "Firefox with Firebug" fan if we are talking about Web development.

I wouldn't know what to do without Firebug as it allows me to investigate my page, run and debug my javascript code, change the styles on the fly, see which files are missing and much more.

But as you probably know, the biggest challenge in web development is being browser compliant. Typically I develop my APEX applications in Firefox, test it there and run another test in Safari (I'm developing on Mac). Having two browsers open is also handy to test session state and what is happening when multiple users are in the application.

I always dreamed of having Firebug also on Safari as sometimes something was working in Firefox but not in Safari. There is a Firebug lite, but I never liked it that much.
A few days ago I upgraded to Safari 4 and enabled the Develop toolbar (Preferences - Advanced).



You get a new Develop menu with a lot of options, just like in Firebug. I like it very much and the Web Inspector is also very impressive. I would definitely recommend to have a look at it, if you have a Mac and are doing web development.



In Safari 3 you could enable Web Inspector as well, but you had to run the following command in a Terminal window: "defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true"

If I test my applications in IE, I use the Web Developer toolbar.

Improve your charts in APEX without coding

I just added another video to the Anychart integration kit for APEX website which shows you in three and a half minutes how to get nicer charts in APEX without having to change a single line of code in your application.

In the previous video we extended the charts in APEX with the new charts so they can both be used, but this time we want that all existing and future charts are using the new charts from the integration kit.

The advantage:

• If you have a lot of charts already created in your APEX application they will get replaced by the new charts without having to change anything. All your charts will look new.
  
• Another advantage is that in the wizards of APEX the new version will be shown directly.

To do this, we take the files of the integration kit (Anychart 5.1) and will overwrite the existing Anychart 3.3 files in APEX. You can see exactly how it works in the below video.



If you prefer to download the video and play in your favorite media player (e.g. QuickTime) you can do that here.

ODTUG Sneak Preview and Meetup

As the tradition wants, AMIS is organizing another ODTUG Sneak Preview on June 15. Two weeks before the real ODTUG conference the Dutch and Belgian speakers try-out their presentation. It's not only nice for the speakers to get feedback, but also for the people who can't go to ODTUG they can see some presentations. Although I had to cancel my trip to the States, I'll still do one of my planned ODTUG presentation at AMIS. The event is free, but you have to register here (site in Dutch).

At ODTUG there is also another APEX Meetup. It's always great fun to meet others and have some beers together. This time John is organizing it. You find all details here. Enjoy!

ODTUG is also encouraging people to Twitter and Blog, which I think is great, so people who can't join can get a feeling of the conference.

APEX 5 on Google Wave?

I was watching the video of the announcement of Google Wave and thought by myself "this is really cool!".

HTML5 looks amazing no? You see changes on the fly and everything is integrated, which is incredible! And it seems to be fast as well and runs in a standard browser!

Adobe Flex and their Flex Data Services have something similar. I played a bit with Flex two years ago and it was pretty nice. I even integrated it with APEX, but the downside was you need a Flash player for it. Also at that time, the rumors were the Flex Data Services and the instant updates weren't always as fast as they should, especially with a lot of concurrent users. Anyway...

I would love to see more about Google Wave and try it myself. There are not that many details available yet, but as it will be an open platform, I'm sure we'll hear more about it soon.

If Google Wave takes really off, maybe we'll see in a later version of APEX (e.g. APEX 5?) the wizards allow you to create these HTML5 Google Wave apps. I really wonder how this would work, having an Oracle Database with your data on one server and on another server the Google Platform. It seems everything works with XML in Google Wave.

I guess we'll see what the future brings!

APEX training/sessions in the US - ODTUG

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the conference!

Using APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC on a Public page

I had to show images on a public page. I've used my own procedure to do that, but when the build-in APEX procedure APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC came available, I tend to use that. Last year I blogged about how to show an image on your page with that procedure.

So I already used this method for a while, but this time when I ran the page it didn't show my image. I was sure my code was right, because somewhere else in the application it worked just fine. The only difference was the working page is not a public page, but authentication is required.

It remembered me to a question we got last year on our training, why a picture didn't show up in somebodies APEX application. It was the same problem, the use of APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC on a public page didn't work if it references an item on a page that requires authentication.

So here are the steps to let APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC work on a public page.

1) In this example we are on a Public Page 6.
2) On that page I've an hidden item that looks like this:


3) My code to show the image looks like this: APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC('P6_FILE_BLOB', r.id)

4) You would think the above is enough to let it work, but it isn't as we didn't tell from which table this image is coming from. So I had to create an after submit process that links to the right table. I 've a condition to Never on the process, so it never runs, but apparently the APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC procedure looks at that to figure out from which table the image comes from.

That should be enough to show images on your Public Page using the APEX_UTIL.GET_BLOB_FILE_SRC procedure.

Video - How to install the Anychart integration kit for APEX

I just added a video to the Anychart integration kit for APEX website which shows you in five minutes how to install the kit.

In the video I don't "upgrade" the Flash charts of APEX, but instead I show how you can use both versions together. So you'll be able to use both the Anychart 3 charts you get out-of-the-box with APEX and the Anychart 5 charts you get with the integration kit.

I uploaded the video to YouTube, but the quality seems to have dropped quite a bit.



I recommend to look at the original video as the quality is a bit better. You can download the video and play in your favorite media player (e.g. QuickTime) in full screen.

Another weird APEX video

I came across another video to promote Oracle Application Express. At least I think that is the goal, but as I don't understand the language I'm not sure about it ;-)

What I find a bit strange is that the author of the video doesn't have a high-speed connection to his APEX instance. So whenever he clicks it takes some time to load the page. Just for the people who didn't see APEX yet, this is not normal. There is definitely something wrong at his end or he must have a very slow line.

Anyway I like there are more videos coming out... actually I'm working on a couple too ;-)

Another fun APEX video

I just came across a blog post of Jeff Erickson, Tech Editor at Oracle Publishing where he shows a nice video. An "Excel Master" becomes an "APEX Master"! djing!

Collaborate 09 - Thursday

The final day... only one session to follow, one session to do and then flight back to Belgium.

The first session of the day was by Francis Mignault. He presented "How to build a multi-tenant SAAS application with Oracle Application Express".
I liked the presentation a lot. He started globally, but also went into the technical part. He showed some really nice things, like their integration of jquery in their application. Some people have doubts about performance and dynamic sql, but Francis showed once more APEX scales well. He's getting very good performance on modest hardware and is using dynamic sql a lot. He creates every page depending on the organization. So one APEX application for multiple customers. It looks like they have all their own application, but underlying it's the same one.

Next it was my turn to present "What happens on an APEX Page?"
I talked about how an APEX page is structured (page - multiple regions - multiple buttons and items and navigation for your page flow) and how an APEX page is working. A lot of people didn't know (or where not conscious) the page has two phases: a show (rendering) phase and an accept (processing) phase.
You can also view your page in different ways. The picture on the right shows you the page in the Events view. These steps you'll also see if you run your APEX page in debug mode. At the end I demoed some more advanced techniques; for ex. how you can track things if your page does AJAX. The session got also recorded but it might be hard to follow certain parts (especially demos) if you don't see what I'm actually doing on the screen. I'm also asked to do a webinar of it, but there is no date etc for it yet.

After having some final lunch we went to the airport. I'm on the same flight as a lot of other Europeans of the conference for ex. Jonathan Lewis, Mark Rittman and John Scott.

I look forward to see my family again...

Collaborate 09 - Wednesday

Before noon I didn't do that much. I stayed in the nice lobby of the Peabody Hotel and worked a bit. At a certain moment the music started to play and ducks came through the hall. That was fun to see. Apparently every day there is a duck ceremony in this hotel.


In the afternoon I went to John Scott's session "Dispelling Myths About Oracle Application Express".
I've already seen the presentation a view times, but every time John puts different jokes in. He had some good laughs. His session got also recorded and streamed, so you might have seen/see it online. John covers the most frequently "untruths" he has heard about APEX. He will also do this presentation again at ODTUG.


The next session was "APEX Interactive Reports: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" by Karen Cannell.
If you as a developer or business user wants to know how to get most out of Interactive Reports, this presentation is worth to follow. Karen had a theme (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is also a movie) and she even played the music of the film :-)

In the evening there was the "big" party. We were invited to Universal Studios.
It was my first time at Universal Studios and there were some pretty good attractions. One of my favorite was the Hulk and Spiderman. Universal Studio is divided in different parts and these parts are all by a certain movie theme.
John and I spend most of our time with Borkur and Mark Rittman. Later that night we bumped up to Karen Cannell, Crystal from ODTUG, David Peake, "RAC-lady" and many others.

It was a good night with a lot of fun, the only pity was we had to pay for our own drinks and food. But not having to queue to get onto an attraction made it good.

Collaborate 09 - Tuesday

It looks like my jetlag is not over yet as I woke up at 4 am again.

It's a habit to get at least once Egg Benedict as a breakfast while I'm in the States, so that is what I took today. It was not bad, but I think the Eggs Benedict in San Francisco was a bit better.

My first session of the day was "Introducing SQL Developer Data Modeling" by Sue Harper.
She gave a nice overview and demo of the possibilities of this Data Modeling tool. I believe this product is worth your try. You can both create a logical, relational and physical diagram or you can reverse engineer an existing database. The product is currently in beta, but it shouldn't take long anymore before it hits production. She also mentioned SQL Developer Data Modeling will be available as a stand-alone product and as an extension for SQL Developer. The first production release will be without a repository, instead it uses XML files.

The next presentation on my list was one of my favorite presenters Steven Feuerstein. Steven talked about "Coding Therapy for Software Developers".
You can actually download this presentation (and all his others) on Steven's ToadWorld website.
I liked his presentation a lot and he hit the nail on the head in a lot of his quotes. One I really liked was: "The fastest way to get the job done is to take your time." For ex. in APEX you can quickly create applications, but if you didn't think about the data model or anticipated the project and the customers future requests that might cause you problems in the future. Of course this counts for every development language, it's just so that with APEX you happen to see it quicker ;-) But that quote counts in real life too. We have some builders building our new house and I found their way of working very different than mine... I want things to be perfect, but for them good is good enough. The problem is their good is even not good enough for me, so they ended up redoing a wall three times! Hopefully it reminded them to the saying "more haste less speed".

In the afternoon we had the "APEX - Ask the Experts Panel". The panel existed out of Tony Jedlenski, David Peake, John Scott and myself. As we were with a small group (around 20 people) it was a very interactive meeting with lots of good questions.
Here are some of the questions with a brief answer.

"Dr. Paul Dorsey mentioned in his presentation he had questions (doubts) about the Security and Dynamic SQL in APEX."

As with any other development language you can also develop insecure APEX applications. But APEX helps you with making your application more secure. APEX already gives you some out-of-the box security options like Authentication, Authorization and SSP (session state protection). But you can leverage all the security options of the Oracle database as well for ex. if you don't want to allow certain rows or columns to be visible you can use VPD (virtual private database). Paul also said there is no development tool secure enough for him, but APEX will be one of the most secure once around.
Concerning the Dynamic SQL, John Scott has a nice presentation about Dispelling Myths about Oracle Application Express where he shows some statistics about APEX apps... at the moment the use of Dynamic SQL is no issue. But it's recommended to use a PL/SQL package in the database than to put all the PL/SQL code inside an APEX process. In that case it can be pinned by the database etc. It also makes debugging easier.

"When I've issues with APEX where do I go?"

The APEX Forum on OTN is a great place to ask you question first. A lot of smart people are in the forum to help you and it's rarely you are the first to come across a problem. If it tends out you are hitting a bug it's good to also log it in Metalink (create a TAR). If you want a new feature in APEX, there will be an application to log these in the next weeks.

"How do you do configuration management for your APEX apps?"

If you define some working practices that should help you a lot. For ex. you can always use the same directory structure for your javascript files, css files etc. You can also use developer comments in APEX to help you document your application. If you are with a larger team of developers naming conventions and an agreed why of working is a good idea.

"In an Interactive Report I've problems with large datasets"

We would need to have a reproducible case, so the person of that question will create an example. John tried an Interactive Report with 1 million records and that worked without a problem, so we'll see about that... If you have found this too, please put a comment on this blog.

David also talked a bit about APEX 4.0. One of the things I heard for the first time was that they are looking to make multiple Interactive Reports available on the same page (out-of-the-box). You find more about 4.0 in the Statement of Direction.

Later that afternoon John Scott had a book signing session and he sold 100% of his books (Pro Application Express) and signed every single one!

At night John, Tony and I had diner at Maggiano's Little Italy. It was a nice and relaxing evening and I enjoyed being outside (we had a table on the patio).
When walking there I saw a very strange building! You see what is wrong with it?

Collaborate 09 - Monday

As usual I woke up at 4 am, but I'm still doing good.

Today I started slow... I didn't follow any sessions before noon.

My first session of the day was "Running Oracle in the Amazon EC2 Cloud" by Tony Jedlinski.
Tony described how he created his Oracle Enterprise Linux instance with Oracle Database XE on Amazon EC2. His presentation was based on the white paper of Justin Lokitz, but Tony extended it with the new Amazon UI. I liked the presentation as he brought the message at a nice peace and I think most of the people knew how to get started now.
We have been playing with Oracle and APEX on Amazon too and so far everything went well. We are not to far off to actually use it for production hosting. Another tip I can say is that next to the UI Amazon provides there is also a nice plugin for Firefox called Elasticfox.

The next session I attended was "Oracle Application Express 3.2 Forms Conversion" by David Peake. I've seen that presentation many times now, but I always find it interesting to see how the public reacts to the presentation, which questions they have etc.
David gave a quick intro into APEX as some people where completely new to it and then started to talk about the conversion tool. He also demoed it of course!

I really looked forward to my last session of the day: "An Architectural Review of Application Express" by Dr. Paul Dorsey. I have a lot of respect for Paul, he's a very knowledgeable guy in different areas especially PL/SQL, Forms and JDeveloper. So I wondered what he thought about APEX. Paul is also an advocate of thick databases and he developed a product called BRIM to support that idea. APEX is living in the database, so that is inline with his view of thick databases. Yesterday I was sitting next to him at dinner and we had a nice talk about a project he's currently doing in Ethiopia. There he has the challenge of delivering applications with very limited bandwidth. His BRIM product is much lighter (transferring data) than any other development tool, including APEX, so I knew a bit more about his background.


I did enjoy the talk and he raised some very interesting points, but on some things I have a different view on. My impression was he reviewed APEX as is for ex. he said that an APEX page can only be linked to one table, which is not completely true. If you base the standard process on a view and you use instead of triggers as I described here, you can support multiple tables. So Paul looked at everything APEX allows you to do with the wizards and how APEX is behaving out of the box, but nothing more. So in that respect I can understand what he was saying. But I see different levels of people using APEX:

• Level 1: You just use the wizard in APEX and are able to be productive with it
• Level 2: You know also the Oracle database including SQL and PL/SQL and include that knowledge into you APEX applications (APEX is living inside the database so you can use all the database features)
• Level 3: You know also more about web development like javascript and css and use that in your APEX applications
• Level 4: You know also web 2.0 and use AJAX, jquery, json and other plugins to get exactly what you want

Paul talked about staying in the APEX sandbox (level 1) and don't try to do other things with it. Of course it's true that you need to have (other) knowledge to achieve what the wizard is not doing for you, but I don't agree you should stay in the sandbox. APEX has some nice API's you can use, so why not doing it? If you first look at APEX you might not know about them, I agree with that, but if you follow training and/or you ask more experienced APEX people to coach you, it doesn't take that long to know how to achieve other things.

Although Paul was sometimes very critical on APEX, he didn't flame it. He even said he liked APEX and it's a great tool in some cases, but does not full-fill in others, which I can agree with. You need to use the tool that fits within the projects. And he made a very nice quote at the end of his presentation: "APEX is frequently used to prototype or “get something out the door quickly” until the “real” application is built using some enterprise-level took architecture. APEX systems are typically completed in a few months and two years later, people are still waiting for the “real” application to work."

Paul is doing this presentation again at ODTUG this year, so I'm interested to know other people's reactions.

After the presentation I went to the Exhibition hall and the party to get some drinks, food and had talks with some nice people like Sue Harper, OracleNerd (Ched) and his wife, David Peake, Tony Jedlinski, Jeremy Sneyder and many others...

Just arrived in Orlando

Just checked into the Peabody hotel. At first sight it's looking like a nice place to stay.
It's very hot in Florida, but probably inside it will be cool (due to the air conditioning).


The flight was really nice, Business Class was worth it. I got some good sleep and it's much more relaxing laying down in a "sofa" than sitting in a seat.


Now I'm going to register, fresh up a bit and then start the conference...

Flying to Orlando

Today I'm flying to Orlando, Florida for IOUG Collaborate.
It will be a long day today as my train to the airport left already at 5 am. I'll arrive in Florida at 3.30 pm, that is 9.30 pm Belgium time, so a 16,5 hours journey.

I tend to work on the flight, that's why I've two batteries for my laptop, but that is even not enough to hold till the end, so a while back I ended up buying an airport power cable. If you travel in World Traveler Plus you have a power connection in your seat, which works great.

At the moment I'm waiting for my connecting flight in Gatwick and I got a very nice surprise from BA... I got a free upgrade to Business Class!
I already looked up the seat I have (sitting in 3rd row) on SeatGuru (see picture). I'll have a real bed (I think) and I'm very curious to see how different flying Business is :-) I'll let you know in 10 hours time!

It's always good to adapt to the local timezone as quick as possible so my evening is fully booked. I'll start with the Welcome Reception (there will be an APEX table there) and a bit later I'm going to a restaurant called the Redrock Canyon Grill. Mike Riley, President of the ODTUG board, was so kind to invite me.

The next days will be busy again...

Amazing things happen

In the last days I got shocked a few times... but not in a bad way.

It started a week ago when I saw Susan Boyle chasing her dream of becoming a professional singer. If you didn't see her performance on "Britains Got Talent", you really have to watch it!
She doesn't look like and everybody was laughing when she came on stage, but once she started to sing, the crowed went bananas! It was stunning!


The next I saw was an incredible goal of Christiano Ronaldo in the Champions League game against Porto. If you have ever played football yourself, you know this is an unbelievable shot.


And then yesterday the announcement that Oracle is going to buy Sun.

Oracle is growing at the speed of light. When I thought they would stop buying companies, every other month there is a new announcement. But buying Sun has huge implications as now Oracle can deliver everything; hardware, OS, database and software.
Another interesting note is that MySQL becomes a database from Oracle now. And what about Java; will that be renamed to Oracle Java?
I'm not sure what this will bring for APEX, maybe it can replace all the MySQL/PHP solutions? My guess would be Oracle will offer a migration project for these solutions to the Oracle DB as that will bring more revenue.


Anyway, in times of economic crisis, amazing things are happening!

New Anychart Integration Kit for APEX and website

We're happy to announce that a new version of the Anychart Integration Kit for APEX is available now.
This release works with Anychart 5.1.2 and 5.1.3 and it fixes some issues of previous releases.

As there was a lot of interest in the product, we decided to create a new website which has all information in one place. In the FAQ we explain how things work, there is an installation section and an explanation how to get support and lots more...


At regular times we offer Webinars (online training) about APEX and charts. The next one is already planned for next week! (see the Webinars section on the site)

As with the previous site, a lot of demos are available. The integration kit helps you to make nicer charts. It not only gives your old standard APEX charts a cleaner look and feel, but it also allows you to create other types of charts. A complete list of charts you find on the Anychart website.

Next to the charts we included a section for Maps, Gauges and Gantt charts. These sections we'll update regularly. We plan to offer more webinars about these charts as well as how to create interactive dashboards.

We also created a section to log Bugs and Enhancements for this integration kit. If you go to the Support section you'll see a link at the bottom. It allows you to log your own issue or to have a look at other known issues.

We hope you like this new release and the new site!

Have fun with it!

My participation in ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009

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

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

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

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

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