Ended up 10th at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 Vote-a-Session

My abstract "It's great to integrate: Combining Oracle Forms and Oracle Application Express" for the upcoming OOW ended up 10th (out of 150). That's one place up compared to last years voting! So a big thank you to all 99 people who voted for me (98 if I count myself out).
And just like last year it proves that APEX has a very strong community: 5 of the top 10 sessions are APEX-related (8 of the top 30: around that number seem to get an invitation).
So thanks again and I hope to see you all in San Francisco in a couple of months!

APEX 3.2 Oracle Forms to APEX conversion in Oracle Scene

The new issue of Oracle Scene (the official UKOUG Magazine) out. I am very proud that one of the articles is written by ... me! It is even on the cover page!
For all the folks out there who don't have a subscription, you can read my article here.
Let me know what you think of it!

APEX FLoating Developer Toolbar

During the APEX 4.0 session at last ODTUG a question was raised: "Can we have a floating developer toolbar" (the thing at the bottom of the page with a.o. the 'Home' and 'Debug' link). There is no need to wait for APEX 4.0 to get that (if it will be implemented as a new feature), you can have it NOW!
If you put the next piece of code in an HTML Region in Page 0 (or in your Template, whatever you like), the toolbar gets sticked to the bottom of your browser like glue...

I guess it only works for FireFox, but that doesn't matter, because that's the tool we're all using anyway, aren't we? Oh, yeah, and you need jQuery...

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler available - but not for free....

Almost covered by yesterdays FMW 11g stampede, the production version of SQL Developer Data Modeler is available on OTN.
As expected (see this and this last years blog entry) this is not a free tool like SQL Developer or JDeveloper. It is a for-cost option of SQL Developer, and requires a separate license. And what are the license costs (as of yesterdays Pricing List): $3000 + $660 per year per Named User.
It looks really good. The functionality is about the same as the modeling part of good old Oracle Designer (it can even import the definitions from a Designer Repository). The full Internet Developer Suite costs $5800 + support per user. But then you get the all Designer functionality + Oracle Forms + Oracle Reports...
Is it worth the $3000? I don't have an opinion on that yet, do you?

The buzz around APEX 4.0

During last weeks ODTUG Mike Hichwa presented APEX 4.0. This seemed to be the best attended session (apart from the 'real' keynotes) with over 200 attendees, so a lot of people wanted to know where their favorite development environment is heading!
Mike demoed some really cool new stuff - I will discuss these later on - and skipped (even more) nice features, with Declarative Tabular Forms, AJAX Client-Side Validations and Improved Error Handling make the top 3 of most interesting ones. See the pic of the slide for a complete list.

Websheets
There has been more blogging about Websheets last year, even with movies. But every time you see it live, it is amazing. Just copy data from a CSV, paste it into the APEX Builder and you're done! No Tables, Triggers, Primary Keys, etc needed: everything is automatically managed in APEX$xxx tables. You can update the data in line (like a Tabular Form), you can do mass update, create an LOV on the fly and add columns. You can also add Attachments, Notes and Tags to a record. The history is automagically kept, so auditing is out-of-the-box. You can define the properties of a column, move columns up or down, define column groups and even validations: all at runtime! So the (already thin) line between the Builder and the Runtime version of an application will get more vague.
But even Websheets will have its limitations: The Page Flow is limited and also the control over the Look & Feel is less exhaustive as with 'normal' APEX Pages: No use of Themes and Templates (more or less similar with the Interactive Reports).

Dynamic Actions
With Dynamic Actions you can Enable/Disable and Show/Hide Items dependent on the values of other Items. Things you nowadays need to code in (one line) of Javascript, will be declarative. That means not only less manual code, but - more important - easier maintenance, because these declarations will be stored in the APEX Repository and thus be available through APEX Dictionary Views.

Charts
In APEX 4.0 all charts will use the - much better looking - AnyCharts 5.1 version. Not quite clear if also the new chart types (like Gantts) can be declaratively created.

REST Web Services
In APEX 4.0 you also the use of REST Webservices is declarative. There was a short - but impressive - demo how to use Yahoo Maps within APEX.

Plug-Ins
Another main new feature are the Plug-Ins (previously called 'Custom Item Types'). You can compare these Plug-Ins to Widgets or - in the good old Oracle Forms environment - Pluggable Java Components (PJCs). Just register it within the Repository and you can use it wherever you like. The idea is that there should be a central 'Plug-In Registry' where every APEX Developer can register his Plug-In and make it available for download (free or for a fee). Oracle has no plans of managing / checking / controlling that registry due to legal restrictions (although just referencing source files didn't help Napster or The Pirate Bay ;-) ). The demo showed just registering / uploading a sql file containing the Plug-In (an Amazon style star rating) and the absurd easy way to use that Plug-In in a Form. Soon Patrick will be blogging about the technical details.

Improved Application Builder
Also the APEX Application Builder itself is revamped. The navigation is more intuitive, Interactive Reports are used all over the place and there is a general 'Search' function. That'll make developing with APEX even more productive...

Improved Interactive Reports
And even the, already fantastic, Interactive Reports got a make-over, with added functionality, like e-mail notification, compound filter expression (so you can use brackets and OR's in a filter) and - one long lasting request - shared saved reports!

Release Date??
As I can see for the search terms that hit my blog, "APEX 4.0 Release Date" is a very hot topic. Of course the Oracle APEX posse didn't gave a fixed date. And if they did, there is always the 'safe harbor'/disclaimer page as the first slide of the presentation. But in one of the presentations a 'date' was mentioned: End of 2009! So I will set my expectation to 2010Q1...

ODTUG in the rearview mirror

Still recovering from a light jet lag, it is time to look back at another excellent ODTUG event. Although I planned to blog about it on a daily basis, the social/networking activities prevented that... (a.k.a. "I rather drink a beer with some friends and have a good chat, that write another blog post"). So here's a (rather) long wrap up of this fantastic event!

Sunday June 21: APEX Symposium
The symposium, with around 200 attendees, started at 8:00 AM (attending ODTUG is really hard work!). The day started with a sort of keynote by Joel Kallman, followed by 6 presentations of real world APEX applications and was finished off with a Panel discussion. Some highlights of the day:
Joel did an excellent presentation called Application Express: Ahead of the Curve. He explained that APEX is still ahead of it's time and therefore will still gain (even) more interest in the market. Especially because of the high speed development, you can create all kinds of applications with a good ROI (but of course you knew that already...).
Olivier Dupont showed that at Brussels Airport APEX is used for securing the entrance to all parts of the area (a real mission critical example!), even using no (real) browser and no mouse.
Cognera utilizes APEX for their billing solution in the utilities market in Canada (using BPO and SaaS constructions). Martin D'Souza even showed they embedded APEX into an Access application!
On behalf of PAETEC, Dennis Vanill presented their APEX enterprise application using an own framework to intercept the standard APEX rendering in order to minimize the number of common objects.
Jan Navratil showed that the National College for School Leadership uses APEX to support over 200,000 school leaders in the UK.
At Cornerstone Brands APEX is successfully used in their call center to handle thousands of orders daily by hundreds of users. So even a data entry environment APEX is suitable as Paul Davidson showed. Using the new APEX application the call center reduced the time per call and so increased the number of calls per agent substantially.

All examples showed APEX is suitable for mission critical enterprise applications with large numbers of users, even in a data entry environment!

The last general session of the day was a keynote by Steve Miranda. He demo'ed a (small) part of the new Fusion Apps. The UI looked very web 2.0, impressive functionality and animations. Although I wondered if all this visual force is still impressive - and useful - if you use such an application on a daily basis...

Monday June 22
Doug Gault kicked off the APEX part of the day with Performance Tuning APEX Applications. Performance is all about the User Experience. Some free tips: Separate UI (APEX) from Logic (SQL); move anonymous PL/SQL into the DB; use binds; instrument your code; gather statistics (for both application and APEX schema). For monitoring performance you can use the APEX Reports (especially the By Weigthed Page Performance); set the debug mode on; show the #TIMIMG# substitution variable in the region footer; use Firebug and/or set &P_TRACE=YES in the URL.
Next, mister APEX Security himself, Scott Spadafore, covered the APEX Security Essentials. All about the risks of hacking and the APEX answers thereto: session state protection, session timeout, VPD etc.
The last session of the day was more or less the general APEX keynote: APEX 4.0 by Mike Hichwa. For a very interested and curious crowd of over 200 people, Mike showed a lot of cool new features. More details about that in a next post.
In the evening we had the usual APEX meetup in one of Monterey's many restaurants. The meetup is getting bigger and bigger. This time there were more than 30 people!

Tuesday June 23
Another (beautiful) day packed with interesting APEX sessions. Bharat had the honor of keeping everyone's interest (after yesterdays meetup). He easily attracted attention by showing what you can do using DHTMLX Tree's and Grid. Very web 2.0 like pages with no resemblance of the standard APEX Themes at all!
Later that day Tim St. Hilaire dived into the wonderful world of jQuery and Yahoo UI. He showed how you can solve Wait Processing, Pop Up Dialog Boxes and Autocomplete functionality using these Javascript frameworks. Looking at the LOC needed for implementing this functionality jQuery will be my personal preference!
Next John Scott showed what you can do to increase the scalability of APEX. Using caching, minifying javascript, adding expiry info, gzip files etc you can dramatically reduce the number of round trips and the size of the data transfer.
Then it was my turn to present about How to integrate Forms and APEX. It went rather well, although I finished somewhat early. For myself I noted some accents to improve the presentation for OOW!
The last session of the day was done by Brian Spendolini. He demoed how to use Oracle Application Express on the iPhone. He showed how to overcome the size and navigation limitations of the iPhone and how to create real native iPhone APEX apps. Very cool stuff...
That evening I was invited for the Oracle ACE dinner in the other conference hotel at the beach. Nice food and good company. As always we ended up at Knuckles...

Wednesday June 24
The (for me) final day of the conference started off with Dietmar Aust's Generating complex Excel reports with APEX and jXLS. Maybe as a last resort I would come up with this solution, but it is not my tool of choice, because you have to learn another specific "jXLS language" and some Java stuff for the communication with the engine.
Next Joel Kallman showed how to Effectively Manage an Application Express instance using the Oracle Database Resource Manager. With live demo's on oracle.apex.com he explained how to use the different resource settings in order to improve the overall performance. With 7,000,000 page views a week, apex.oracle.com has only around 5 (real) active sessions at any moment. Should I say more on scalability?
After that, two sessions about managing the development of larger and multiple applications. In the first, Scott Spendolini explained the use of multiple Applications (one master application to subscribe to, one login application, one template application with all the subscriptions as a starter app and one for access control) can simplify, unify and speed up your development effort. In the other session Raj Mattamal raced - in his own special way ;-) - through the problems you might encounter when working with a larger team on an APEX application. Version control, page locking, page exports and - again - splitting up an application into different sub-apps where discussed.
In between these two, Francis Mignault talked about How to Build a multi-tenant SAAS application with Oracle Application Express. Very impressive to see how they managed to support such a different style of UI for their customers, while it still is one application in the end. Using VPD, customer specific style sheets and customer specific information it seemed like we were looking at totally different apps!

Thursday to Sunday June 25 - 28
While suffering from an information overload I decided to skip the last three sessions on Thursday morning and drove to Yosemite. After a very nice drive over the Californian roads (sometimes very long and straight, just like in the movies) I arrived in Yosemite. First I went to see the really, really big sequoias. Then I drove all the way up to Glacier Point. From there you have a stunning view on the amazing wonderful environment. Another long and winding road later I ended up in Yosemite Valley where I had reserved a cabin on forehand. Lots of squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons, but no bears... The next day I headed up to Mirror Lake, and took a quick look at the Yosemite Falls. Alas I had too little time to make a big hike all the way to the top, because I had to turn in my car at the end of the day. Another fine drive to (even visited La Grange) San Francisco - driving over the Bay Bridge is really special! Early next morning to the airport to catch my 7:35 flight to Atlanta. In Atlanta my 2 hours transfer time was extended to five hours before I could get on the long second leg to Amsterdam. Back home Sunday around noon....


Thanks to Crystal and her team and all the ODTUG volunteers it was another great ODTUG conference. Hope to see you all in October at OOW or at the next ODTUG event (in Boston? Atlantic City? Orlando?).

Abstract for Oracle Open World accepted!

To my suprise I received an e-mail from the Oracle Open World Content Team that my abstract "It's Great to Integrate: Combining Oracle Forms and Oracle Application Express" has been accepted - even though it is still "in the Mix", open for voting (currently 65 votes at the 9th position).
Maybe a 'spy' attended my session at ODTUG?
Nevertheless, I proudly accepted the invitation and hope to see you all at the next Oracle event in San Francisco!

ODTUG 's just like a high school reunion

Today I drove down from SFO to Monterey via the scenic coastal route. At first I had some problems with my car: it is the first time I drive a car with an automatic gearbox, so I have to keep remembering to leave my left foot just where it is....
In Monterey I first went to the Bay Aquarium. It was quite busy there, but once you've seen it, you know why. I especially liked the jellyfish and the octopus. Just beautiful! At the aquarium I already met "the Insum guys": Francis and Patrick.
Back at the hotel I met more old acquaintances, visiting ODTUG again is just like a high school reunion...
After dinner and some beers, the jetlag is really kicking in...my computer tells me it's 6 AM and I feel tired...
Looking forward to the sessions of tomorrow!

Anycharts Conversion Package available

As I wrote in a previous post my colleague Rutger was working on an Anycharts Conversion Package to automagically convert the standard charts in APEX from version 3 to version 4. That's finished now. You can download the latest (beta) release on http://apexacp.blogspot.com! Give it a try!!

Earplugged, Blindfolded and Jetlagged

After a long long journey I finally made it to my hotel next to San Francisco Airport. I can see the planes as they come and go, but luckily can't hear them.
The first leg of my trip, from Amsterdam to Cincinnatti, wasn't that bad: I had a complete row of three chairs for myself! Delta provided everyone with earplugs and blindfolds, so I stretched my legs and took some naps (still don't know if it is a good idea to take as much sleep as you can on a flight or to try to stay awake as long as you can, in order to survive a none hour time lap). The offerings on the entertainment system where good enough and even the food was ok.
I had less then two hours to change planes in Cincinnatti, and - with the experiences of the Sam Francisco and Houston Immigration lines - I wasn't certain that that would be enough. To my big suprise there was no line at all (I don't want to call three people in fron of me a 'line')! I even had to wait at the luggage belt before my suitcase arrived.
The second leg was worse. The airplane was completely booked, and there were lots of children aboard. I don't have anything against children (I have two of my own), but they don't make me happy when they're sitting right behind me and play around with the table tray and kick against the chair every time I almost fall asleep.
And also the service for this part was very minimal: no inflight entertainmant, only food for purchase and too few beverages. But what can you expect when you go for the cheapest option (only 450 euro ($600,-) for the complete trip).
In my hotel I stayed awake until 9:30 and then fell in a deep sleep. From which I woke up at... 3 AM! With some effort I managed to stay in bed, with some little naps, until 6. After breakfast I'll go to the car rental to get my car and drive the scenic route to ... Monterey!