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UKOUG Day 3

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The (rather ambitious) schedule for today was :

Lost in JDeveloper by Sten Vesterli : Sten guided the (Forms experienced) audience in creating an ADF Swing Client App ofcourse declaratively (next to AJAX this is the buzzword of the conference : everything should be declarative, you can be a programmer when you' re able in controlling your mouse ;-) ).
'Christmas
Programming Real Applications with APEX by Andrew Woodward : Again everything declarative but now using APEX instead of JDev. The point was: you can create simple applications faster than using Oracle Forms but when you need more advanced features you'll need to program Javascript and AJAX. But that's only temporarily, because in the next version(s) you also will be able to create AJAX components declaratively.

Modelling on the cheap by Andrew Clarke (I chaired this one) : Andrew sketched out the pros and cons of different modelling tools - from whiteboards to (free) datamodelling tools. As far as he knows the best free datamodelling tool on the market today is Schemester.

Oracle SQL Developer Advanced Features by Sue Harper : Sue pointed out how to make our own extensions - as extra tabs and right-mouse-options - on SQL Dev and demonstrated the power of the Migration Workbench. Also APEX content in your database is visible throug SQL Dev and a nice new feature (in the next version) will be to possibility to view trace files as a very flexible TKProf like output!

Oracle Forms Roundtable by Grant Ronald : In this round table all attendees could present their views on Oracle Forms and what features should be added in subsequent releases. Alas not much came out - I think we are so "comfortable" with the imperfections of Form... Grant suggested a couple of enhancements like a kind of JTable option (where you can click on the header for automated sorting etc) and a new look-and-feel / color scheme. Ofcourse no fixed promises where made...

Integration of BI Publisher and APEX by Dimitri Gielis : Dimitri, enthousiastic as ever, showed the possibilities of using BI Publisher for creating very good looking reports. The integration between the two products is very good. But a great disadvantage is that BI Publisher is not as free-of-charge as APEX is (maybe this is Oracle's way to earn some money out of APEX - apart from the database licenses?).

Special : Trevor Baylis - a World Famous British Inventor : Trevor, a 72 years old 'world famous' inventor (I never heard about him, but he is the inventor of, amongst a lot of other stuff, the wind-up radio - now I understand why we've got one from the organisation) presented his views on " invention". In his opinion you can learn to invent and, just like there is a School of Arts, there also should be a School of Inventions. The presentation was very amusing.

Event Dinner : One hall was transformed into a ' Christmas Eve' kind of room and we all enjoyed the drinks, food and (more or less) the DJ...

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