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OOW2008 - Sunday

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Due to the jet lag this Sunday had a very early start. I was wide awake at 5:oo AM, so I had a long time to check my e-mail, take a shower and eat a full American breakfast. After registering for the conference it took about 5 minutes to walk into someone I know...it's a small world after all.
For me the conference started with a Hands-on-Lab : Extending the APEX Framework with Web 2.0. To me there where just a few new features mentioned in the handbook, but I guess most people didn't finish all examples within an hour. The handbook will be available as an OBE within a couple of weeks. The next session was on Achieving ROI with Oracle Database 11g and APEX. It was about a new application Harvard Pilgrim needed to offer health insurance to individuals. Instead of taking 1000's of phone calls, they decided they needed an on line self service application - and built it in APEX. Another good example how you can build an application with APEX in less than a month. You can find the application here.
After that Joel Kallman presented on Globalization with APEX. Apart from Java (with resource bundles) and .Net (using resource files), in APEX you can do the translation after the development. It needs just 6 easy steps: Map, Seed, Export (to XLIFF), Translate, Import/Apply and Publish. The translated versions of an application are replica's from the original one (with their own application id). You can only make changes to the original application. After changes you just have to make the additional translations and (re)publish the translated one. Live has never been so easy. One free tip from Joel : Create your database using the AL32UTF8 character set, so you can easily handle all languages... Examples of multi language APEX applications are BioQuebec and ProMed. He also announced some new APEX 4.0 features, but I will collect all those features for a separate post.
After the session about Weird PL/SQL by Steven Feuerstein and the - funny political - keynote by Carville and Matalin I went to the Blogger meetup. Allways good to match names and faces...
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