Roels Blog

Yesterday evening Rutger and I did a Pro4Pro session with the fascinating title "Extreme RAD : Live Web Application Development with Oracle Application Express" . In this session we built an APEX application to manage a conference with different kinds of users like organizers, presenters and attendees. We had just a little preconfigured: the tables and views where there, we created a workspace and had set the UI defaults in advance. The rest was all l ive. During the 1,5 hour session we built all the screens, authentication and authorization to manage such and event. The last 15 minutes the audience had the opportunity to put forward some additional functionality and we (try to) build that also - we couldn't translate the whole application to another language in that time, but we showed the date and money localizations. At last we showed what such an application could look like if you spend a day or three on it - with up- and downloading presentations, dragging and dropp...

This is probably the saddest post I'll ever write. Just as many of you, today I also received the message that Carl Backstrom died in a tragic car accident last weekend. I met Carl on two events this year: ODTUG and OOW. He was a very nice and energetic guy to talk to, open to everyone who wants to talk to him. Apart from the neverending fly whiskeys at the the bar in the hotel lobby and the visits to some Bourbon Street bars, I guess a lot of APEX'ers will remember him by his presentation on last ODTUG. Dan McGhan , as an ambassodor for that session, introduced Carl as The UI God . And Carl did his most nervous presentation ever I guess. He struggled with the mic because his hands were too shaky to get the clip fixed the right way. And everybody wondered why he could be so nervous as he knew so much and we knew so little. But that was typically to Carl: Although he knew everything about APEX, Javascript, jQuery and JSON, he still was a regular guy, happy to share his knowledg...

From November 26 to 28 Ordina, Oracle and Miracle are organizing the O>ZONE event in Zandvoort, The Netherlands. I received an invitation to present there, and if you take a look at the list of speakers , you can imagine I was quite honoured by that! Together with Dimitri I have to fill in the APEX slots. I'm not quite sure what the exact title and contents of the presentation will be, but I guess it will be something around AJAX, JSON and jQuery. But I am open to suggestions!

In the afternoon of November 3 Oracle guru Tom Kyte will talk about " 11 Things about 11g " at the Logica office in Amstelveen (near Amsterdam). I have attended this presentation at ODTUG this year and I assure you it's worthwhile! After his presentation Tom will do an AskTom Live session. So a great opportunity to enhance your knowledge with everything you wanted to know about Oracle but you never dared to ask... There is more info on the Logica site (in Dutch, but Tom will do his presentation in English ofcourse). You can also register ("aanmeldingsformulier") there.

As Oracle Open World 2008 is 1,5 week behind us, it is about time to finish up my posts on this subject - and get rid of my notes. So let's take a quick look on the sessions I didn't mention already. Forms2APEX Migration David Peake introduced the "soon-to-come" APEX 3.2 release. The most important new feature (or maybe the only new feature) is the support for migrating Oracle Forms to APEX. He emphasized that there is no need from an Oracle support perspective to move from Forms to APEX. You should only go for this route if there is a sufficient business justification for it. A migration from Forms to APEX has to be considered as a real project, consisting of Analysis, Design, Convert, Post Migration, Acceptance and Training. The Forms2APEX toolkit is in no way a silver bullet. There will be a lot of handcraft involved to achieve acceptable results. Especially for more complex Forms you'll need a lot of effort to get similar functionality in APEX. Luckily the too...