Roels Blog

I just received an e-mail from the OOW Content Team. They've managed to schedule my session at Sunday morning from 8:00 - 9:00. So that's officially the kick off for the event... Two advantages for this early hour: I will probably wake up at 4:00 AM anyway due to the expected jet lag (just like all the other Europeans that will fly in on Friday or Saturday, so no excuse for you guys!). And I will have finished my duties one hour after the event starts, so I can enjoy the show without worrying about my presentation! Hope to see you all at this early - and probably inconvenient - time...

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!

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!

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...

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?

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 Atta