Roels Blog

As I blogged about two weeks ago, I still get a lot of hits regarding problems when running Oracle Forms with Firefox. From this Client Platform Statement of Direction you can see that Firefox 2.0 (current is 3.5!) is the latest version that is certified in combination with JInitiator and Sun's JVM version 1.6.004 (current is 1.6.015). Not certified doesn't imply that it doesn't work, but from my experience running Oracle Forms with Firefox 3.0/JVM 1.6.005 works without any problems, but Firefox 3.5/JVM 1.6.005 does not! So be aware of 'automatic updates'...

APEX is cool, Google is cool, Google Visualizations are even cooler. So the combination the coolest technologies available is sub-zero! A Google Visualization needs can get it's data programmatically by using javascript: create a DataTable object and use addColumn to define the columns and addRows to define the rows. But a Visualization can also be fed with a JSON object. So I created a package prodcure that reads a sql query and spits out a JSON string in the format Google likes. This procedure is called by an APEX On Demand Application Process. In every APEX page the necessary Google Visualization packages are loaded by calling google.load with some packages, like this: google.load('visualization', '1', {packages :[ 'geomap', 'intensitymap', 'map' ]}); (The google.load function is loaded in the template by referencing a javascript file http://www.google.com/jsapi). Every chart is defined as an HTML Region. The source of that Region contain...

According to Statcounter, the most popular page on this blog is an entry from as early as 2007...about how JInitiator can make Firefox crash. It even made it to an "official" manual of library of the Technical University of Eindhoven (it is in Dutch, and the link is almost at the bottom). I don't know if what I wrote there still holds for the current versions of Firefox and JInitiator, but according to the stats, the problem is rather persistent...

After ODTUG and OOW I will also present about the Integration of Oracle Forms and APEX at the next UKOUG event, from Nov 30 to Dec 2 in Birmingham. Unlike OOW, where my session is planned at the very beginning of the event, the UKOUG organization committee kindly planned my session in the very middle of the conference: on Tuesday from 12:05 - 12:50. So for all Europeans who couldn't make it to ODTUG or OOW and are interested in this kind of integration...you know where to go!