Roels Blog

I am very proud to announce that in the latest ODTUG Technical Journal one of the articles is written by yours truly. It is all about the integration of Forms and APEX. See this link . You have to be a member to download it (but I think you can become an Associated Member for free) - or you have to wait until the next release is out, then the one before will be freely accessible.

The day started with the General Session. There the ODTUG Board announced when en where the next Kaleidoscope will be held: At Long Beach, California! From June 26 to 30 2011. And you can even submit papers as from now! There is a link somewhere, and if I'll find it I'll add it to this post. Another remarkable thing was that the number of attendees this year was up with 50% to around 900! So ODTUG grows bigger and bigger every year - and so even getting more important in the Oracle world. Next - and rather important - was the game...The Netherlands against Slovakia. We saw the match with a couple of other attendees, most of them Dutch, but also some other guys - but all supporting Holland And we won with 2-1, which was great. So in the next match we have to beat Brazil - which will be though! Back to the stuff we all here for... The first afternoon session was the " APEX 4.0 Keynote ", where Mike showed all the cool new APEX 4.0 features for an interested audience ...

This morning I started with an early walk to the zoo. With the idea in mind that it might be not so hot around 8 or 9 AM. But that was wrong... Even at that time of day it is hot. The temperature would rise to a 37 C this day! But the zoo is very worthwhile. Not that I have seen all of it, because the whole track is about 15 kilometers... I especially went to see the Giant Panda's. Never seen them before, but they are just as cute and adorable as you would expect. After the zoo I went to the National Cathedral, one of the biggest churches in the US. I thing it is a sort of copy of the St. Peter in Rome - and I heard that Darth Vader is on one of the colored glass windows (didn't see it though). Beautiful church with a number of "Dan Brown" style crypts below. Around 10:30 I got back to the conference to pick up on the ongoing APEX Symposium. At that moment Dan McGhan was talking about Dynamic Actions and PlugIns. Especially his "recurring event" PlugIn is r...

On Saturday I had a very well scheduled travel from my home to Washington. Even the plane departed and arrived exactly as scheduled. And while the line for the US Border Security was quite long, it only took half an hour or so to take that hurdle. I have seen worse (1,5 hour in Houston), but also better (5 minutes in Minneapolis). In my shared shuttle drive to the hotel the impression I didn't get an impressive view of Washington: just the regular broad streets packed with stores and restaurants. Once out of the shuttle the impression is that it is impressively hot and humid. Not as bad as New Orleans, but still. After registration I went for a Indian dinner with Monty and Mark, I even managed to stay up until 10PM (and that with a 6 hour time difference). Due to that time difference I first woke up at 4AM, but managed to stay sort of sleeping until 6AM. Still to early for breakfast, but that gives me the chance to write this short blog post. Today there are two important things ...

As of Wednesday July 23, 14:00 (GMT+1) APEX 4.0 is available from OTN . See Joels post on this. I am downloading this as I type, but it seems I am not the only one... Takes some time, but we have waited long enough for this release, so adding another 15 minutes doesn't harm.

Last Thursday the first official OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group) was held in Antwerp with APEX 4.0 as the main subject of all presentations. Over 80 attendees attended this event and listened to six presentations during the day. Although it was very warm (some people would claim even 'hot') in the room, (almost) nobody feel asleep - for long. After a warm welcome by Dimitri, Patrick Wolf showed a lot of the cool new APEX 4.0 features in a 1,5 hour presentation and demo.  Next another Patrick (Hellemans) from InterAccess did a presentation on The Maturity Level of APEX.  According to Gartner and Forrester APEX will kick off (even more) the next two years! He also demo'ed an APEX Framework they made, to enable a kick start for APEX Application Development. Looked very good! After a lunch with some nice sandwiches, I did my first gig on "Developing a Google Visualization Plugin for APEX 4.0" - the same as I will do next week at ODTUG. I think it went pretty wel...

Last Tuesday CampusIT - in cooperation with Oracle - organized the first APEX event in Ireland. Around 50 people from around the country visited the O'Callaghan Alexander hotel for a series of five presentations around APEX (done by the four presenters on the picture). First on was Dimitri with his "Mastering an APEX Page" presentation - always a success. I was om next doing my "APEX and Forms Integration" presentation and demo. After a - very good ! - lunch Bary McGillin from Oracle (from the SQL Developer Dev Team) was substituting Hilary Farell (from the APEX Dev Team), who couldn't make it - probably very busy with the last loose ends of APEX 4.0. After the APEX 4.0 presentation Barry did a presentation on SQL Developer 2.1.1.  But he also did a demo on the brand new 3.0 release. And as you might expect this release includes many new features and enhancements. Some of these features are aimed at the DBA, like changing Oracle parameters on the fly, addi...

Since some time last week the third version of " Suggest a Session " for Oracle Open World 2010 is live. You can already pick your favorites from 60 sessions at this moment - that number will probably rise the next couple of weeks. Warning....shameless plug ahead... And if you're interested in an extra APEX session, you can vote for mine: Creating a sub-zero dashboard plugin for APEX using Google Visualizations . Voting is open until June 20!