Roels Blog

I created a simple Twitter Plug-in - using the Twitter Search Widget - to incorporate something similar in your APEX application as shown here below. The APEX demo is here . You can download it (soon) from http://www.apex-plugin.com .

I just downloaded and installed version 1.10.xx of the APEX Listener. After solving some problems - most of them due to "no need reading the manual", I've got it up and running. Now I can access APEX choosing from a variety of ports: APEX Listener, EPG, Apache's mod_plsql. A few things are confusing me though: 1. At last weeks ODTUG was announced that the APEX Listener made it into production (the version number also indicates that status). But if you're looking at the official download site , it says: "The Application Express Listener is currently an early adopters release and is not supported by Oracle Support.".  So what is the - current - truth? 2. Reading the documentation (after all), I noticed: "The Oracle Application Express Listener supports the following Java Enterprise Edition application servers: Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.3), Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 3 +, Oracle Containers for J2EE 10.1.3.4 or higher"

The last day of this great conference had "only" three presentation slots. The first one I attended, but honestly I didn't pay that much of an attention. I was writing my previous post at that time and I was rather familiar with the subject " Forms to APEX conversion ". And I totally agree with the conclusions: Converting simple Forms is easy, but the more complex the Forms, the more work it will take to convert it to APEX! The second one was called " APEX Stimulus Package ". In fact it was more or less a list of things you have to consider to improve the performance of your APEX application - also due to the fact that most demo's didn't work because of a failing internet connection.  To name some of the tips: Reduce images sizes and use png instead of gif or jpg; check the Apache log for errors and resolve them; add a favicon.ico; watch out with pagination schemes; tune your Page 0 processes; use Page and Region caching where appropriate; min

This day started off with a very nice presentation about the joys of Javascript by Dan "The Man"McGhan. In a very nice pace he took the audience by the hand and increased the difficulty level step-by-step. His key message was; Don't be scared of Javascript, because if you look close enough it is looks more like PL/SQL than you might think at first sight. Get to learn jQuery and do your thing! Another nice presentation was about " RESTful Web Services " by Jason Straub. He demoed how you can use webservices withing APEX to manage the buckets and contents on an Amazon S3 cloud environment. He also pointed out that not only APEX can consume webservices, but also can act as the source of a webservice. In order to achieve that you have to create a report on a public page that returns either XML or Json. He didn't show a demo, but promised to get out a paper or how-to out there next week. Have to try that myself soon! Another fine session was Tim St. Hilaire '

One of the highlights of todays conference was the " Plug-In Showcase " where Anton, Dietmar, Dan, Dimitri and Doug each showed a plugin they wrote the last couple of days. They showed some real simple ones, like a hover function up to more complex things like a Netlfix style drag and drop functionality. The conclusion is; Once you get the hang of it, writing Plug-Ins isn't that hard - and using good Plug-Ins is very simple. So Plug-Ins enhance your development speed dramatically and can be an enormous improvement to your end-user experience. One other session was about changing the look-and-feel of your APEX page, using the templates and changing the css. The new Theme 4 in APEX 4.0 is even shipped with PSD (Photoshop) files that contain the sprites (a collection of images within one file) used within that template. You can edit these files in order to change the look of the buttons, regions and whatever else there's on your page. Another nice one was " Oracle T