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KScope 11 - Sunday

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The first day (or pre-conference day) was filled with four full day Symposium sessions. The APEX one I attended was completely filled by the APEX Development team itself. 
Joel Kallman kicked the day off with a nice story about the development of APEX, the tools they used etc. Then there where three more sessions about Tablular Forms, Interactive Report and Webservices - all pointing out the new APEX 4.1 features. 
The coolest one of the day was Marc'Sewtz's presentation on APEX for Mobile Devices. He showed that, using HTML 5 in your template, you can create real native-looking applications for mobile devices. You can already do that using the current version of APEX, but the 4.1 will also contain support for special mobile actions, like rotate and tap - so you can create Dynamic Actions on these events. As jQuery Mobile, the framework they're using, isn't production yet, probably some of these mobile features will be disabled in the first release of 4.1. 
Mike Hichwa had the keynote as the last session of the day. He outlined the plans for APEX after 4.1. Next on the wish list are more cool functions like a Modal Dialog, Multiple File Upload etc. It seems that every good plug-in out there will be added as standard functionality! Als providing RESTful web services will be a feature of an upcoming APEX release  - using the power of the APEX Listener.Talking about APEX Listener...some BI Publisher functionality might be incorporated in the AL, so the AL then can be used for generating PDF documents - a sort of "BI Publisher Light"...
Last but not least: Did you know Oracle uses an APEX application for their partner store and orders with a total worth of 4 billion dollar go through it....so, who dares to say APEX can't be used for business critical applications and is only suitable for small department level ones?
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Location: Long Beach, CA, USA

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