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Kscope Wednesday

Also today is packed with excellent sessions. The first one, "Cookie Monster", by Tim St.Hillaire covered the different type of cookies and how you can set and read them from within your APEX application. For a lot of purposes you could nowadays use local storage as well, but there's still a case for cookies - and that's not a jar ;-)
The second one, "Single Sign On", by Anton Nielsen was excellent as well. He made clear that just Authentication is not enough: In most cases we need to get back our previous session state as well. A feature that will be included in APEX 5: Session joining. Only in a multi-tenant infrastructure it is not a good idea to enable this as this might open up the possibility to hijack a session. He also explained that from a security point of view, it is important that the APEX authentication is based on both the cookie and the sessionID in the URL.
In session number three, "Pins, Polygons and Perspective", Christoph Ruepprich showed how you can add very nice - and rather easy - geo information to your APEX application. Especially LeafletJS is something to check out, as it is perfect for mobile devices and can use different layers.
After a long break I attended "Production Level Trouble Shooting", especially because I have done sessions on that same subject as well. The key take away is that it is a good idea to instrument your code in a way that you can switch on debugging in a production environment for a single user, a single page and/or a period of time. You can do that - even when debugging is disabled, as it should be - issuing a (conditional) apex_debug.enable command before both page rendering and page processing.
Then, my personal highlight of the day, John Scott did his NodeJS presentation. With some great examples / use cases he made clear that this is something we definitely should check out. With just a few lines of NodeJS code you can create a webserver, a proxy server, create a REST server, create an APEX exporter or a mail reader and websockets server.
The final presentation about APEX URLs by Christian Rokitta gave insight why your URLs should be (more) readable by the user and search engines and some great options and tips how to accomplish this: using intelligent rewrite by either PL/SQL, the ORDS (APEX Listener) and/or by changing the Listener configuration. 

A long, but very interesting day, And now it's time for the big event....

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