Roels Blog

After a few nights of good sleep (that means more than the average 4 to 5 hours at Kscope), it is time to sit back and evaluate what happened last week. I arrived on Thursday night before the event, just in time to catch Danny Bryant at the bar for "just one last beer" (I don't know how often I heard, and used, that phrase last week). The whole Friday was filled with an all day Board Meeting, mainly discussing the future of ODTUG, a reception and a fine dinner. Since a couple of years, Saturday is the Community Service Day. This year, an impressive number of people showed up and were transferred to "Up Orlando", to make its easier for them to help the people that really need some help. All kinds of different activities were done, like cleaning, filling shelves, painting chairs etc.  After that there is another tradition: bag stuffing. All those (about 1500) bags didn't get delivered with all those goodies in there! A number of volunteers created the most ...

After some thought, I decided I will be running for the ODTUG Board of Directors this year. I have been attending Kscope since 2008 (New Orleans). Presented at Kscope and APEXPosed since 2009. Did a few webinars. Was a member of the APEX Content Team for Kscope12 and 13. And now I am the Content Lead for the APEX track for KScope14 and Kscope15. So I like spending my free time for ODTUG, to keep Kscope the best conference out there. But ODTUG is more than Kscope. And I would love to add my time, expertise and network to ODTUG in order to do more. So that's why I am running for the Board. But it seems I am not the only one running.... As for four positions, there are 24 nominations. Twenty-four! That means the changes are slim, but it shows how vivid ODTUG is. Most organisations that run on volunteers have a hard time filling these kind of positions. ODTUG doesn't. I don't have a full list of names, but I now know about six of them. And they are all well known persons and...

It is still a long time before Kscope15. But if I look at the website .... I can hardly wait!  A good conference needs a good time for preparation. An awesome conference .... needs even more time. So that's why we need your abstracts a.s.a.p. After the close every member of the review committee will go over every abstract and will give it a rating and a comment. When that's all done, the committee will have a number of (virtual) meetings to select the best abstracts and create the stunning program you expect from Kscope. And last but not least the schedule for the event has to be created where everything falls into it's place ... So we really do need some time after October 15! But what are we looking for - and this only applies to the Oracle Application Express track as every track has it's own "wish list"...you can see that when you enter your abstract in the Sub Category field. We split it up into these six: Integration : We often see that it is...

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...

This day was quite busy: I had two presentations and a panel session, more or less back to back. My first presentation " Intro into Mobile APEX Development " went ok, but I was especially pleased with the way my second presentation " Creating Hybrid APEX Applications " did go. I think I got the message across that it is not that hard to create APEX Applications with native iOS (or Android) functionality, like accessing the Contacts on the phone and use the native Twitter app (or Facebook, Mail, etc) to send a message straight from your APEX application. And I received some very positive feedback, either via Twitter or directly .. And - also important - I had really fun while presenting as this pic (by Jorge Rimblas) proves. In the evening we had a great ACE Dinner at a local brewery. So that included good food. And beer. And more beer .... And a poker game concluded another awesome day (although I didn't win) !

The Monday started off with the general session. The most awaited announcement was: Where will Kscope have it's residence in 2015? The answer can be found on www.kscope15.com (in short: in an awesome resort in Florida). After that, the selection begins ... which session should I attend... I picked two interesting sessions about the APEX Listener / Oracle Rest Data Service. This product is growing fast in functionality and will get more important in the Oracle infrastructure soon! My favorite session of the day was the one from John Scott, called " Removing the boring from testing ". A maybe slightly misleading title, as he was covering utterly cool " headless browsers ". Apart from NodeJs, which is a headless server, you can also have an headless browser: a browser without a screen output. Using these tools you can programmatically - using JavaScript - call webpages and examine the result. So using this technique you can write test scripts - in an easy and fa...

As a tradition, this Sunday Kscope kicked off with a full day of presentations by Oracle's APEX Development Team. And of course it was all about "5.0". Joel started with the "Awesome revolution of APEX" - the term " awesome " (and the associated song) seems the be the conference team this year. After that the Page Designer, Interactive Reports, Mobile development all got the special attention they deserve. But the best part - or at least the most surprising part - was the "UI" presentation by Shakeeb. He introduced the new Universal Theme (number 42) with the Template Options feature - so you need less templates because special settings are driven by the options. But - with a great "one more thing", he surprised everyone with the demo of the Universal Theme Roller. Similar to http://themeroller.jquerymobile.com/ but it looked better. So you can "live style" the look and feel of your application. CSS knowledge becomes...

Building a schedule for Kscope seems to get harder and harder every year. The number of interesting sessions per time slot is usually more than 3, so it's very hard to pick one - because you're pretty sure you are missing a few other good ones. And via Twitter you'll find out pretty soon whether you picked the right one or not. A complicating factor is the World Cup that's organized simultaneously - just like four years ago in Washington. Luckily the Dutch team is scheduled only once in that week: on Monday morning at 9AM. So that means ... I have to skip the opening ceremony. For the rest of the week it's just packed. Some people think attending conferences is a holiday. Once you've done Kscope you know better. It's work. Hard work. And it is so much fun! But in the end I managed to create a schedule (see below if you actually do mind). There's still a few slots with two sessions in it. So I have to split myself now and then. I'm doing two sessi...