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...

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!

The agenda for the first APEX OBUG SIG is finalized. From a number of abstracts Dimitri and I picked two to fill the open spaces. Patrick Hellemans (InterAccess) will do a presentation on the " Maturity level of Oracle APEX " and Olivier Dupont (iAdvise) will emphasize more smaller but nevertheless very powerfull new features in his presentation called " APEX 4.0: Feature 135, 184, 301, 315, 348 … ". Also the location is defined : congrescentre 't Elzenveld Antwerp . You can see the complete agenda on the OBUG website . You can register there too (be quick, full = full). It is gonna be a long but interesting day with 6 hours of APEX presentations!

In the latest release of APEX 4.0 (available on tryapexnow ) I noticed two nice new features. First of all, on the far right side of the Home page of the builder, there is a little region called "Available Updates". If you click on the little "i" in the upper right of that region, you'll navigate to another page where you can control if you want to check for those updates. Wonder what will happen if I set it to "No"...will it be switched of for just my workspace or for the whole APEX instance? To me it seems it should be an "Administration" kind of functionality - so instance wide. In the "Help" it says: "This attribute controls if Application Express should check if updates are available for Oracle Application Express and the Oracle Application Express Listener. Note: To perform this check Application Express transmits the version number of Application Express and other system components to Oracle Corporation." This seem...

June will be a busy month. Not only the famous ODTUG's Kaleidoscope conference will be held that month, but also two events in Europe! The first one is on Tuesday, June 15 in Dublin. CampusIT organizes a free (!) one day APEX event, packed with good sessions from Dimitri Gielis from Sumneva, Hilary Farell and Barry McGillin from Oracle and Jan Navratil from CampusIT (and I'll do a session myself). You can register using this link . Later that week, on Thursday, June 17, the first official OBUG APEX SIG event is planned. The location will be conveniently located for all attendees from Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg, somewhere in or around Antwerp. Also this event is jam packed with sessions, all aimed at APEX 4.0. Patrick Wolf, Dimitri Gielis, Iloon Ellen and myself will do a session on one (or more) of the many APEX 4.0 new features. There are still two presentation slots open, so if you do have a good APEX 4.0 idea and want to present on this great event, send a ma...

I was really looking forward to fly out last Saturday to Las Vegas for my first visit to Collaborate. But the Icelandic vulcano with the unpronounceable name (something like " Eiwjhfdjaajfkjjsirsuj "), threw soot in the food - which is a direct translation of a Dutch saying, the corresponding English saying would be something like: " spoil-sported it ". So both my presentations are canceled, sorry for those who had planned to attend! The good thing is, I got a 100% refund of both flights and hotel from Expedia, with one single phone call of a few minutes on Sunday. A great service, that I didn't expect, so I was happily surprised by that! So at least I got cashes for ashes, bucks for dust .... I really hope the air will be clean before the next big conference, ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, and hope to see you all there!

  I just received an email that the Call for Papers for the UKOUG Conference Series Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 has opened. The submission deadline is 2nd August, so you still have some time. The event itself is from 28th November to 1st Devember in Birmingham. From my experience I can only say that this is the best European Oracle event around, so if you want to be part of it: Just do it! Submit your abstracts here:  http://techandebs.ukoug.org/ .

Almost a year ago I blogged about a solution how to create those nice striping in an Interactive Report . That solution is based on using the onLoad method of an image that you use in the IR for linking to a Form. The downside of that solution is that it doesn't 'support' sorting and filtering. After applying a sort of a filter the coloring is all gone. Also - in some browsers - the order in which the rows (or images) are loaded is not the same order as you see on the screen, resulting in a more or less randomized striping... But recently I found out about the l_LastFunction attribute of a report. That function is called after all worksheet (report) AJAX calls. So if we define a function that does the striping for just the odd rows in the worksheet after all calls - like sorting, filtering - are done, the striping just keeps working! The code uses jQuery and is just this: $(function(){   function altColor(){    $(".apexir_WORKSHEET_DATA tr:odd").addClass(...

Yesterday the OGh (Dutch Oracle User Group) organized a full day about APEX. There was a very good turn-up of about 150 attendees and about 10 sessions to choose from. A couple of attendees already blogged about it like Rob , Michel and Dimitri . I agree what they already have written so I won't repeat it. There also was a rumor - that I heard of before, so it might be true - that APEX 4.0 is planned to be released just before/after or even during ODTUG ... So around the end of June we will experience if the source of the rumor is a reliable source or not...