Roels Blog

Using the jQuery BetterGrow Plugin , I created a BetterGrow APEX Plugin. The APEX part is just a simple wrapper of the jQuery Plugin - so all the credits go to " The Product Guy " who came up with that one. It just does this: You can see it in action on the demo site . And download it from apex-plugin.com . There already was an similar plugin, created by Martin . On the demo page you can see both, so pick the one you like most!

In my current project I have to create a dashboards that reflects the actual (and historical) situation in a factory. At first I tried something like the dashboards Anychart provides on it's site, like this . It is possible to create that kind of stuff in APEX, but then you have to generate all the XML data by yourself. And the fastest way to do something is...don't do it at all. So, since the subregion-feature of APEX 4, you can achieve the same results by only tweaking the Chart XML itself a "little". And now I have something like this: Kinda cool huh? I also created an example on apex.oracle.com (refreshes every 3 seconds with random data).

Wednesday I started late, because I skipped the first session to prepare for my second one " Tales from a Parallel Universe: Using 11gR2’s Edition Based Redefinitions ". Went also pretty good as well I think, ended nice on time - even, again, with a session chair. And I received some really positive feedback from people like John King and Christian Antognini. Thanks guys! Then there was a funny debate kind of session between Tony Hasler and Jonathan Lewis about " Does Oracle ignore hints? ". In the end it was all about semantics...if you discard bugs, poor or wrong documentation and more or less hidden features and unexpected optimizer processes, Oracle never ignores your hint (which in fact is more a 'directive' than a hint) - otherwise you might say that Oracle actually does  ignore your hint. After lunch - instead of the good hot lunches we received a school-like lunch bag this time - I chaired my second session : " Edition-Based Redefinition: Tes...

Tuesday started of with a two hour Masterclass by Cary Millsap " Thinking clearly about performance ". A really great session that explained clearly what performance actually is (so the content covered the title). Using with a lot of nice stories, examples and analogies Cary has the ability to explain stuff that seems difficult in a way everybody can understand. If you haven't seen this one, it is really a must see if you have the chance! Because the next session on my agenda was shifted to another place and time a had some time to walk through my own presentation for that afternoon before attending the APEX Roundtable . A nice Q&A about what all APEX stuff. Some person from Oracle even gave us some insight on when to expect APEX 4.1, but I won't repeat the schedule, because he actually was not allowed to say that (but if you are really interested, I already tweeted about that...). After lunch I chaired Anthony Ashton's session about " Practical Oracle ...

Compared to some other attendees I had a fairly easy travel back home from another great UKOUG conference. And now I finally have the time to look back and write a blog post about my experiences over seas. As usual I planned to do a daily blogpost, but - also as usual - I can't find the time during the conference to blog. All those "social commitments" in the evening...sigh...  I'll split it in three, otherwise it will become too long. At Monday I started of with Grant Ronald's " The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development with Oracle ADF ". A good session that covered baby's first steps in ADF Development. As always, as Grant shows is, it seems so easy... But, coming from a Oracle Forms/Designer background, to me JDeveloper is still a huge box with tons of options to me. But I think I've forgotten how impressed I was when I first opened up Designer - with also tons of options! So IMHO developing in JDev might be fast (and definitely can resu...

As more or less a tradition, there will be an APEX Meetup during the upcoming UKOUG. Ben (a.k.a. Munky) was so good to organize this social gathering of APEX enthousiasts.  Venue: Pennyblack's at The Mailbox -  http://www.pennyblacksbar.com Time: Monday 29th November arrive 8:00pm - 8:30pm He needs to give a rough confirmation of numbers by the start of next week. So if you are in the neighborhood and would like to attend (and who wouldn't), please leave a comment on this post!

Booked my flight :  Made a reservation for my hotel :  Picked sessions for those three days :  See my (ambitious) schedule below...really looking forward to it!

At APEXPosed in Brussels I attended a presentation by Lucas Jellema  called " Reaching out from PL/SQL ". It was all about leveraging the central position of the Oracle database in the application architecture. Of course the examples were accompanied by some fine demo's. One of them was sending and receiving email by the database: You could ask the database a question, and the database answered that one. Another one was sending instant messages from the database when some data was changed. Interesting stuff! So I decided to combine those two: Why not chat with the database? Ask the database a question using an IM client and the database will (try to) answer to that question... I started off with downloading and installing the Oracle-XMPP code (XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ). Because I needed my own XMPP-server, I also downloaded and installed OpenFire . One of the options when installing OpenFire is to use an Oracle Database for storing th...

In theory it should be so easy...running an APEX application on an Oracle instance with database links to MySQL for retrieving and modifying data. In theory that is, because in practice it is somewhat more cumbersome. I finally got there, but it took some steps  - and patience... I started off with the steps provided from a couple of websites. Like these from Birijan , from Pythian , from WebAJ and from Easysoft . They´re all not the most recent ones, so I downloaded the latest versions of MySQL (5.1.51), MySQL Connector for ODBC (5.1.7) and unixODBC (2.3.0) and installed this stuff on top of the Oracle Developer Days Virtual Machine. Following the steps provided on the sites earlier mentioned I had a MySQL database with a demo table within minutes. So far so good! After changing the odbcinst.ini, odbc.ini, tlistener.ora, tnsnames.ora and the initmysql.ora (in $ORACLE_HOME/hs/admin) file I fired up SQL*Plus and created a databaselink using  create database link mysql ...

Last week the first European OPP / APEXposed ever was held in Brussels. And just like the US originals - which I actually never was able to attend - this also was a huge success, when you listen to all the positive feedback and comments issued in the hallways of the Brussel's Sheraton.  In two days there were 9 sessions to attend in 4 to 5 tracks. And even which such a relative small number of tracks it was hard to pick just one...so many interesting presentations! APEXposed kicked off with a keynote by Patrick Wolf, in which he addressed all the nice new APEX 4.0 features at a glance. All of these features deserved a presentation on their own, and luckily most of them got one during the conference. Next I attended a session by Steven Feuerstein (he did 8 ! in these two days) about PL/SQL for APEX Developers. The key thing here was: develop your application as it was a regular PL/SQL based application, so use packages, test thoroughly, handle your errors well and code as less PL/S...

As you might know, next week (Oct 27 and 28, 2010) the first ODTUG's OPP/APEXposed conference will be held in Europe - in Brussels that is. And even for such a small conference (compared to OOW, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and UKOUG), it is hard to choose the sessions. For every session you select, there are at least two or three other ones you would like to attend also! But I managed to create a nice schedule for myself. During the conference I might change plans - so no guarantee.... And yes, I have one of the final slots - just before the APEX and PL/SQL quizzes.

Probably totally superfluous, but a "favicon" is the little picture that shows up in your browser tab or bookmark list - like the example above. The APEX Page Templates support this nice feature by these two lines in the Header property : So if you replace that default favicon file - which is not so cool - with your own, then you'll get something like the picture above. However, that file (on your virtual /i/ directory on a standard install) may be overwritten by the APEX default icon when upgrading or patching! That favicon will then be used for all your APEX applications A more flexible alternative is to go through all page templates and change the reference to your own favorite icon file to #APP_IMAGES# .ico (or to something like #IMAGE_PREFIX#my-icons/ .ico. And of course upload a nice little icon for every application...

This morning I arrived rather early at SFO. When checking in I noticed that the first leg of my trip was delayed by almost 2 hours. And, originally, had a 1.5 hour layover in Minneapolis. So that wouldn't work anymore... So Delta rescheduled my whole trip: From San Francisco to Los Angeles to Paris to Amsterdam. With a couple of hours of layover at each stop. Initially I would arrive around 11 AM in Amsterdam, but that will be around 8 PM now! So a nice 9 hour delay. Luckily SFO offers a free 45 wifi service. As I have three wifi enabled devices I am fine for over 2 hours. I must get as much sleep as possible at every leg, to feel just a little bit alive tomorrow. Or the day after that. The one and only positive thing is that I can head straight to bed when I finally get home. I really realty hope no other delays will pop up... (to be continued) The continuation So SFO - LAX took about 1,5 hours, then 3 hours of waiting. Next a 9 hours flight to Paris, and of course I got a s...

Today I got two e-mails from the organising committee of the upcoming UKOUG Technology Conference in Birmingham saying that both of the abstracts I submitted were selected. That's cool! A 100% score! I will do my presentation on Edition Based Redefinition and APEX and the one about creating a Google Visiualization Plugin for APEX. They will have to change the schedule a bit, because at this time both session have an overlap of half an hour. Or I'll need to split myself in half... Looking forward to it!

The last day of this year's conference. And the day after the event. It was noticeable that it already was a lot more quiet than the days before. And that sure had an effect on the turnout of my session. Being scheduled on the last day isn't an advance. Just before my session about Edition Based Redefinition and APEX started I checked my demos and they ran perfect. And after my session they ran perfect as well. But during my session they didn't perform at all - and Marco was enjoying that on the front row... But luckily I had a backup: a number of screenprints. Apart from this minor inconvenience the presentation went pretty good! Afterwards I got some really nice compliments of Brynn, Patrick and Joel. Then it was time to wind down. First in the OTN lounge, and then at the "It's a wrap!" party. That party was really nice: sun, beer and good music. A perfect way to end a good Oracle Open World See you all again next year...or earlier when possible!

Alas I missed the Benelux cocktail part last night, because the dinner took somewhat longer than expected. The dinner was extremely good though. This day started with a session by John Scott Spendolini about "Recovering from APEX mistakes" - I didn't know they existed but nevertheless. Good session on how to undo changes you've made, debugging etc. The next one was by Marco Gralike on XML-DB (what else could it be?). Good, detailed info with some nice examples. Not all demos worked like he meant to, but that's the price you pay when you mess with them the night before! Especially the event firing mechanism when you drop a file in an XML folder are very cool! Marco, we definitely need those for our ODTUG presentation! Then Raj did a presentation on collections, enthusiastic and dynamic us usual. But also his deno didn't turn out as expected. The best take away from this session was the idea to create views on top of your collections, so you can maintain the c...

The day started really early with a 8 o'clock session about ExtJS integrated in APEX. Marc Lancaster is one of the few people I know of who uses ExtJS in an APEX environment, but he still wrote a book about it (due very soon). But I have to admit that the user interface you can create with this framework is very nice. And when you wrap the whole ExtJS stuff in Plugins, it isn't very hard to use. Marc's book will come with a number of Plugins and templates. The next session was on the Oracle Service Bus. The best thing was that the presenter perfectly demoed how easy (agile) it is to add and change services you need to exchange information from one system to the other. Next was a session on Edition Based Redefinition. My session is on the same subject, so I was curious what Dan Morgan would tell and show on this matter. But - luckily! - no new stuff for me. Then I had a very nice lunch with my Logica colleagues here present. Good to meet colleagues from the US, France and...

The first real day of this Openworld started off with a PLSQLChallenge 'live'. Good fun as alway, but this time no prices to win. The second session was about integrating Adobe Flash into Application Express. My idea is: ok, you can do it, but why would you? Just because you can? After that Lucas and Alex did a good job about "Xenogentics" as they cold it. It was all about Java best practices for PL/SQL developers. Some fine and good ideas, but some I never would use in a real environment, because they are too complicated to implement and maintain. But the whole idea too look further than your regular scope for some good practices is very useful. Then I attended a session about replacing mod-plsql modules in an eBusiness Suite with APEX. Mainly because mod-plsql isn't supported in an eBS12 environment. The presenters mainly focussed on getting the security stuff - authentication and authorization - right. Good stuff if you're in that situation. The last sessio...

In the evening of this day Oracle had organised a cruise for all ACE's. At least for who that were on time....(sorry Jacco, had to mention it). It was good fun, a nice trip with beautiful views of San Francisco at night. We had to leave during Larry's keynote, that overrun an hour or so. Larry announced the Exalogic machine. Also called "your own private cloud". He mentioned that Facebook could run on two of those machines. But thinking of that: if Facebook needs two, who needs one? I guess the installed base will not be that big. But you can also buy "half a rack"! The other big thing was the announcement of the general availability of Fusion Apps in 2011Q1, 5 years after it was mentioned first. The third thing was the new unbreakable Linux kernel, to overcome the - according to Oracle - slow development of Linux by Redhat. I wonder what will be left for the Wednesday keynote...probably the new Java roadmap... Before the keynotes, there were some user group...

Yesterday was one of those days. Crossing the Atlantic and ending up with crossing 9 timezones. So that day had 33 hours...(so you can definitely have  more than 24 hours in a day !). I got up at 6 AM, traveled to Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport) by train. At Schiphol it was crowded! People with large bags everywhere, no one standing in line. Giant congestion for the border security etc. And then there is the obligatory chat with a security officer when boarding (did you pack your bag yourself, brought anything etc..). The strange thing is the US carriers seem to be obliged doing that - but only for inbound flights?? But the good thing was: I managed to upgrade my first leg of the trip (to Minneapolis). Never traveled Business Class before, but, man! what a joy!. Imagine long, broad seats with lots of buttons on the armrest. If you use the right ones, you can get the chair in a 100% horizontal position - while massaging your back! And then there is the drinks and the fo...