OGh APEX Day 2011

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Due to the overwhelming number of registrations (250+ participants, entirely sold-out) the OGh Apex Day 2011 “Mini” congress had to be relocated to a different, larger location. This states the enormous interest in APEX in the Netherlands. Oracle Application Express is hot in NL. Another reason for the large number of participants (mainly developers) must have been the subjects of the presentations and the lineup of well known and respected (international) speakers: Dimitri Gielis & John Scott, aka the APEX Evangelists, where scheduled for 3 (!) presentations; Hilary Farrel represented the Oracle APEX development team; Roel Hartman and Iloon Ellen Wolf, both known for their high quality APEX presentations; Peter Raganitsch, APEX expert from Vienna and developer of the OpenSource Framework ApexLib.

Line-up

The OGh Apex Day 2011 was kicked off by Tony Andrews en Nigel Blair from Northgate (UK), presenting their experience with migrating a large Oracle Forms application to APEX. It was very interesting to hear, that moving from traditional Forms to browser-based increased customer satisfaction and actually earned Northgate new customers. 1500 forms+ thousands of users: who said APEX isn’t scalable?

Next Hilary Farrel from Oracle revealed some functionality planned (you probably know the usual Oracle disclaimer sheet) for release 4.1. Most of it you will find in Oracle’s SOD. I really liked the APEX & jQuery Mobile demo. Although Hillary mentioned, that jQuery Mobile will only be included with APEX 4.1 if the production release will be available by then. Maybe will hear a release date for jQuery Mobile production from the jQuery Conference in April. Maybe this could be an indication for a release date of APEX 4.1?!

Last session before lunch: the first ever duo-presentation of the two APEX Evangelists, John Scott and Dimitri Gielis, demonstrating the AE-way of handling an APEX project. Preconfigured plug-and-play installations, version control and an integrated custom issue tracking (APEX-) application: very impressive. The whole approach showed just how experienced AE is in executing APEX projects.
During the presentation Dimitri and Scott revealed the latest AE project : FoogleTwit.

 

After lunch I had to choose from 3 parallel tracks:

Core APEX
  • APEX Translation Mechanism (Peter Raganitsch)
  • Building APEX 4 Plugins (John Scott)
  • Customizing Apex Templates & Themes (Christian Rokitta; Yes, that’s me!)
APEX and “?”
  • APEX and Security (Iloon Ellen Wolf)
  • Charting and Dashboards (Roel Hartman)
  • APEX and Locator/Spacial – A Success Story (Dimitri Gielis)
APEX at Work
  • Eneco (Jasper Alblas)
  • Province of Zeeland (Hans Quist)
  • golfscores.eu (Hans Wijnacker)

 

I decided to listen to Peter’s and John’s Core APEX presentations.

Peter Raganitsch demonstrated the possibilities of translating APEX applications into different languages. It became clear, translation mechanism in APEX is not trivial and does have some pitfalls.

 
John walked the audience through the process of developing Plugins for APEX. Some of the examples where extraordinary educational and useful (the “Hello World” Plugin was just amazing). In fact, John dit such a good job, he got an extra 15 min from his audience to teach and demo.

The last presentation of this OGh APEX Day 2011 was my personal highlight: Myself speaking about Templates and Themes. I’m not talking about the quality of the presentation - that’s for others to decide - but the experience to be allowed to speak to a large audience.

Many thanks to the OGh organization for this excellent congress and for the opportunity to present.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 25, 2011 at 1:44 PM

    Hi Christian,

    You once called me the guru of Oracle BI EE. I guess I can call you a Oracle Apex guru now.

    Keep up the good work!!

    Daan

    ReplyDelete

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