My presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008

Two weeks ago I attended the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 conference in New Orleans. This was a great event.

The view from my hotel room was truly awesome:


On Saturday I did have some time to hang out with Patrick Wolf in the French Quarter for breakfast:


On the first (pre conference) day, there was an APEX symposium held. The focus was on customer success stories showing off successful real world implementations of APEX projects to add even more "street" credibility to APEX.

It was very interesting to hear about the different projects.

My presentation was about the successful implementation of two projects at the German Telecom Shops. My main struggle there has been the very tight deadlines (only a few weeks) in which I had to deliver the applications.

(Scott Spendolini and me)

(giving the presentation)

(answering questions)

I am very happy that my presentation was well received. You can download the presentation here.

Also, it was the first time for me to record my online demo and show the video during my presentation. This way I could pause the demo and explain more details where necessary. Also I wouldn't have to switch between screens so often to copy/paste information for the demo. Sometimes this makes a presentation a bit hard to follow. The tool I used for that was the Camtasia Studio by Techsmith. I am very pleased with the produced results.

I really enjoyed hanging out with the APEX development team and meeting really nice folks I know from the Oracle APEX forum.

Regards,
~Dietmar.

APEX Advanced Training held in Munich

It is a little bit late, but I still wanted to share the photos from our last Advanced APEX Training held in Munich on 02.06.2008-04.06.2008.

Once again, (Denes Kubicek, Patrick Wolf and me) held another APEX Advanced Training in Munich.


Although the class wasn't as packed as the previous one, it was again very successful and the participants enjoyed the training, judging by their feedback. And we truly enjoyed it, too.


The class covered the complete life cycle of an APEX project, starting with the analysis and planning, design, indepth coverage of the implementation, PDF reporting alternatives, forms, reports, tabular forms, AJAX, Javascript and ended with the deployment, change propagation and administration.

We also covered the ApexLib framework and other extensions as well as our favourite tools we work with. It was the essence of all the lessons we have learned in our previous projects delivering successful and scalable APEX solutions.

We were especially happy to have Marc Sewtz from Oracle join us with two presentations. He is one of the managers responsible for the development of Oracle Application Express (APEX).

(in the picture you see Patrick, Denes, Dietmar and Marc from left to right)

He was talking about Oracle SQL Developer, also showing the integration with APEX: deployment, browsing the data dictionary information of the applications and also how to debug an APEX application.

Futhermore he was giving us some insight about the possible new features of the next APEX release, targeted for 2009. There is no definite feature list at this time.

Many of the packaged applications will become multi-tenant capable.

Websheets will become one of the major features for the next release. Based on the interactive reports (part of the 3.1 release) it will be possible to edit and share the information.

Forms Migration will be another hot topic for the next release.

The APEX framework will be opened up further, giving us a documented PLSQL API and custom item types.

There will be declarative client side validations using AJAX, cascading AJAX select lists, better error handling, more native authentication schemes (NTLM, OpenID, LDAP/SSL) and finally a new DHTML tree component as well as a new DHTML calendar popup for date fields.

Regards,
~Dietmar.