Track Highlights: Check out the Application Express Podcastthat ODTUG President, Mike Riley did with Brian Spendolini of JSA2. Plugin Showcase - Take 5 NEW APEX Plugins Home as Souvenirs!
The new plugin architecture is probably one of the most exciting features to be announced for APEX 4.0, allowing anyone to create extensions to the core APEX framework. In this session we'll showcase 5 useful plugins that we've created from scratch, discuss the ideas behind them and how they were created. As a souvenir, you'll get to take all of them home, learn from how they were coded and use them in your 4.0 applications.
APEX Open Mic Night – Your 15 Minutes of Fame Starts NOW
Done something cool with APEX lately? Got a favorite feature that you think everyone should be using? Found a unique way to solve a problem? Well then, this is your chance to tell the world! APEX Open Mic Night will give you 15 minutes to present your ideas and discoveries to your peers without the pressure of having to produce a full conference presentation. There will be no slides allowed, and your app/demonstration must be run on APEX.ORACLE.COM from a laptop that we will provide. Other than that, there are no limitations. Think Oracle Unconference meets The Improv. Good luck and your time starts ... NOW!
Sunday Symposium - APEX A to Z
This year's Sunday APEX Symposium will take on bit of a different twist. We're going to follow the development of a single system from data model to deployment, each session focusing on a different aspect of the development process. Topics covered will include :Data Model/Foundation,
Application Development, Dynamic Actions/Plugins, Performance and Tuning , User Interface , Printing , Security, and Globalization.
Each session will use the foundation that is build by the previous ones, but will be a self contained lesson. This way you can see the things that are most important to you without the fear of missing something from a previous session. Although we hope you'll stay with us for the entire symposium.
APEX Application Lifecycles: Managing the Change Dietmar Aust, Opal-Consulting
Every application changes over time. Keeping track of the different software versions in multiple environments (development, test, and production) quickly becomes a nontrivial task which every developer has to solve. This session details best practices for the configuration management of an APEX application. It covers a proven file system layout, automated DDL extraction, generation of documentation, a completely script based deployment approach, and the integration with Subversion. You will get all the scripts.
APEX Through the Eyes of a Beginner - The Manual Approach Paul Broughton, APEX Evangelists
This presentation will teach you how to create an APEX page and manually create page items and buttons. It will then take you through writing custom PL/SQL to fetch data from your database and to process your items updating multiple tables at a time.
This practical session presents the direct, shortcut version of what you need to know about APEX 4.0 new features. It will cover Websheets, team development, declarative tabular forms, integrated JavaScript and JQuery, improvements to the builder, charting, interactive reports, Web services, error handling, and use of the APEX Listener. You will gain practical pointers on APEX 4.0 new features, including if, when, and how to assimilate them into existing apps and development practices.
Migration BI Tool to APEX Interactive Reports: What Works and What Doesn't, and Lessons Learned Along the Way Karen Cannell, Integra Technology Consulting
APEX Interactive Reports offer a wealth of end user functionality for filtering, organizing, and charting data - but is this enough to replace your business intelligence tool? Learn from our experience migrating from business intelligence to APEX IR: what works, what doesn't, and under what conditions such a migration succeeds. Track our progress - the leaps, the (scope) creeps, and the stumbles - from analysis and planning to report conversion to testing and implementation.
APEX in the Cloud with Amazon Flavio Casetta, Yocoya.com
Cloud computing is the cool trend of the moment, but how does it relate to Oracle Application Express? Can we put Oracle Apex on a virtual box in a cloud?
What are the steps required to carry out the relocation from a traditional physical host server to a virtualized service? How much does it cost? Does it scale? How many users can it support?
Does it work with Oracle XE? What are the pros and cons of this technology?
The presentation aims to answer these and other common sense questions as well as to provide an account of the experiences of the author with this kind of service during the first six months up in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
APEX 4.0 New Features –Enhanced Interactive Reports and Websheets Christina Cho, Oracle Corporation
Interactive Reports has been one of THE best features within Application Express since it was released in APEX 3.1. Come and learn first-hand what we have added into Interactive Reports for APEX 4.0 to make them even more compelling for online reporting.
Even though APEX is very easy for developers to create applications, it remains intimidating for many business users. These users are often not comfortable defining tables and other database components, so we developed Websheets. Websheets are one of the premier new features within APEX 4.0 and include the ability for end-users to create pages of static information together with data grids which are effectively updateable interactive reports without the need for any tables.
Jumpstart for APEX Templates Patrick Cimolini, Independent APEX Consultant
Some APEX programmers and business users are a bit intimidated when they first look inside an APEX template. This is especially true when they are not familiar with the relationship between HTML and CSS within the APEX theme/template framework. This presentation, in detail, walks through the process of taking a standard APEX theme and evolving it into a tailored, custom theme. The intent of the presentation is not to dazzle the audience with cool stuff; rather, it is a primer that will help them get a basic jumpstart on learning how to successfully manipulate an APEX template.
APEX High Fidelity Reporting using Excel
Patrick Cimolini, Independent APEX Consultant
This presentation shows how to build high fidelity reports using APEX coupled with Microsoft Excel. APEX’s ability to very easily export a CSV file dove tails well with Excel’s ability to import the CSV file and then to format the data using an autopen macro that is written in Excel’s scripting language, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This technique can be used in situations where BI Publisher it too expensive and where the client is comfortable with Excel. A working Excel template will be freely available after the presentation (bring your memory stick).
Enhancing APEX Security Martin D'Souza, Cognera Corp.
APEX has some excellent built-in configurable security features. This presentation will go over some extra functionality you can add to your APEX applications that will make it more secure both in the front-end and back-end. Primary focus will be on "enhanced session state protection" and "poor man's" VPD for Oracle XE.
How to be Creative: Using the APEX Dictionary to Create Solutions Martin D'Souza, Cognera Corp.
The APEX dictionary is a very useful tool which can help enhance existing features in APEX. This presentation will cover how you can use the dictionary to resolve your problems. It will include some real-life issues and how the APEX dictionary was used to resolve them.
Although Oracle Application Express enables you to create very robust Web-based applications in a very short timeframe, there are areas where the UI can be extended into the realm of Web 2.0. jQuery, one of the most popular open source JavaScript libraries, and can be used to add sophisticated user interface functionality to Web-based applications. To demonstrate this functionality, this session shows, step-by-step, how Oracle Application Express and jQuery can be used to fairly easily duplicate the functionality of the NetFlix movie queue. You'll gain an understanding of the basic structure of the jQuery library, and how it can be integrated into Oracle Application Express and used to implement some very impressive interface techniques.
Mastering an APEX Page Dimitri Gielis, APEX Evangelists
If you know how an APEX page works and you know what to look at for the different components, it will give you a great benefit to be able to code exactly what you need. This presentation will show you the two states APEX is working in and, as the definition of the page got changed quite a bit in APEX 4, spend time on that as well.
Creating Sub-zero Dashboard Plugin for APEX with Google Visualizations Roel Hartman, Logica
Learn how to use the new APEX 4.0 plug-in features and how to create dashboards - with charts not native available in APEX - using Google Visualizations.
Using Collections in APEX: The Definitive Intro Raj Mattamal, Niantic Systems, LLC
Many developers who are new to APEX are unfamiliar with the powerful collections capability provided with the tool. This session aims to introduce the concept of collections and walk through some of the most helpful use cases for them. Using the APEX-specific examples of a shopping cart, interactive reports with dynamic SQL, and running saved queries, the audience should leave the session feeling comfortable using collections in various scenarios.
JavaScript in APEX - A Lesson for the PL/SQL Developer Dan McGhan, SkillBuilders
Oracle Application Express developers often have strong backgrounds in SQL and PL/SQL, but JavaScript is another story. However, JavaScript is a very important part of any well-built Web 2.0 application. In this session, explore JavaScript through a comparison of the language to PL/SQL and SQL—both similarities and differences. Throughout the session, learn techniques to write code that is easy to maintain, profile, and deploy.
Adding Statistics to Oracle's Application Express Rory McLean, Aderas
This session provides APEX users with an understanding of how to incorporate a variety of SQL Analytics and Oracle Data Mining tools into their APEX applications. The focus will be on using statistic functions and data mining procedures to enhance reporting or drive dynamic changes to the presentation layer. The presentation will include a live demonstration on steps needed to incorporate these capabilities.
Code Instrumentation with APEX - Step by Step Jan Navratil, CampusIT
The session gives answers on why and how you should use code instrumentation in your projects—all backed by real-life examples from large scale APEX implementations. 1) What code instrumentation is 2) What benefits it brings to the project (and dispel some myths) 3) Features available in Application Express 4) How you can put instrumentation into your own PL/SQL code 5) How to sell this technique to your colleagues.
How to Hack an APEX Application Anton Nielsen, C2 Consulting
In this live demonstration Anton Nielsen will demonstrate common hacking techniques and how they apply to APEX applications. Naturally, he will demonstrate how to secure an APEX application from each technique.
APEX 101 – APEX 4.0 Edition David Peake, Oracle Corporation
You keep hearing about Application Express as the popularity of this tool continues to grow. Learn for yourself just why Oracle Application Express is such a powerful, easy to use development tool. This session is designed to give you an overview of the tool complete with demonstrations on how you can maximize your Oracle Database investment. This session is based on APEX 4.0 and all of the brilliant new features that make development even easier and more productive.
APEX Features We Should All Be Using...but Probably Don't John Scott, APEX Evangelists
Application Express has lots of features tucked away, but how do you know which ones are going to be useful unless you try them out? This session will cover some of the features that John Scott considers essential for productive development.
Increasing Scalability with Oracle Application Express John Scott, APEX Evangelists
APEX makes it easy to quickly develop applications, however, what can you do if those applications need to support more users? This session focuses on the many different areas (both inside and outside of the application itself) which you can leverage to increase the scalability of your application. This session is not only of interest to people looking to build large applications; even the smallest of applications can benefit from some of these techniques too!
APEX 4.0 New Features – Tabular Forms Marc Sewtz, Oracle Corporation
Oracle Application Express (APEX) has long been providing easy to use wizards for creating sophisticated, modern web-based forms with a wide variety of items types and widgets and the ability to declaratively add validations for form fields, along with user-friendly, customizable error messages. Tabular forms, i.e. forms used to update multiple records simultaneously, have until now been somewhat more difficult to use and often required manual coding of JavaScript and PL/SQL functions to achieve functionality comparable to standard single-record forms. Oracle Application Express 4.0 finally address these issues and introduces declarative tabular form validations, customizable error messages, new items types, such as radio groups, checkboxes and popup key LOVs along with various other enhancements, which make tabular forms much easier to use for novice APEX users and long-time APEX enthusiasts alike. This session will outlines the various new tabular form features, include a live demonstration on how to use these enhancements on new and existing tabular form regions and provide APEX developers with code samples for the improved and extended APEX_ITEM API.
Creating User Experiences that Work with Oracle Application Express Brian Spendolini, JSA2
Many times when developing Web applications, aesthetics come as an afterthought. This presentation will help you incorporate the user experience into your application workflow to create pleasant user experiences as well as fully functional forms that flow.
ALT-TAB: Better APEX Tabs Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
Oracle Application Express has always provided the capability to include tabs in your applications. Unfortunately, APEX’s tab mechanism is quite confusing and unintuitive, which causes a lot of frustration on the part of the developer. Even with these known drawbacks, APEX’s tabs have seen few changes since its initial release.
Fortunately, there’s a better and less confusing way to add tabs to your APEX applications: using lists. Like tabs, lists are hierarchical structures that can easily be mapped to specific pages. With a little help from some cascading style sheets, we can easily add lightweight, customizable, multi-level tabs to our APEX application - all without any JavaScript or jQuery! As an added bonus, source code for all demos in this session will be made available online.
Troubleshooting APEX Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
APEX is made up of a number of technologies - PL/SQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax. When something goes wrong, it's often more difficult to figure out what went wrong than it is to fix it. This session will feature an in-depth look at each technology that makes up APEX and discuss and demonstrate how to effectively track down the problem.
APEX and AJAX - Where to Start Tim St. Hilaire, BAE Systems
This session will demonstrate how to start using the abilities of Oracle Application Express to create AJAX-enabled Web applications. It will step through the technology building blocks, debugging techniques, and design considerations required to develop dynamic behavior inside the APEX technology framework. This session is intended to show the main points that individuals can take with them and expand upon to create their own dynamic, AJAX-enabled, applications.
APEX 4.0 New Features – RESTful Web Services Jason Straub, Oracle Corporation
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a pay for what you use storage solution on the Internet. Amazon S3 is a Web service and offers a REST API. Application Express 4.0 introduces support for consuming RESTful Web services.
This session will cover Application Express 4.0 support for consuming RESTful Web services. The demonstrations will be based on Amazon S3’s REST API. Attendees of this session will learn how to build an Application Express client application on Amazon’s S3. A fully functional Amazon S3 client will be built during this session’s demonstrations.
Forms to APEX – Live! Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger A/S
This presentation will demonstrate by example how to develop Application Express (APEX) screens corresponding to an existing Oracle Forms application. Topics covered include the APEX Forms conversion utility and the available “hooks” to include your own code. The presentation shows where Forms and APEX are similar and where they are different. The main part of this presentation will be live development (not PowerPoint).
APEX 4.0 New Features – Dynamic Actions & Plug-Ins Patrick Wolf, Oracle Corporation
Application Express 4.0 introduces 'Dynamic Actions', a new and easy way to declaratively define client-side behavior in your applications, without needing to know JavaScript and 'Plug-Ins' to declaratively extend the existing functionality of APEX.
In the first part of this session, you will learn everything you need to know about 'Dynamic Actions'. By the end of the first part of this session, you will have a good appreciation for what is possible with 'Dynamic Actions', understand how you can benefit from using them and be able to start giving your application a richer Web 2.0 feel, all with a few clicks of the mouse.
The second part of this session is all about 'Plug-Ins', directly from the developer of this feature. You will understand how to deal with dynamic SQL, JavaScript, performance and the security aspects of writing a plug-in. Last but not least you will get to know all the documented (maybe also some undocumented) utility functions to make you a plug-in developer rock star!
