Oracle Apex Notebook

My OpenWorld 2008: 21 Set

Written by Paulo Vale on Monday, September 22, 2008

Today I had the chance to attend 4 sessions. Two of them were Hands on Labs from Oracle Develop. Also, it was nice to put some faces in the names I’m used meet on the net. I met Carl Backstrong, Joel Kallman, David Peake, Dimitri Gielis, Francis Minault, John Scott and Patrick Wolf.

Session 1: Hands-on Lab: Extending the Oracle Application Express Framework with Web 2.0 - APEX Development Team

There was a full room of interested audience attending this session. I guess this topic of using Javascript and Ajax is the hardest part for a PL/SQL developer who starts using APEX.

The session consisted in following step by step tutorials to perform tasks like changing values in form elements before submitting the page, creating client side validations and enabling/disabling form elements, among others.

The good news is that this and every Hand-on Lab tutorials will be published on OTN some weeks after the conference at http://otn.oracle.com/obe, and believe me, there are some nice tricks you can use to upgrade your applications.

Session 2: Using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Application Express to Change Business Practices and Realize ROI - Anton Nielsen, Concept 2 Completion; Diana Suteu, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare

I liked this session very much. Anton Nielsen, along with Diana Suten explained how they implemented in a short period of time (one month I think) a solution for subscribing insurances over the net.

They used agile methodology taking advantage of the client human resources to get the project done in such short time. Soft requirements definitions redefined over the project, prototyping and testing onsite and even letting the client employees to change themselves some parts of the application like forms and reports labels.

This was possible taking advantage of some of the APEX features like having a web based interface allowing development anywhere and having super users being able to act as developers.

Session 3: Go global with APEX – Joel R. Kallman

For me, this was the best presentation of the day. If you are thinking in having your applications available in more than one language and have the opportunity to attend this session in some other event, do yourself a favor: don’t miss it.

In a very interactive session with risky live testing, Joel Kallman showed us how to translate an application, changing language and altering numbers, currency and dates format.

Joel also revealed some of the features – globalization related – expected for the APEX 4.0 release like having options to define application timestamp format and application timestamp with time zone format, a modern popup calendar using jQuery and using client time zone.


I wish I had seen this presentation some months ago…

Session 4: Hands-on Lab: Creating "High-Fidelity" PDF Reports with Oracle Application Express - APEX Development Team

This was another Hands-on Lab session, where BI Publisher was integrated with APEX to generate complex PDF reports including charts and using custom made templates. An impressive demonstration of BI Publisher capabilities, but being such an expensive product it is very difficult to make a competitive APEX application using it.

This tutorial will also be available on OTN at http://otn.oracle.com/obe.


After the sessions I was so tired due to jetlag that I decided to go for a little rest at the Hotel. I felt a sleep and missed the blogger meetup.

Time for a little visit to Welcome Reception Party at Howard Street tent and Yerba Buena Gardens and the day was over.