Oracle Apex Notebook

My OpenWorld 2008: 23 Set

Written by Paulo Vale on Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The first session of the day was schedule to 11:30 AM. I had some free time that I used to get around and see what was happening.

I went to Moscone North and after blogging a bit on the couches, went to the Unconference section and then the bookstore. I couldn’t find John Scott’s Pro Oracle APEX book, but later at night he told me that the book was there, so maybe I’ll go to the bookstore again tomorrow, if I have the time. Then I went to Moscone South into the exhibition hall, just for a really quick visit.


Session 1: Writing custom authentication scheme for Oracle Apex – Raj Mattamal

Wow... Raj Mattamal must be the fastest speaker at OpenWold :)

His session was around getting custom authentication to work between workspaces.

First he started by quickly explaining the authentication methods provided be APEX. Then he focused on the custom authentication to provide a method to maintain sessions between applications in the same workspace using a cookie. This was a single APEX instance approach that explained the way page sentry function works.

After that Raj explained how he managed to have something like a single sign-on feature across different workspaces and logging out from each individual application.

I really enjoyed this session and the theme was also very interesting.


Session 2: The power of APEX repository – Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf made a very original presentation. Slides were very nice with animations and strong pictures, and there was that moment with the lights off and sounds of birds singing, like if we were in the Garden of Eden :)

The presentation itself was about playing with APEX repository: the dictionary views, the applications and workspace metadata and the logging/monitoring.

Patrick talked about the advantages of using the APEX repository for tasks like: quality checks, application documentation and application sitemaps. Then he introduced his Apex Essentials, which is a tool for application quality check. I’ve tried this tool myself and I can just advice you to do the same because it will help you detect common application errors.

Then he talked a bit about his known ApexLib project, which is a tool that adds some functionalities that APEX doesn’t support like: cascading LOVs; browser checks; validations for date picker; tabular forms validation; etc.

The session finished with Patrick talking a little about monitoring application activities.


Session 3: Building large commercial applications with Oracle DB 11g and APEX – Dennis Vanill and Eric Scholer from PAETEC

With this presentation with could see a fine example of how APEX can manage with large projects. They have migrated from a 14 years old application with almost 800 databases. A big project!



They have also developed something that they call Pinnacle APEX Framework to customize their application actions and help with repetitive tasks when developing.


Session 4: Zero-cost business intelligence using Oracle DB 11g and APEX 3.1 - Jim Lancer, Paetec

Essentially this was a demonstration of capabilitiest that can be found in Interactive Reports and Flash Charts and how they can help analyze enterprise data. PAETEC also added some customizations to get the most of these functionalities.


Finally I had a decent night of sleep. I think the beers at Apex meetup on the end of the night helped a little :)