PRESENTATION DESCRIPTIONS
KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS
Blazing the Future of Database Tools
Mike Hichwa, Oracle Corporation
If you’re at this conference, you’re undoubtedly aware that Oracle APEX has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years. What you may not know is that other complementary Oracle Database Tools are also rapidly advancing. Michael Hichwa, VP of Database Tools at Oracle, will outline the futures of Oracle APEX, including the much-anticipated WebSheets. He will also discuss other database tools that integrate with APEX, including SQL Developer, Data Modeling, and Oracle Forms conversion. This will be the most comprehensive APEX 4.0 demonstration to date.
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Avoiding APEX Pitfalls
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
If you've been using APEX for more than a few weeks, you likely have more than a few applications. While this is not typically a problem, managing access to these applications can quickly become one. In addition to access control, managing and updating consistent user interface across all applications can prove to be quite difficult. This session will outline and demonstrate a number of different APEX features and techniques that when combined, can provide a robust, single point of user access management for a suite of APEX applications - all without the addition of any middle-tier or single sign-on software. It will also cover how to centrally manage and update a single set of APEX templates for any number of applications.
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Track A
Tuning Oracle APEX Applications
Doug Gault, Hotsos
Application Express (APEX) is a highly flexible and highly scalable Rapid Application Development environment for web applications. But what do you do when your application's success starts to become it's downfall. This presentation will cover strategies and tactical advice for monitoring and addressing performance issues, and present some best practices for making APEX Performance As well as problems easy to diagnose.
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Integrating Web Services and APEX
Jason Straub, Oracle Corporation
Application Express has supported consuming Web services since version 1.5. Starting with Version 3.0 the feature Manual Web references was introduced to allow for maximum flexibility in interacting with Web services. This session will cover both wizard style interaction with Web services and manual Web references using a variety of Oracle products (BPEL, JDEV, XML DB Native Web Services, Stellent) and Application Express. The session will also cover cases where neither style is appropriate and what you can do to still interact with Web services in Application Express.
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Delivering Enterprise Solutions for Your Company
Ronnie Lashaw, The Tesla Group, Inc
As your organization grows, so will your use of APEX. This session will
discuss a framework methodology and several development strategies that will
enable you to deliver successful business solutions that meet the following
enterprise objectives: authentication, authorization, roles and
responsibilities, usability, and production integration. Using this
framework, a power user can develop an APEX solution and deploy their
application to production for personal, departmental or enterprise use.
Development strategies will include: forcing session timeout for inactivity;
requiring end-user password resets; switching between http and https
connections; end-user personalization; application site mapping; and many
more techniques.
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A Solid PL/SQL Foundation for APEX Developers
Steven Feuerstein, Quest Software
Application Express generates applications built on the PL/SQL language. APEX developers write additional PL/SQL code to handle complex requirements. There is always a tendency when writing code within a UI-driven environment to treat that code rather casually; after all, it is not the "main" part of the application. That is a big mistake, because this custom code must be maintained and enhanced. If you don't write it well, that maintanence becomes a nightmare. In this session, Steven Feuerstein will provide recommendations on establishing a
solid foundation for custom PL/SQL development in APEX, covering
error management, tracing and key performance
techniques.
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Advanced UI Presentation Techniques
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
This session will demonstrate advanced techniques in outputting your information to both the screen and printable reports. First will be a demonstration on expanding the basic functionality available with Interactive Reports. This will be followed by utilizing Flash charts with multiple data sets and some of the lesser used capabilities. Then to round it off developing complex reports with BI Publisher will be demonstrated.
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Integrating APEX with JQuery & Yahoo UI
Tim St. Hilaire, BAE SYSTEMS
This session will show how APEX developers can utilize the third party components of J-Query and the Yahoo YUI tool set to add rich user interface components to their APEX applications. Common problems such as wait processing, dialog boxes, and auto-completions will be shown and options for solutions will be discussed. A review of implementing and managing the source files of each library will also be discussed and demonstrated.
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APEX Migrations
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
This session will demonstrate the existing Access migration capabilities within APEX and also preview the upcoming release of APEX Forms migration capabilities currently under development. The two will work in a very similar manner, other than when coming from Oracle Forms you do not need to migrate the database schema which has distinct advantages. This session will help you understand the migration processes and the support offered by the APEX tool.
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Track B
APEX_ITEM and Dynamic Tabular Forms
Greg Jarmiolowski, SQL Prompt
To create forms that update multiple records at once Application Express provides the built-in tabular form feature. Using properties of the report columns, it allows you to define several different types of fields to update sets of data. However, there are many situations where the built-in capabilities will not meet the needs of the given requirements. Thus, we can utilize the APEX_ITEM API to manually build tabular forms. APEX_ITEM affords us the ability to dynamically determine which type of item to use on a row and column basis - text field, text area, check box, select list, etc. This session will outline the power of the APEX_ITEM API by way of a demonstration of a complex tabular form, multiple forms in one page, the use of collections, and the required PL/SQL processes and validations to make it all work.
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Deploying APEX Applications on the Internet
Anton Nielsen, C2 Consulting
You've just finished a slick new APEX application and you're ready to open it up to the world. What should you consider? Security, of course, but what about firewall issues, internet search rankings, high availability and scalability? Do you have a look and feel that is unique and compelling? Will you allow access to the builder from outside? This presentation will highlight areas of consideration and give best practices for many common scenarios.
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Many to One: Managing Multiple APEX Applications as One
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
If you've been using APEX for more than a few weeks, you likely have more than a few applications. While this is not typically a problem, managing access to these applications can quickly become one. In addition to access control, managing and updating consistent user interface across all applications can prove to be quite difficult. This session will outline and demonstrate a number of different APEX features and techniques that when combined, can provide a robust, single point of user access management for a suite of APEX applications - all without the addition of any middle-tier or single sign-on software. It will also cover how to centrally manage and update a single set of APEX templates for any number of applications.
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How to Hack an APEX Application
Anton Nielsen, C2 Consulting
Oracle's Application Express (APEX) allows developers to quickly build highly functional applications that interact with an Oracle database. APEX dynamically generates HTML applications (hence the former name, HTML DB). All HTML applications share some attributes that expose them to potential hacking. APEX has many features that will allow developers to lock down their applications or to expose them to hacking. I will show (live!) a number of techniques that can be used to hack HTML applications and how to close these holes within APEX and where APEX may expose these holes through its wizards. Naturally, I will show how to protect against any hack that I demonstrate. The session will be interactive with the audience participating in ways to hack and prevent hacks. This is truly a session that can benefit the novice or the highly advanced APEX developer.
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Integrating DHTMLX Tree with APEX
Bharat Pappu, VISTA Technology Services
Make your Oracle APEX Web application look rich and provide the sizzle by integrating your Oracle APEX application with one of the best DHTML and JavaScript UI component library. This session will showcase real world examples on how to integrate Oracle APEX with dhtmlxTree, dhtmlxGrid, dhtmlxTreeGrid and other dhtmlx products. I will provide live demonstrations with both small and large datasets and share some tips and tricks to overcome potential performance issues.
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Integrating APEX & PL/FLOW
Scott Stegemann, Opis Resources
PL/FLOW is an open source workflow engine written in PL/SQL. If the Oracle Workflow product is overkill and hard coding submit, review, and approval events does not meet the dynamic business requirements of your next APEX application, PL/FLOW may be your answer. This session will show how to integrate PL/FLOW, which has its own set of metadata tables just like APEX, with a simple APEX workflow example. We will explore and implement changes to an existing workflow sequence without having to make any changes to our APEX application. An APEX administration application will be used to manipulate the PL/FLOW metadata and demonstrate how the different PL/FLOW "pieces" fit together to provide a data driven workflow solution.
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You Can't do THAT in a Browser! Version 2.0
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies, LLC
While APEX offers a robust set of features, it does not address every possible scenario that you will run into when developing your applications. Fortunately, it is quite simple to use a number of third party tools to enhance and/or supplement APEX's functionality. This presentation will review a number of these components and demonstrate how to integrate them with APEX.
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APEX Crossfire
Doug Gault, Hotsos
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
What better way to end the conference than to put the presenters against one another in a public forum! In the spirit of political election season, our presenters will each be given a side to defend on a wide range of APEX-related topics. They will then debate these topics from both sides. Come with your questions, as audience participation is encouraged.
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Vendor Track
PL/SQL comes to TimesTen
Sam Drake, Oracle Corporation
The PL/SQL language has been an indispensable part of Oracle Database for many years. Not satisfied with living in just one database, it is coming to another! The PL/SQL language will soon be available in the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database.
The Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database and the associated In-Memory Database Cache option provide scalable relational database capabilities for mission critical applications with extremely low latency requirements.
This session will introduce in-memory database technology and the TimesTen In-Memory Database, and will discuss how it adds value for existing users of Oracle Database. It will also discuss PL/SQL in the TimesTen environment and how PL/SQL and other TimesTen features make writing low latency applications simpler than ever before.
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Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeling
David Gambino, Oracle Corporation
 This addition to SQL Developer allows database architects, database developers, and DBAs the flexibility of forward or reverse engineering database structures to provide graphical models of their databases. Developers can also create logical entity relationship diagrams, transform these to relational schema diagrams, define physical properties, and generate DDL. The tool supports extensive importing and exporting options including importing from Oracle Designer, DDL and the Database Catalog. Users can work with large diagrams and create a variety of differently formatted displays of parts of those diagrams. SQL Developer Data Modeling also supports DataType and Multidimensional models. The session will be demonstration-rich, reviewing as much of the new product offering as time allows.
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Web Development Using Only SQL & PL/SQL
Dr. Paul Dorsey, Dulcian Inc.
Michael Rosenblum, Dulcian Inc.
Web application development is usually very complex and usually requires learning a number of programming languages, mastering many new tools and frequently means making sacrifices of UI quality and performance compared with client/server tools.
BRIM®-UI is easy to learn, capable of providing all standard client/server functionality and the completed applications run up to ten times as fast as applications using any other web architecture.
The BRIM®-UI architecture is conceptually similar to that of Oracle Forms, so it is particularly easy for Forms developers to learn. Anything that it is possible to do in Oracle Forms can be done using a BRIM® -UI.. Conversion of existing Oracle Forms to this environment can be 90% cleanly automated.
BRIM®-UI only requires knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL. Developers who are proficient with SQL and PL/SQL can become productive using BRIM®-UI with one week or less of training.
If you have been struggling with the complexities of most web application development environments and have been frustrated by the lack of productivity and functional limitations of other tools, attend this presentation to learn how BRIM®-UI can assist you in building complex, high-performance web applications quickly and easily.
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Analyze and Centralize your PL/SQL Code with PITSS.CON
Chris Baker, PITSS America, LLC
Whether your PL/SQL code is in your database or in your Forms, PITSS.CON can interrogate, analyze, and help you maintain your PL/SQL code. This presentation demonstrates how powerful PITSS.CON is as a Developer’s tool. With PITSS.CON’s unique architecture and PL/SQL parser, you can analyze the impact of making a change to a form or table field, then initiate an automated update to ensure a fast and consistent implementation across your entire application. See how you can extract PL/SQL code from your Forms and move it to your database, making the logic accessible by Application Express (APEX), 10g Forms, PL/SQL code, or SOA technologies.
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Oracle SQL Developer: Focusing on a Few Advanced Features
David Gambino, Oracle Corporation
This session reviews PL/SQL debugging, building extensions, source code control and reports in SQL Developer. Initially reviewing editing and debugging PL/SQL, with particular reference to debugging remote applications, the participants are then shown how to add context menus, navigator displays and editors to SQL Developer using XML and Java extensions. The latest release of SQL Developer introduces a number of rich reports that you can use to help you tune code or review the database. The final section introduces source code control. Essential to any file-based project, source code control is now integrated into SQL Developer.
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Oracle SQL Developer: An Overview and New Features
David Gambino, Oracle Corporation
SQL Developer provides database developers with a powerful tool for database tasks. Users can browse, create, edit, and delete Oracle database objects; create, edit, and debug SQL and PL/SQL code; manipulate and export data; run reports and place files under version control. Time does not allow for a full product walk through, so the focus is on a few highlights, including schema copy and compare, code templates, and SQL formatting, all new functionality introduced in SQL Developer 1.5. Following this you see how to add features such as context menus, navigator displays, and editors to SQL Developer, by creating user-defined extensions. Throughout the talk use will be made of the integrated source code control when working with files. The next release of SQL Developer will incorporate logical and physical data modeling for Oracle and third-party databases. This addition to Oracle SQL Developer will allow database architects, database developers and DBAs the flexibility of forward or reverse engineering database structures to provide graphical models of their databases. The talk includes a brief review of this and other new functionality to be included in the next release of SQL Developer.
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