PRESENTATION DESCRIPTIONS
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Keynote Presentation: Eating our Own Dog Food with Oracle Application Express
8:45-9:45 AM
Mike Hichwa, Oracle Corporation
Oracle is very fond of the term “eating our own dog food” and the APEX team certainly lives by that mantra. Given that APEX is written in APEX, Mike Hichwa, software tools vice president, regularly uses the tool to develop new features. This often leads to him defining new requirements, such as, team development being implemented into APEX 4.0. In this keynote, Mike will outline how extensively APEX is used within Oracle from highly visible internal applications, such as ARIA People Search (an employee directory application), to the new Oracle Store.
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Session 1
10:00 AM-11:15 AM
A Solid PL/SQL Foundation for APEX Developers
Topic: All
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 maintenance 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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Session 2
11:30 AM-12:45 PM
APEX Performance Tuning
Track: APEX Core
Doug Gault, Sumner Technologies
Application Express is a highly flexible and highly scalable rapid application development environment for Oracle platform-based Web applications. But what do you do when your application's success starts to become its downfall? This presentation covers strategies and tactical advice for monitoring and addressing performance issues in Oracle Application Express-based applications, using built-in as well as free third-party (open source) tools. The session also presents some of the best practices for making Oracle Application Express performance problems easy to diagnose.
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APEX and Ajax: Where to Start
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Tim St. Hilare, BAE Systems
This session will show how APEX developers can utilize the third party components of J-Query and the Yahoo YUI toolset 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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Intro to Oracle APEX
Track: Beginner
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
So you keep hearing a lot about Oracle Application Express or APEX. This is your chance to learn all about it. This session is designed for those who know nothing about APEX but want to learn about one of the fastest growing development tools. The session will cover positioning, how to get started, and ways you can use APEX to get radical return on investment.
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Session 3
1:45 PM-3:00 PM
Many to One: Managing Multiple APEX Applications as One
Track: APEX Core
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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Integrating APEX and dhtml Tree
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Bharat Pappu, VISTAtsi
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 libraries. This session will showcase real world examples on how to integrate Oracle APEX with dhtmlxTree. The session will also showcase integration of other dhtmlx components (dhtmlxGrid, dhtmlxLayout, dhtmlxWindows, dhtmlxToolbar) with dhtmlxTree. 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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APEX by Example
Track: Beginner
Greg Jarmiolowski, SQL Prompt
Get an introduction to Application Express capabilities and features by way of example. This presentation will help attendees learn how to use Application Express through dissecting packaged applications that are available for download on the Application Express homepage.
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Session 4
3:15 PM-4:30 PM
How to Hack an APEX Application
Track: APEX Core
Anton Nielsen, C2 Solutions
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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Building a Netflix Queue-like UI in APEX
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Doug Gault, Sumner Technologies
While APEX allows you to create very robust Web based applications in a very short time frame, there are areas where the UI can be extended into the realm of Web 2.0.
jQuery is one of the most popular open source JavaScript libraries, and can be used to add very sophisticated user interface functionality to Web-based applications. To demonstrate this functionality the presentation will show step-by-step how APEX and jQuery can be used to fairly easily duplicate the functionality of the NetFlix Movie Queue.
Attendees will walk away with an understanding of the basic structure of the jQuery library, how it can be integrated into APEX, and how it can be used to implement some very impressive interface techniques.
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Interactive Reports: The Good, Bad and the Ugly
Track: Beginner
Karen Cannell, Integra
APEX Interactive Reports offer amazing functionality, but this wealth of features comes with limitations. This session presents the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of APEX IR, then details and demonstrates workarounds to address the Bad (the limitations) and the Ugly (the appearance). Learn how to limit features for different user roles, how to eliminate part or all of the Search and Activity Bars, and how to customize the appearance to fit your corporate template.
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Session 5
4:45 PM-6:00 PM
APEX Migrations
Track: APEX Core
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
Oracle Application Express 3.2 introduced Forms Migration. APEX captures the design of existing Oracle Forms and automatically translates some components. Other components, such as complex triggers, will need to be manually converted from client-side PL/SQL to server-side PL/SQL. Moving to native HTML is not seamless, and changes to the user interface are required to deliver optimal Web interactivity. This tool is designed to take advantage of APEX’s dynamic HTML capabilities, including interactive reports. This session will demonstrate how to migrate those Oracle Forms applications and give an overview of the end-to-end process and how the tool supports certain process steps. A brief overview of the Access migration process will also be included.
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Extreme Makeover, APEX Edition
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
Users will make up their mind as to whether you site looks professional in a matter of seconds. Thus, you get only one chance to convey an image of professionalism to both existing and potential clients. Even sites that don't compete for clients—such as internal applications—will benefit from a crisp UI, as it will exude a level of confidence to your users. This session will outline the steps and skills required to create a custom look and feel for your APEX applications. It will include a live demonstration of how to incorporate an existing look and feel into APEX templates.
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APEX Deployment Strategies
Track: Beginner
Francis Mignault, Insum Solutions and Eric Boissonneault, Insum Solutions
This session will explain the deployment process of an APEX application.
Tips & tricks and comparison of different strategies related to deployment will be explained. It will cover many subjects such as the use of Supporting Objects and deployment of static files, translation, SQL scripts, user preferences, security and much more.
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Keynote Presentation
Avoiding APEX pitfalls
8:00 AM-9:15 AM
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
Oracle APEX provides one of the easiest and fastest ways to design, develop, and deploy an application to the web. There’s little technically that you can’t achieve either with APEX, the Oracle Database, or third-party components/frameworks. Despite this high level of extensibility, all it takes as a single ill-informed person to derail an entire APEX project. This presentation will address how to both identify and avoid these potential pitfalls. It will outline a variety of easy-to-learn techniques which will ensure that all parties come out of any potential conflicts still speaking to one another.
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Session 6
9:30 AM-10:45 AM
How to Build a Multi-tenant SaaS Application
Track: APEX Core
Francis Mignault, Insum Solutions
Based on a real-life experience with a commercial multi-tenant SaaS application, this session will demonstrate techniques for supporting multiple companies in a single APEX application. Topics covered will range from Apache configuration to application maintenance passing by data modeling, development challenges and Dynamic UI generation. Come and see “under the hood” of our APEX application to learn and share some useful tips and tricks that will help you make the right technical choices.
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Integrating Yahoo UI and jQuery with APEX
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
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 toolset 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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Managing APEX Application Development
Track: Beginner
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
Is developing large scale applications with APEX different from developing with other tools? The answer is both yes and no! This session will be a non-technical look into how to staff, teach, and manage your APEX developers and manage end-users. From project inception through deployment, learn some of the practices to enhance your projects success, lower costs and shorten development time.
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Session 7
11:00 AM-12:15 PM
Debugging APEX Applications
Track: APEX Core
Karen Cannell, Integra
APEX development is a breeze, until something goes wrong and there’s no obvious clue of what happened or how to fix it, and there's no UNDO. Or is there? This session presents tactics to tackle common APEX problems such as MRU internal error, Browser errors, SQL and PL/SQL issues, HTML, and JavaScript problems. We cover triage, debug tool options, and debug tactics, and then demonstrate applying those strategies to tackle common APEX problems.
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Integrating APEX and PL/Flow
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Scott Stegemann, Principle 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 3
Track: Beginner
Scott Spendolini, Sumner Technologies
As you venture into working with APEX, it won’t be long before you come across issues that can not be solved by APEX alone. Generally, issues like these are best tackled with jQuery or some other JavaScript library with ease. What? You don’t know JavaScript? Fear not – this presentation will discuss and demonstrate how you can use nothing more than PL/SQL and copy & paste to add sophisticated components to your APEX applications.
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Session 8
1:15 PM-2:30 PM
APEX_ITEM APIs
Track: APEX Core
Greg Jarmiolowski, SQL Prompt
Go beyond tabular forms with the power of APEX_ITEM. This presentation takes over right where tabular forms leave off with demonstrations of the uses of APEX_ITEM; processing submitted pages; customizing the HTML in your forms; dealing with checkboxes and radio buttons; preprocessing and validating data; and using AJAX to simplify processing and enhance the user experience.
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Integrating APEX and dhtmlxGrid
Track: Web 2.0 and Integration
Bharat Pappu, Vista TS
Enhance the look and feel of your Oracle APEX Web application and provide the much needed sizzle by integrating your Oracle APEX application with one of the best DHTML and JavaScript UI component libraries. This session will showcase real world examples on how to integrate Oracle APEX with dhtmlxGrid. The session will also showcase integration of other dhtmlx components (dhtmlxTree, dhtmlxLayout, dhtmlxWindows, dhtmlxToolbar) with dhtmlxGrid. 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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APEX and the Oracle Database
Track: Beginner
Anton Nielsen, C2 Solutions
APEX is a window into all of the features of the Oracle database. This session will cover several database features that will be of interest to APEX developers: Oracle Text (formerly Intermedia), SQL analytics, spatial and others. We will demonstrate how to integrate these into an APEX application.
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Session 9
2:45 PM-4:00 PM
APEX 4.0 Demo and Q&A
David Peake, Oracle Corporation
This session will cover all the exciting new features that are expected in APEX 4.0. Don’t miss the demonstration of Websheets, the premier new feature for business users, or the demonstrations on features such as dynamic actions, plug-ins, charts, improved application builder, tabular forms, and error handling, REST Web Services, etc. APEX 4.0 promises to make development even faster and easier.
