ODTUG Kscope12 - Kscope12

Writing documentation is one the most unbeloved activities in any software development project. It is boring, tedious, and already outdated once you are finished writing it. This session will present an approach to documenting an APEX application, covering the automated generation of documentation from the Oracle Data Dictionary as well as the APEX dictionary. A fair amount of time has been spent to figure out how to make documentation "work." How much detail is required in the documentation, how do we document change, how can we structure the environment so that we are actually inclined to write the documentation and keep it current?

Many customers are moving away from Oracle Forms to other alternatives. Oracle APEX is an especially interesting option because it leverages existing Oracle database skills (SQL and PL/SQL) nicely. But what about your existing Oracle Reports? This presentation will cover the open source solution, JasperReports, as a viable alternative. The session will cover the typical use cases and design patterns used when building reports in Oracle Reports and how to implement them using JasperReports. You will learn everything you need to get started with JasperReports including best practices, possible pitfalls, and integration with APEX.

This presentation shows how Google services can be integrated with APEX. The majority of Google services use the OAuth authorization process, so by including this process in an APEX application, developers will have access to a range of Google services. The presentation will demonstrate how the Gmail API can be used to access, create, and modify Gmail messages from within APEX itself. Accessing the Google Calendar is also a really useful feature that will be discussed to show how entries are created and edited from within APEX.

Loading data is a common APEX task. There are many ways to do it, most of which involve user cut/paste and/or custom coding. This presentation reviews APEX data load options: the common, the not-so-common, the Data Load wizard, Websheets, and the APEX Listener XLS upload. What are the APEX data load options? What are the costs involved in each? What's the best way to load data via APEX for your users, for your environment, for your budget? This presentation will demonstrate each data load option and compare the pros and cons of each. You will leave with enough information to make intelligent choices for your data load needs.

Are you an Oracle Application Express (APEX) developer who has a nagging feeling that you and your team could be more productive? This set of best practices will help you hit your APEX quality, cost, and schedule targets efficiently by demonstrating practical ways that APEX can be configured to explicitly support the values, principles, and techniques of Agile software development (Agile). Developing APEX applications with an Agile mind-set enables you to reap the significant benefits that are built into this seriously practical and complementary marriage between APEX and Agile.

As your team grows and evolves, so do some of your development problems. Most development teams struggle as they grow and try to implement top-down processes that don't always work well with developers. This presentation will guide you through proven steps and techniques to bring an unstructured development environment into a cohesive unit. The processes discussed will help you and your team develop better code, reduce development costs, and build better applications. The techniques discussed in this presentation have been successfully implemented at various organizations and have helped both APEX and PL/SQL teams.

This presentation is a continuation of last year's award winning talk on some of the new HTML 5 features and how to integrate them in APEX. HTML 5 is the next major version for HTML. It consists of many new features which will make developer's jobs a lot easier and improve end-user experience. This presentation will highlight some of these new features and demonstrate how to leverage them within an APEX application. New features include (but not limited to) Drag & Drop, Media, and Graphics.

We like designing Web pages and user interfaces. It's a lot of fun to point and click and - like magic! - things happen. But we will have to write PL/SQL code for our APEX applications - and then all too often, we write this code in a way that makes it hard to debug, enhance, and reuse business logic. In this session, Steven will go through examples of problematic code in APEX and show how to change it so that (a) there is lots LESS code in your APEX app and (b) you can manage your PL/SQL code more easily.

This presentation will take an in-depth look at the new error handling features of APEX 4.1, provide some practical examples of how and when to use the new API's , logging the errors for later analysis and various methods of capturing and logging APEX session state during error processing. Attendees will leave with a working knowledge of the new functionality and a solid foundation for building their own error handling mechanisms.

One of the features of Oracle Application Express 4 is the much improved debug information now stored in the dictionary views. This data can be used to track, monitor, and identify performance trends across your APEX application. The trick is capturing instances of this information for interesting APEX processes programmatically. This session will introduce the idea of using APEX debug data for performance trending, the techniques and information necessary for you to mine the Oracle Application Express 4 debug data, and methods for programmatically capturing runs deemed as "interesting."

Dimitri wanted to know his less performing APEX application and pages instance wide. From there he wanted to find out why certain pages where not performing well and wanted to know the nitty gritty details about it. For example, sometimes queries run fast in sqlplus, but not in APEX, but how do you know what to look for? Dimitri will share his experiences in using the APEX dictionary, debugging, and tracing APEX applications. He'll go deep into tracing APEX pages and will explain how to read and understand those trace files.

There are currently three Web listeners available for Oracle Application Express: the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway (EPG), the Oracle HTTP Server with mod_plsql, and the Oracle Application Express Listener. This presentation will go over the advantages and disadvantages of all three options. The EPG is rarely considered for production environments while Apache with mod_plsql is used quite extensively. But is the APEX Listener ready to take over? If you are in this presentation you will know the answer :-).This presentation will also demo how to test the performance of the APEX Listener and which extra features you get with the APEX Listener.

This session will cover RESTful Web Services and the ways you can use this data access technology with security across a variety of dimensions.

This session will review considerations for partners looking to create applications for the Oracle Database Cloud. The session will review limitations of the environment when compared to standard Oracle Application Express, options for licensing and reselling applications, and potential certification processes. The session will be an open discussion - your input is welcome and will help to shape the eventual shape of our Oracle Cloud partner program.

All performance problems with APEX applications are deemed Application Express problems until proven otherwise. But the vast majority of these are due to improper SQL tuning. DBAs usually have a poor understanding of Application Express. Application Express developers often have a poor understanding of the information the DBAs are presenting to them. This session will review how to analyze a poor performing application from a DBA's perspective, using the tools most DBAs are familiar with such as Active Session History, Active Workload Repository, TKPROF, and more.

Oracle Application Express and Oracle SOA Suite offer a fast and powerful way to add new user interfaces and functionality to your existing packaged applications. This results in a non-obtrusive method of adding features to a packaged application so the support and upgrade paths are not affected. The presentation will cover the use of SOA to interact with packaged applications as well as the considerations for security and user management.

Cameron Mahbubian, a Harvard educated executive who is the current president & CEO at ClariFit Inc., gives you an insight into Oracle APEX that you have yet to experience at ODUTG. See APEX from a completely different angle: from behind the dev-room-curtains and straight into the private executive board rooms of America. How did he convince Fortune 500 companies to adopt Oracle APEX in their companies where they hadn't before? What type of demo packs enough punch and delivers enough wow-factor to convince the most skeptical non-technical executive to become excited about APEX vs. what the techie cares about seeing?

APEX offers many options to sort and paginate data using server-side processing. These techniques can be slow at times, while many client-side and Ajax-based solutions are available to help in such cases. This session will walk through the considerations of client- versus server-side pagination and sorting with APEX applications. With this understanding, the session will show attendees how to implement client-side pagination and sorting in their APEX applications using commonly available jQuery plug-ins. Time allowing, Ajax-based solutions will be demonstrated as well.

Focus on the essential. Eliminate the superfluous. Less is more. Is this a Zen class or a session on mobile User Interface (UI) design? Actually, the two have more in common than you would think. The high demand for mobile Web applications is forcing Web developers to rethink UI design. After years of working with an abundance of pixels, this can be a difficult process and the actual implementation even more so. But it can also be very Zen like. In this session, attendees will learn about the most common patterns in mobile UI design as well as how such designs can be constructed in Oracle Application Express.

The automatic row fetch and DML processes in Application Express are very powerful, allowing developers to create applications quickly and easily. However, their inflexibility often forces developers to implement sub-optimal workarounds to satisfy complex UI or data processing requirements. But when armed with knowledge of PL/SQL, APEX developers can take back control with packaged based APIs. In this session, attendees will learn how to integrate PL/SQL APIs in APEX through a series of example problems and solutions.

The Dynamic Action framework, a feature introduced with APEX 4.0, allows developers to interact with end users on the client-side in a highly declarative fashion. However, many developers have not yet started leveraging this amazing feature. Some developers have little or no experience with client-side coding and may not know where to start. Other developers are very experienced with JavaScript and may believe that Dynamic Actions don't have anything to offer. This Dynamic Action Deep Dive was designed to teach developers at any experience level how to use dynamic actions for basic to complex interactions. This is a hands-on workshop, so don’t forget to bring your own laptop.

This technical presentation is about building and maintaining multilingual applications with Oracle APEX 4.1. You will learn how to run the builder in different languages; the translation process when you create or modify an application; how to export and import the translations without loosing the mapping; and how to allow the end-users to switch from one language to another in your applications.

APEX is a RAD development product that allows you to build FAST, efficient Web-based database applications. In a number of the government agencies the presenter has worked in, they have polices and mindsets that do NOT allow you to use APEX to its fullest capabilities. This session will demonstrate these and show how to deal with these issues.

Tabular Forms have been a great way to show and edit multiple rows of data on one screen since APEX was born. However, they haven't always been the easiest to work with depending on business requirements. Many of these issues have been addressed in APEX 4.X to make a developer's life easier. This session will demonstrate how to take advantage of these latest features so the biggest gain for the least amount of work can be achieved. The presentation will show a comparison of the level of effort that was previously required versus how easily tasks can be accomplished now. Features such as the enhanced Tabular Form Validations and filtered Row Processing options will be discussed. In addition, examples of how to use JavaScript/jQuery will also be shown so developers can see how easy it is to extend their own custom needs into a tabular form.

Considering transforming your existing on-premises solution to the SaaS model? Then you must attend this session! This presentation will share the journey they took with their ten-year-old student interaction management solution (800 Oracle forms, 2000 tables) used in sixty universities to manage 500,000 students to make its viable cloud offering. Where to start? What options do I have to address multi-tenancy? How to re-architect large system without breaking it? What to consider when choosing a hosting platform like Amazon EC2 or Oracle Cloud Database service? Should I worry about commercial aspects of the solution as an engineer?

Sound source version control and automated build process give us confidence to make changes to the code base and eliminate associated risks. However, database adds extra challenges: What to consider when organizing source code in the version control system? How to manage dependencies between database objects? How to automate creation of the build script and execution? How Subversion and Hudson/Jenkins can help me? How to monitor patches applied by my customers/colleagues? This session will help you find answers to these questions by sharing the journey they took with their student interaction management solution consisting of 1000+ APEX pages, 100s of APIs, and 2000 tables developed by ten developers.

APEX applications are used throughout the enterprise for small and large applications, for mission critical systems on multi-node RAC databases and on laptops with a single user, and even on Exadata servers (think Oracle Cloud). The same application that runs on an XE database on a laptop can run on Enterprise Edition on Exadata and vice versa (well, sometimes). The beauty of Oracle RAC databases is that you don't need to do anything to make your application work--if it runs on a single node, it can run on RAC. The truth, though, is that many applications can be improved to get the most out of RAC or Exadata databases. This presentation will cover APEX infrastructure configurations (middle tier and database), APEX engine configurations, and design considerations of your application as it relates to APEX applications on multi-node databases, enabling you to get the most out of your RAC and Exadata investments.

Peter Raganitsch, click-click IT Solutions

Break free of any pre-conceived APEX limitations and learn how the latest APEX 4.x features will allow you to create rich forms-like APEX applications using the most advanced JavaScript UI Web development frameworks. Learn new design techniques for managing large numbers of plugins, handling inter plugin communication, and how to turbo charge your productivity.

Integration is a hot buzzword in the Oracle community today. If you start looking at some of the integration offerings from Oracle and others, however, it can seem pretty overwhelming very quickly. Many organizations are looking for simpler integration solutions and Oracle Application Express can be used for those types of integrations. This presentation will explore how organizations can use Oracle Application Express to integrate systems.

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 4.1 and all of the brilliant new features that make development even easier and more productive.

Get an in-depth insight into Application Express 4.2 features directly from the Application Express Development Team.

It is all about the A’s: Agility, Adaptability, Accessibility, and Assuring. Creating applications that ensure data integrity, manageability, and protection can be challenging for biomedical research centers today. Project requirements are often vague and extremely dynamic. In this session, learn how a leading center for heart and lung research achieves its data management goals by creating a Rapid Application Development environment with the Oracle Database and Oracle Application Express that coexists with existing IT infrastructure and frameworks.

Creating Applications with Oracle APEX is fast and easy, but do you think you know all the tricks to be really efficient? Avoid unnecessary clicks and navigation; jump directly to the function you need. Use keyboard navigation and the powerful search box. Learn about undocumented features and powerful add-ons; you will be amazed! This presentation has valuable tips and tricks for APEX developers of all experience levels.

Creating mobile applications with Oracle APEX is easy, but what to do if you want to have charts and dashboards on your phone or tablet? Because some of the phones and tablets don't support Flash, we can't use the built-in APEX Anychart Flash Charts. The good thing is that modern smartphones already support HTML5 which gives us a broad range of new tools and possibilities. With a set of plugins and built-in components like lists and reports, we can build a good looking and informative dashboard.

Web accessibility is a difficult subject to address. For a start it's subjective. Subject to users with different types of disability, with different impairments, using different Assistive Technologies. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible to build a completely accessible web application to all users. What we can do is identify and define appropriate standards that help us try and meet our users needs and use a tool that helps us easily build to those standards, without compromise. In the Application Express team, we are serious about accessibility and strive to build a product that not only meets the standards we define at Oracle, but also allows you to do the same in your own applications. In this session, Anthony will show you how to go about tackling this subject to build highly accessible products, with Application Express.

Dynamic Actions provide an easy way to define client-side behavior in your Application Express applications, without needing to know JavaScript or AJAX. In this session, you will learn everything you need to know about Dynamic Actions, directly from the developer of the feature. Anthony will talk about its beginnings, its architecture, what's possible, and also discuss how to approach common situations with Dynamic Actions. You will also learn about what's coming in our next release to make things even easier, and be able to put forward any Dynamic Action questions you may have. Want to improve your application's user experience and give them that richer and more interactive look and feel? It's easy with Dynamic Actions!

What's the difference between a websheet application and a database application? Why create a websheet application in first place? Where would they be the most useful? Who would be the ideal user(s) for a websheet application and when should we consider building a websheet application solution? How do we build and manage websheet applications? Come to this presentation for answers to these questions and others and to learn more about this relatively new feature available to us in Application Express

Just what is a Dynamic Action anyway? Is it a feature like Interactive Reports? Well, not really, no it isn't ...so...come to this presentation to learn about one of the most interesting new features in Application Express - Dynamic Actions. They pack some major power that developers can incorporate into their applications for end users. This presentation will focus on some interesting and fun features that will incorporate simple yet powerful Dynamic Actions into your APEX pages....and learn how to make your pages "Come Alive!”

You just received an image or layered file from marketing with the design for an application you need to build. You're wondering what to do. How do I translate this into a usable APEX template? APEX provides great flexibility that allows your applications to fit within your corporate visual theme, but many people don't realize that the APEX built-in themes are not static or your only option. HTML and CSS can be daunting when your expertise lies within the database realm. This session will show you that a little understanding goes a long way.

One of the major new features of the upcoming APEX 4.2 release is the integration of the jQuery Mobile framework. With jQuery Mobile integrated, it will be possible to declaratively develop mobile Web applications on top of your Oracle database. This alone is fun already. But what about combining APEX, jQuery Mobile, and soccer? During June 2012, the European Championship Football will be held, and again, Christian will put the APEX-based prediction game FIFApex.net online. The FIFApex EURO 2012 game will be accompanied by a mobile version, APEX-based too. This presentation will demonstrate how the mobile application has been designed and built with Oracle Application Express and the integrated jQuery Mobile themes. AND: Kscope12 participants will have the chance to win prizes for best predicting results of matches played during the conference.

With jQuery Mobile integrated, we can now easily build browser-based applications optimized for usage on mobile devices. But if you want your application to be used frequently and present a more native experience to the user, you should consider offering your application as a native mobile application (app). This presentation will show how an Oracle Application Express application can be converted into a native mobile app, offering more advanced interaction with your mobile device's capabilities. TIP: Visit Christian's presentation on APEX & jQuery Mobile first. Both presentations will use the same demo application.

The new Application Express 4 charts now allow for much greater flexibility in displaying and controlling flash charts. This presentation will look in detail at the chart XML for flash charts, and learn how to manipulate its various components. You will learn how to control attributes like line thickness, tooltip behavior, background shading, and how to change chart attributes depending on data that is being passed to the chart page.

APEX 4.0 gave us the ability to develop and use plug-ins, which allows us to really step-outside-the-box when it comes to APEX development. However, not many people are using plug-ins, let alone developing them. This session will cover fifty different plug-ins (really?!) of the different types and attempt to show just how useful they can be and why every APEX developer should be using plug-ins.

This session will cover one of the nice new features in HTML5, namely WebSockets. Rather than using the traditional polling methods to determine when data has changed in your application, WebSockets allow the server to PUSH notifications to the browser, which has all kinds of implications for scalability and usability of applications. The presenter will show some different ways in which you can use WebSockets in any APEX application to really make your application stand out.

Join us in a discussion on what it takes to develop complex APEX applications: how to work with the framework and not against or around it and how to develop a well-performing APEX database application that complies to modern Web requirements. This session will go beyond the typical theoretical discussions, as well as compare first-hand experience of developing real APEX, Forms, and ADF applications.

Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a declarative web application development tool for the Oracle Database. It allows to rapidly built applications that run on any platform that supports a web browser, including mobile devices. With smart phones and tablets approaching 10% of all browser usage, building web applications that work well and look good on smaller screens and respond to touch input and gestures, becomes increasingly important. To help our customers with building these kinds of user interfaces APEX integrates the jQuery Mobile framework. jQuery Mobile is a unified, HTML5-based user interface system, supporting all popular mobile platforms and built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. This session gives an overview of the basics of jQuery Mobile, explains how it is integrated with APEX, and how customers can quickly build mobile web applications and extend their existing APEX applications with mobile capabilities

Responsive web design allows the web page to adapt or respond to the device or screen size it encounters. From iPads to iPhones to BlackBerry devices and Android tablets, they all have a variety of screen resolutions. Don’t forget laptops and desktops. Business apps also need to scale to that 24-inch monitor on your desk to the 13-inch laptop in your bag. This presentation will walk the attendees through a responsive web design framework. See what’s behind the covers and what allows the pages to scale using HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets). In this presentation, the attendees will see a responsive application being built, tested, and displayed on a multitude of devices and screen resolutions and the resulting effect on the page itself. The business application builder being used will be Application Express, but the techniques can be applied to any web-based toolset.

Developing in APEX is easy...but creating the environment to support this development is sometimes tricky. In this presentation, learn how to setup your browser for testing and developing in APEX. Next see how to build an APEX VM from scratch using free VM tools and operating systems. Next set up your desktop with the right text editors and development tools for optimal productivity. Next hear and see some tips and tricks that work for many of the star players in the APEX world. All tips/tricks and software will be presented for Windows as well as Mac environments.

Since it's introduction, Oracle APEX has evolved from a basic toolkit for small applications to an enterprise-ready platform for applications of almost any size. However, one area has been at almost a standstill since its inception: printing. This session will discuss how to integrate PL/PDF - a 3rd party PL/SQL-based printing solution - with Oracle APEX, so that you can provide your end users with beautiful PDF reports in almost no time. It will use real-world examples and discuss now only basic reports, but also charts, templates and bar codes.

Jermone Raja, Carnival Cruise Lines

Forget the new waterslides, the expanded suites, and the freshly renovated grand ballrooms. The best upgrade to Carnival Cruise Lines ships is Oracle Application Express! On every Carnival Cruise Lines ship is an Oracle Database 11g server, tasked with running the property and guest management systems. Originally installed almost twenty years ago, many of the applications built to interact with the database are still in Oracle Forms – some even in character mode. As times and regulations changed, it was becoming increasingly difficult to adapt these systems to both SOX and PCI requirements. In order to satisfy these requirements, management was looking to modernize theses systems, but trying to do it in the most cost-effective way possible. Thus, Carnival turned to Oracle Application Express 4.1 to modernize their systems. With the assistance of Sumneva, Carnival was able to migrate a working prototype of their embarkation application from Forms to APEX in less than two days! The new APEX-based embarkation application interfaces with existing passport and credit card readers, which will speed up the check-in process significantly, providing both cost savings and more revenue for Carnival. Perhaps most importantly, Carnival was able to leverage their existing staff of PL/SQL developers and their domain expertise, as very little of the existing sophisticated PL/SQL code had to be changed. This system will eventually be rolled out to all twenty-three Carnival ships and will lead the charge in modernizing all Forms-based applications to Oracle APEX in the near future.

With all of the draws to get individual attention from users, how do you make e-mail communication effective? How many systems are built where the primary use is to generate SPAM mail? This presentation will discuss techniques for including complex reports, dynamic graphics, and user feedback within e-mail communications with the goal of making the message itself more effective and relevant. Examples will include: Dynamic Images, consuming external reports for communication, e-mail construction techniques, follow-up methods with security considerations, and methods for managing e-mail follow-up.

With the release of the Java-based APEX listener, there is an even easier way to implement your APEX applications. The J2EE implementation offers functionality including a Web-based configuration, enhanced security, Excel uploading, and file caching. This session will show how to deploy and configure the APEX listener, how to test for common installation issues, and secure your implementation. The session will go through a full installation showing how easy configuration is and demonstrating the debugging methods discussed.