Two and half years ago, I formed APEX Evangelists together with Dimitri Gielis because we both had a passion about Oracle Application Express. For the last two and half years we have been extremely successful providing training and consultancy around the Oracle Application express product. In the United States, Scott Spendolini and Doug Gault have walked a parallel path.
After many discussions between the four of us, we all decided it made sense to combine our respective talents to create Sumneva (the name being a combination of the company names).
I’ll post more information soon about the company and our ideas, but right now we’re all very excited about the plans and possibilities ahead of us, with 4 of the top world experts in Oracle Application Express our combined experience and talents will give our clients even better service.
Now that the APEX 4.0 EA (Early Adopter) release is available to anyone to sign up and try out APEX 4.0, I’ve had a bit of time to play around with some of the features that up till now I’d only seen demo’ed.
My first impressions are very positive indeed. Whilst I’d seen quite a lot of it already, it’s not quite the same as being able to use it yourself.
Perhaps one of the first immediate changes, is the newly designed Application Builder look and feel
APEX 4.0 also has a new Tree View in the Application Builder, which is very different to the ‘traditional’ view which has remained more or less the same across all versions of APEX.
I must admit, when I first heard about and saw this feature (Patrick Wolf very kindly showed me a preview of it at a conference) I had my reservations about it. In fact I think I might have even said to Patrick that I wasn’t a fan of it. However, I now take that back. Now that I’ve used it (rather than just seeing it), I can see how it’s going to not only speed up my productivity (fewer clicks etc), but it is also going to be a big help to people new to APEX to understand the structure and flow of a page.
I’ve also had a play around with Dynamic Actions (which is really going to level the playing field for people who are not comfortable with custom javascript coding) and also Plugins to a limited degree. Both of these features are real game changers for APEX since they suddenly make the ‘sure we can do that, but it will take a while’ into ‘sure we can do that, there you go’.
I’m drilling down into a more detailed look at the features (future blog posts), but for now I have to say…I’m very very impressed (but then I already knew I would be).
I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on the Chrome Browser from Google and noticed they’d just released the Mac Beta version so I thought I’d have a quick ‘play’ with it.
As you’d expect it does everything you’d want from a browser, I’m pretty much a Firefox/Safari person (they complement each other pretty well particularly with APEX development).
If however you’re coming from an IE background, then Chrome adds a lot of nice features, for example I tried out Chrome against one of my local APEX instances and I had to say it *felt* pretty fast and I didn’t find anything in APEX that didn’t work in Chrome (which is pretty impressive considering APEX isn’t certified against Chrome yet, but I have heard that is something the Oracle APEX development team are looking at for the future).
Even SQL Workshop (which I’ve had a few issues in Safari with seemed to work nicely).
From a development perspective there are some very nice features, such as the “Developers Tools” panel which shows you detailed information about the pages you’re browsing. For example, it is now very easy to determine how long it takes to download and render all the resources in your webpage, or whether a particular Javascript routine is responsible for consuming all the time etc.
If you’ve already used Safari then most of this will already be familiar to you (as it appears to be the same code from WebKit). I’ve been using this functionality in Safari, together with the YSlow and Firebug plugins for Firefox to get the same information, but it’s always nice to have more options.
With UKOUG Tech and EBS conference in Birmingham a couple of weeks away, I thought I’d see if anyone is interested in an APEX Meetup during the conference.
Usually at most conferences I attend Dimitri Gielis and myself try to arrange a very informal gathering of APEX-minded people in a pub. It’s a great time to network with old and new friends away from the conference halls, particularly if it’s one of your first events.
So, if you’re interested in attending an APEX Meetup, add a comment below (including your preferred night) and we’ll try and sort out an evening which suits most people.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people say “The site must be designed to work in 800×600 resolution”. Now there are a few cases where this definitely is a real requirement, however often it’s more of a case that people don’t want to potentially exclude people from their site (and if it’s a commercial site why wouldn’t you want to appeal to the widest possible audience?).
However, how many people really use an 800×600 resolution these days? Out of interest I took a look at the statistics from my blog (the one you’re reading right now) for yesterday (I posted a new post yesterday so it would be interesting to see the stats for the new views just for yesterday rather than over the entire lifetime of the site).
So, whilst I’m not trying to pretend that these figures are representative of any other sites out there. They highlight a couple of things to me.
1) Nobody visited my site using 800×600 resolution.
2) The smallest resolution was 320×396 (probably an iPhone or other mobile device). After that the next smallest was 1024×768.
3) There are quite a lot of variations in browser resolution, more than I expected really.
So, what’s my point here? Well…I don’t really have one….other than -
1) Needing to support 800×600 is very different to designing the site in 800×600. In other words it’s no bad thing to have your site gracefully degrade to working nicely in 800×600, but I certainly wouldn’t make the starting design 800×600, otherwise you’d spending effort where there seems to be least reward.
2) 1024×768 is now becoming over-shadowed by higher resolutions. Most laptops these days support higher resolutions than that, let alone desktops. Most developers I know have multiple monitors too.
So, don’t be afraid of challenging the requirement of “We must design for 800×600″…how many people are *really* using it? Let’s stamp it out now…
Yesterday, at the UKOUG APEX SIG (which I’ll post a follow-up about shortly), I did a quick 1 hour presentation on Increasing Scalability with Oracle Application Express, I touched on (and demonstrated) quite a few different techniques in which you can make you APEX applications more scalable (and/or just as importantly, reducing the overhead of your APEX applications).
Today, I received an email from someone who attended that presentation. I have asked their permission to post their message -
“I just thought I would let you know of the performance improvements I have got since your presentation yesterday”
and what were those improvements?
“The updateable grid has always been slow to run and was taking 1min 2seconds ( I couldn’t think how to improve it without completely redesigning it), with the changes this has been reduced to 6 seconds.”
and the difference in the production system -
| CPU Seconds | Disk Reads | Buffer Gets | Executions | Buffer Gets/Rows Processed | Elapsed Seconds |
| Before | 32.570227 | 1 | 41770 | 1 | 41770 | 32.570227 |
| After | 0.098593 | 1 | 1818 | 1 | 1818 | 0.108206 |
That’s quite an improvement from the users perspective, something which used to take over 30 seconds is now well under a second.
From my perspective, it’s great to know that some people were inspired to use what they learned to make some significant changes which will ultimately make their end users happier (and we’re all end users of one system or another right?).
At the UKOUG conference in a few weeks time, I’m actually going to be presenting a 2 hour Masterclass on the same topic (which allows me to go into more depth, more demos and more aspects than an hour allows).
Just a quick note to mention that on Wednesday I’ll be at the (2nd!) APEX SIG meeting at the Oracle City Office in London, it looks like it’s going to be a packed day (already sold out sorry!) full of APEX sessions. I’m very happy that something ‘official’ is now being held in the UK for APEX and that so many people are involved and supporting it.
Secondly, time flies…UKOUG is right around the corner now (30th November – 2nd December). There are lots of great APEX sessions planned -
| Date | Start Time | End Time | Session | Presenter |
| 30 Nov 2009 | 10:55 | 12:55 | Building Scalable Applications with Oracle Application Express | John Scott |
| 30 Nov 2009 | 12:05 | 13:05 | Life After Forms | Sten Vesterli |
| 30 Nov 2009 | 13:55 | 14:40 | APEX – An enterprise development tool? You bet | Chris Gilbane |
| 30 Nov 2009 | 16:15 | 17:00 | Accessibility in APEX - Attempting Not to Exclude | Anthony Rayner |
| 30 Nov 2009 | 17:10 | 17:55 | Connecting Oracle Spatial and Google Maps API through APEX user interface | Marin Huljev |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 09:45 | 10:30 | Building Rich Web Applications! Inside Look into the Oracle APEX 4.0 Development Lab | Anthony Rayner |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 12:05 | 12:50 | It's great to integrate: Integrating Oracle Forms within Oracle Application Express | Roel Hartman |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 12:55 | 13:55 | Application Express Roundtable | Panel |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 14:45 | 15:30 | Apex – The Fast Way to Extend the e-Business Suite | Rod West |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 15:40 | 16:25 | Enhanced Charting Capabilities with Oracle APEX 4.0 | Hilary Farrell |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 15:40 | 16:25 | Choose Your Weapon - An Overview of Oracle Development Tools | Sten Vesterli |
| 1 Dec 2009 | 16:50 | 17:50 | Oracle Application Express 4.0 - The Latest & Greatest | David Peake |
| 2 Dec 2009 | 09:50 | 10:50 | Dispelling Myths about Oracle Application Express | John Scott |
| 2 Dec 2009 | 11:05 | 11:50 | Building Large Scale Mission Critical Systems with Oracle Application Express | Jan Navratil |
| 2 Dec 2009 | 13:50 | 14:35 | Oracle APEX Forms Conversion | John Batchelor |
If you didn’t spot it, I’m doing 2 sessions, Dispelling Myths about Application Express and also a 2 hour masterclass on Building Scalable Applications with Oracle Application Express (which I believe should be interesting to *anyone* developing with APEX, not just those people who are developing large scale applications).
We are also going to hold an APEX round-table on Tuesday (1st December) at 12:55-13:55, where you can come along and ask any (APEX related!) questions you have.
It’s interesting to see that Oracle are taking this event seriously too, with David Peake, Anthony Rayner and Hilary Farrell from the APEX Development team all attending (and presenting).
Now, I just need to book my hotel!
Joel Kallman just posted that Oracle are in the process of creating a certification exam for Oracle Application Express, this is a very interesting development (and something that we in the community have discussed for a few years now).
Whilst I’m still on the fence about the whole ‘certification thing’, I do see this as another commitment by Oracle to make Application Express a serious contender amongst some of the more publicised (shall we say) development tool offerings they have.
You can get directly to the pilot page here (but I advise reading Joel’s blog first).
Just a quick note to say that the APEX Listener has been released as an Early Adopters download.
If you’re not familiar with it, this is a Java alternative to the OHS or Embedded PL/SQL gateway. However that is vastly understating some of the potential this has.
I was lucky enough to be given an early preview of this and was extremely impressed by how fast it was (I performed some in-house benchmarking on it). There are lots of reasons why I’d favour using the Listener over the Embedded PL/SQL gateway, such as -
1) Caching
2) More control over configuration
3) Ability to install it on a machine other than the same machine as the DB
The list goes on…so grab it, try it..give your feedback.
Following the very successful (over-subscribed!) first ever UK Application Express SIG meeting last year, it seems like a good idea to do another one.
The sessions include:
- Integrating Apex with Oracle Apps – Putting the Sweet back into e-Business (Pete Mahon – Virgin Mobile)
- New Features of Apex 4.0 (Anthony Rayner – Oracle)
- Oracle Forms Migration (Chris Gilbane – Northgate)
- Enhancing User Interface with ExtJS (Vincent Migue – e-DBA)
- Increasing Scalability with APEX (me! APEX Evangelists)
It is being held on the 4th November in the same location (Oracle City Office), you can see the Agenda here. I’ve been told it’s already more than half full (before it’s really been advertised!), so I advise signing up ASAP if you want to spend a day with fellow UK APEX’ers.
Thanks again to Justin Hudd for his tireless pursuit in organising this.
