OGh Oracle APEX World 2015

The OGh Oracle APEX World 2015 was an interesting event, entirely focussed on Oracle Application Express (APEX), with lots of information about APEX 5 and APEX related software. The location, on board the ss Rotterdam, was great. Sometimes it felt more like a reunion with former colleagues and co-workers. But of course there was still lots of information and new ideas to be inspired by. In this blog a resume of some of the presentations:

SOA Suite and APEX – Best of both worlds

The speaker of this presentation stated that there is no real user interface for SOA Suite. In most cases ADF is used for that, but why not APEX? You can do Webservice calls from within APEX (Shared Components – Webservice References) and present the response in a region. The speaker made a testcase to prove it can be done.

Migration Forms to APEX

Speakers presented their project to migrate a Forms application to APEX. I expected something of a export/import tool with which the new APEXapplication can be generated (or at least made a jumpstart). So we were a little disappointed to see none of that. Instead they just developed a whole new APEX application, based on an analysis of the old Forms application. So no migration, just another rebuild (But a nice one nevertheless).

Spotlight on the smaller features of APEX 5

The new APEX 5.0 version has numerous of interesting features and functional improvements. Speaker of this presentation explained some of them and illustrated them with examples. Very useful.

JavaScript based web applications

Speaker showed how easy it is to create a JavaScript based web server with Node.js. Very easy to set up and you can do everything you want with it. (Not really everything: Node.js does have some pros versus for instance Apache, but there are a lot of cons as well). A little bit disappointing was that the technique failed when speaker wanted to show how to fetch data from a database. Still, a subject to look into.

Conclusion

An interesting day at a spectacular location where we learned a lot of new useful features and techniques in APEX5 and an excellent opportunity to expand our network.