Ok, it's been a while since I returned home–you're probably wondering why I haven't written about last Wednesday and Thursday yet. It's been a busy weekend, and I've been distracting myself with a couple of side projects (which I'm hoping will reach the point where I can share them soon…)

So, the rundown of where I was:

Wednesday

• Building APEX 4 Plug-ins, by John Scott – Every now and then I think about making a plug-in, but it's very daunting. John did a good job making it less scary.
• APEX Face/Off, by Christian Rokitta – A good introduction to making your own theme, which isn't as scary as it may seem at first. The most amusing part for me was that I was sitting next to Shakeeb Rahman, who was presenting on themes on Thursday…and muttering under his breath that Christian was saying many of the things he'd been planning on saying.
• Striving for Perfection: the Ultimate APEX Application architecture, by Roel Hartman – More of an overview than I was hoping for, but still overall an interesting look at the considerations to think about when designing your APEX architecture.
• Plug-ins Reloaded, by Patrick Wolf – It's always great to listen to someone talk about something they've built, and Patrick's the developer largely responsible for the plug-in architecture.
• Practical Uses for the APEX Dictionary, also by John Scott – I've used the dictionary views before, though not very often. John showed off several ways that they can be used to build very useful administrative tools.
• Creating a Sparkline Plug-in from Scratch, by Doug Gault – Yes, this was another plug-in session. Wow. Anyhow, I had no idea prior to this presentation what a sparkline was, but it was definitely fun watching the entire process from start to finish. Pro tip of the day: it's a lot easier if you can find a jQuery plug-in that does what you want.
• Wednesday evening was spent partying on board the Queen Mary. Very fun, though my poker winnings weren't enough to win either of the prizes they were raffling off.

Thursday

• How to be Creative II, by Martin D'Souza – The sequel to a presentation Marty gave at last year's Kaleidoscope conference (back when it was spelled out). His point was that if you take the time, you can often find creative, elegant solutions that work much better than the alternatives.
• User Interface Design & Themes, by Shakeeb Rahman – Great presentation that demonstrated some useful tools for building themes, including browser-compliant CSS files. The last twenty minutes or so were spent building a theme that looked like Apple's iTunes website. Very well done.
• Hypertherm, APEX, and E-Business Suite, by David Gale – Yep, I had to finish out the conference. Had about a dozen people, and it seemed very well received. Haven't been able to access my evaluations yet (the site keeps insisting that they're verifying data), but the immediate feedback was positive. Hope it helped those who were there.

Ok, KScope11 is over (I don't know why, but it still bothers me that they decided that Kaleidoscope was too hard a word to spell…oh, well). Soon, I'll be on my way back across the country. But I promised the people in my presentation that I'd post my slide deck–there's a link in the sidebar, or you can just click here. It should also be on the ODTUG website; I'll post a link later (once I find it). A wrap-up for Wednesday and Thursday will have to wait until I get home, but it is coming.

Another full day at the KScope conference, so I'll just get right to it.

I started this morning with Dan McGhan's presentation on plug-ins. Rather than a demo of how to build a plug-in, Dan discussed a lot of things to consider when building one–in other words, things to remember in order to make a good plug-in.

Before lunch, I went to a presentation by some folks from the United Space Alliance on the system they've built up over the years which is almost entirely configurable by the end users (at least, those who had administrative rights). It was an impressive system, but I sincerely hope I never have to build anything half as complex.

Lunch itself was a discussion panel, where we got to ask questions of several Oracle Aces. A few of the questioners seemed to be confused as to the nature of the people on the panel and asked questions that would have been more appropriate directed to members of the APEX development team, but luckily David Peake was moderating, and able to field/deflect those.

After lunch, I went to Scott Spendolini's presentation on “APEX Behind the Scenes”, where he talked about the underlying architecture of APEX. Interesting information, though (as he acknowledged), probably not going to directly impact how I build applications.

Doug Gault spoke next about the APEX API's, giving a (very quick) rundown of what is available and what it is (potentially) useful for.

Rounding out the day for me was Dimitri Gielis, who spoke about how to build large applications with multiple developers. Version control, good project management, best practices–these seem to be the themes of this year's KScope conference (from an APEX standpoint, at least).

Today was the first day of presentations. First, however, was the welcoming ceremony/keynote address. The highlight (for me, at least) was the “false” keynote–they announced the keynote speaker; a man came out, gave a presentation, and then revealed that he was not actually Joey Asher–he was Don McMillan, an engineer/comedian (who will also be performing Wednesday night on the Queen Mary). Don's presentation was very funny (I especially liked his pie chart->cake chart->birthday cake chart->wedding cake chart sequence), and I'm looking forward to seeing him perform again.

As for the presentations…the first one I went to was APEX Adolescence, by Scott Spendolini. The first part was an overview of APEX's history, from Oracle Flows, through Project Marvel, to HTML DB, and then through the various versions of APEX to where we are now. After that, he launched into a discussion of the need for the APEX developer community to really work on establishing best practices–security, version tracking, etc.–since APEX is working its way into areas that are generally audited (“central IT”, to use Scott's terms).

The second presentation I went to was Patrick Wolf's demonstration of the new error handling options in APEX 4.1. Very exciting (I know, that sounds sooo geeky…oh, well). I'm not sure I'm thrilled that you have to go into globalization to customize the text messages (or write your own PL/SQL error handling routines), but it has to go somewhere, so…(shrug)

In the middle of the afternoon, I attended Neelesh Shah's presentation on page stiching–basically, using javascript substitution to splice one APEX page into the middle of another, allowing for nested reports. Could be a very useful technique, but it also seemed potentially difficult to set up. I'll need to go through his files after the conference.

For the last session, I went to David Peake's discussion of using APEX to extend the E-Business Suite (based on this white paper). If you're on EBS r12 and want to link it to your APEX, follow the white paper–you'll have a configuration that is certified by Oracle (and thus able to get support on it).

Finally, in the evening, I went to the APEX Open Mic Night; the part I liked best was Dan McGhan's demo of a plugin he's going to be releasing soon to make it somewhat easier to include modal dialogs in your applications. Still takes a few steps to get setup, but much better than coding it yourself.

After a fairly long, but thankfully uneventful day of travelling, I made it to the ODTUG KScope conference. Today is “Symposium Sunday”, where there are a series of large presentations split by track. Naturally, I went to the APEX symposium, where we had presentations by several members of the Oracle APEX development team.

• Joel Kallman started off with an overview of the development process for the APEX tool itself. One of his key points was that although the team itself is small (about 15 people), there's a fairly extensive network throughout Oracle–legal, support, translation, etc. So don't let anyone argue that the small size of APEX's development team implies that they're not a big part of Oracle.
• Marc Sewtz covered master detail and tabular forms, with a special focus on what's coming in 4.1. I was most interested in the new ability to add validations based on the values of other columns in tabular forms, because this keeps coming up every time I build a tabular form, and so far, my best answer has been to use jQuery. Related to this is the ability to create a process on the rows of the tabular form, which refers to the columns by name (rather than the f0X_* fields we've had to use previously). Marc also mentioned that there's a new report template for reports with fixed headers–think freezing the headers in Excel–which my users frequently ask for; the downside of this is that you need to specify the width of each column explicitly. A trade-off, but perhaps a useful one, depending on your requirements (or your users).
• The third presentation was David Peake, covering interactive reports and web sheets. The IR section was fairly quick, showing many of the features that are available to users. The bulk of his presentation was on websheets, a feature of APEX that I haven't paid much attention to…but which I probably should.
• After lunch, Jason Straub presented on dynamic actions and APEX_WEB_SERVICE. The first segment was a demonstration of dynamic actions and how to use them, which is important because many people don't use them yet. Then he moved on to debugging, and demonstrated the extra information that's spooled to the javascript console if you have debugging turned on. After that, he moved on to the APEX_WEB_SERVICE API, which lets you interact with web services any where you can use PL/SQL. I don't work with web services (at this point), but I was really interested in his attaching a dynamic action to a button (something you can't do without jQuery in 4.0).
• Marc returned for a second presentation, this time on building mobile applications. I've had a few requests to make this blog and WriteTrack work better on mobile devices, so I was very interested in this one.
• The day was closed out by Mike Hichwa, who spoke about APEX 4.1's new features. Lots of stuff to be excited about here–application templates, allowing users to upload spreadsheets, etc. It was rather amusing watching Mike pitch the Expert Oracle Application Express book multiple times (I think he got up to five or six over the course of the hour). Once he finished with 4.1, Mike went on to talk about future features, proving that as awesome as APEX is now, it's just going to keep getting better and better.