iAdvise organises a free seminar about Mobile Business Development on 4(Antwerp, Belgium) and 6(Breda, The Netherlands) June.
In this seminar we will discuss Mobile Development and Usability(UX – User Experience) in Mobile Development.
But we also compare different solutions, give pros and cons about: APEX Mobile, ADF Mobile and Tabris.
Of course we will also show you best practices, problems and solutions,…
More information(Dutch): http://www.iadvise.eu/seminars
APEX is well known for his RAD solution and the no-extra cost factor: APEX makes it possible to build on time and within budget your database application for the web. But an application is more then building pages for CRUD operations. Very often you also need to generate well looking documents. And this is standard not possible with APEX. A pity! Within the Oracle world, Bi Publisher is by far the best solution. But from the pricing point of view, it does not really fit in the ‘cheap’ philosophy of APEX. Further, you can also look for Open Source solutions like Jasper Reports and Birt. Both have a community version that you may use for free.
Nevertheless, we decided to build our own tool. During the presentation at APEX World of last week, organized by OgH, we explained how we came to this decision. On different projects at the Flemish Government we always had the business requirement to generate output for MS-Word (.docx). We first tried to solve this requirement with Jasper Reports. This was fine for simple letters. But the end-user also wanted to change some of those documents after generation … and that was not so easy to do with the output created by Jasper.
So the idea for an own “document generator for Oracle” was born. The main objective was trying to bring some of the better features of other tools together in one solution:
Our custom solution evolved well: we already used it successfully in different projects. Therefor, we decided to make it available for the world and packaged the solution in a tool with the name Docufy. You can find more information on the Docufy-site or you may always send a mail to info@docufy.be.
With Docufy,
we proceed on the APEX philosophy,
there where APEX it self stops:
easy and quick generation of operational documents.
April 9th 2013, APEX World took place, one of the biggest APEX only events in the world, organized by the Dutch Oracle user group (OGH). iAdvise was gold partner of this year’s edition. Below is a view on this event from our perspective.
iAdvise booth
The event took flight with the keynote by David Peake, product manager from Oracle. He spoke about Oracle DB 12c, what it is and what’s in there for APEX developers, and some words about what to expect from APEX 5.0. Again, we had to conclude that great things are coming our way in the months to come:
But as we are used to with Oracle, it’s all subject to change and might not make it into next release 
More in-depth details and another view on this presentation can be found on Christian Rokitta’s blog.
The only two things David was clear about were:
Below are our highlights from the presentations we followed.
Transfer Solutions presented their “portal” solution to combine both Forms and APEX applications with one custom single sign-on. We saw some interesting approaches for common issues and found confirmation for our approach in comparable situations.
Rob van Wijk from Ciber presented his white paper “Professional software development using APEX”. Together with his colleagues, he worked out a way to version database schemes and APEX applications in Subversion when all developers are working in their own isolated environment. On top of this, he used Hudson to automate the versioning update-commit process. A must read paper if you consider versioning within your APEX environment!
Regarding responsive web design (RWD), there were two presentations of interest:
Dimitri Gielis introduced how RWD can be accomplished in APEX by using the new built-in grid system and spoke about APEX theme 25 (fully responsive and new in APEX 4.2) but also Twitter bootstrap, which can perfectly be integrated in APEX.
Later on, it was up to CB Logistics, together with iAdvise colleague Stijn Van Raes, to present how they used RWD in a recent project.
Peter Raganitsch and Matt Nolan from FOEX came all the way to Zeist to state that APEX truly is the best successor of Oracle Forms…but not out-of-the-box. In a few demos, in which they combined declarative APEX functionality together with their plug-in framework, they showed how APEX can become a perfect fit for everyone who wants to migrate good old Forms without losing much functionality, usability and maintainability. A bold statement but definitely something our APEX developers will look into.
Roel Hartman showed us what mobile web development with APEX theme 50 and jQuery mobile is all about. He walked through the new item types, lists and buttons and demonstrated how you can easily make your application look better with standard APEX functionality.
Our iAdvise colleague, Karen Van Hellemont, presented with Natasha Van Hoof from the Flemish Government how documents can be generated from the database. Throughout several years, iAdvise gained experience in generating documents with PL/SQL and developed a metadata driven solution with a simple API to re-use it in other projects. The Flemish Government is our first customer to use the complete version of this solution and therefore gave a customer testimonial on their experience with the tool.
The price for most-entertaining presentation definitely goes to John Scott (APEX Evangelists) when talking about HTML5 websockets! The concept of websockets took about 10 minutes. The remaining time was used for demos about what you can do with this. We never heard so many sounds of astonishment in 30 minutes!
For a Belgian-Dutch Oracle consultancy company, this is one of the most valuable events next to Oracle Open World and this year’s edition really showed us that APEX is far from ever going away! It has great potential for a very wide range of businesses and allows both developers and end-users to maximize their needs in every way.
Do you have one or more applications on top of on Oracle Database?
Do you want to show this data in documents and/or reports?
Did you know you don’t have to make a big investment in a BI solution to create attractive letters, orders, invoices or lists?
But which reporting tool, from a long list, is the best solution?
After many years of using and testing different tools, we will show and share our experiences of our preferred reporting tools:
We’re going to demo and compare those tools so you can learn the possibilities, advantages/disadvantages, …
Of course we’re also taking the learning curves and prices in count, so you can find out the best solution for you and your company.
About a month ago I saw a mail coming by where a colleague of mine had integrated the jQuery plug-in Codemirror into a text area for the end-user. I hadn’t seen this plug-in before, but I really liked the feel of it.
Since we can not change the APEX Application Builder, it would be nice to find another solution? And that solution exists: take a look at the following screenshots:
So how did I do it? A little “thinking outside the box” did the trick. While we might not want to mess with Apex directly, we can use browser Extensions and add-ons, to alter the looks, safely from a distance. So I created a small Chrome Extension that integrates CodeMirror into the APEX Text Areas.
Chrome Extensions are created with HTML5 and JS so once you have the basics of your Extension set up you can convert an Apex Text Area like this:
var vTextArea=document.getElementById(“F4000_P4312_PROCESS_SQL2″);
vMyEditor = CodeMirror.fromTextArea(vTextArea, {
mode: “text/x-plsql”,
tabMode: “indent”,
tabSize : 2,
lineNumbers: true,
firstLineNumber: 2,
lineWrapping: true
});
I wrapped this in a “$(document).ready(function(){});” to make sure it is executed after loading all plug-ins.
I hope I showed you all that you can do allot with a little imagination, and I welcome any questions or suggestions.
Joni Vandenberghe
Less than 3 weeks before the biggest Oracle event in the world kicks off: Oracle Open World 2012!
I already wrote about some interesting events: ADF EMG Sunday and the Oracle Benelux Architectural event.
In case you’re into Oracle Forms, you can add an extra event to that: The Oracle Forms Community Event.
After the session of Mia Urman and Grant Ronald “CON5639 - Give Your Forms a Face-lift: Tips and Tricks for Oracle Forms GUI Modernization“(Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM – Marriott Marquis – Foothill F) there will be an “Ask the experts” event.
Here we will answer questions from the audience with Grant Ronald (Oracle Forms Product Manager) as our moderator and a panel of experts(with Lucas Jellema, Oracle Ace Director, as one of them) both solution providers and consultants.
I will be one of the experts too:
- 14 years of Oracle Forms experience
- Presented on several conferences and seminars on Forms and Forms Modernization(OOW, UKOUG, …)
- Presenting this year on OOW: UGF3783 - Oracle ADF Immersion: How an Oracle Forms Developer Immersed Himself in the Oracle ADF World
You can register and add questions using this form.
On May 12 iAdvise hosted the “APEX and mobile seminar”.
With a turnout of more than 50 customers and interested developers, it indicates that mobile development is a real hype and the demand for mobile applications is rising.
This was the starting point for Stijn who started with an overview of the current situation and evolution of mobile applications.
It became clear that as a developer you can’t ignore mobile devices in the future.
He continued with explaining the challenges in mobile development and which guidelines and strategies could help in choosing the right technology for mobile applications.
Bart took the word and focused on developing web application for mobile devices using APEX.
By combining APEX with JQuery Mobile, HTML5 and CSS3, one could develop a mobile web application rather fast and simple.
Also implementing specific mobile behaviour(eg. “swiping”) and generating extra content on a tablet are rather simple using APEX.
After Bart, Jan showed a demo about the opportunities on offering APEX applications to users as a native app.
This sounds rather strange, but is possible. He had worked out a demo using PhoneGap, a javascript library which create the communication between a web application and the API of the mobile device.
The demo showed how the APEX application from the other demos was wrapped in a native app.
This makes it possible to add a new contact in the contact list of Jan’s IPhone.
After the demos, they gaves us a look at the future of mobile development with APEX, what we could expect in APEX 4.2 and how PhoneGap will take its place in this future.
At the end Johan Byl of Hestia showed us some points which had to be taken in mind when using mobile devices in a company.
This was also very interesting for application developers.
When developing applications, they’re not always keeping in mind that there will be a maintenance phase.
Eg. The support for the application will be allright, but what about the devices itself?
How will we get the application on all the mobile devices of our company?
Can everybody connect to the company network with his or her device?
Or should we prepare a different infrastructure/security?
These and a lot of other questions were explained and answered by Johan and showed us there are a lot of things we have to think over again before putting a mobile application in production.
At the end, a lucky attendee won an IPad3.
For him, iAdvise and regarding the positive feedback for others as well, it was a succesful seminar.
If you missed this seminar, there will another one at the office of our dutch colleagues in Breda, The Netherlands on May 24 2012.
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Grant Ronald brought this Gartner Report to attention on his blog: “Modernization and Migration Strategies for Oracle Forms“.
It’s great to see that our message brought to our customers and at our presentations is confirmed by this Gartner analysis
If you want more information on this topic, you can read my article on All Things Oracle: “What’s Your Choice for Oracle Forms?“.
