Birmingham

Today, it’s the third day in Birmingham for the UKOUG Tech16 event. We had a good time yesterday evening in English pubs.

Today, I attended several sessions. Sessions that I was mostly interested in was the “Application Express 5.1 New Features part 1 and part 2.

The 1st session was presented by David Peake from Oracle. He provided main new features that will come with Apex 5.1. He demonstrates new capability for developer usage improvement in terms of productivity. In Apex 5.1, we will be able to define the page designer as we want, customising tabs order, displaying the page designer in different pane layout and page rendering. He also presented the Interactive Grid and quickly created a master detail, detail, detail, detail view. The number of detail is unlimited but he strongly advises to carefully minimise the number of detail.

The 2nd session, APEX 5.1 part 2 was presented by Patrick Wolf. He concentrated his session by presenting improvement made on the Universal Theme that was already rolled out with APEX 5.0. So they continued to improve it in APEX 5.1. In my opinion, the important information is the upgrade of the Universal Theme for any existing 5.0 application. You will have to refresh the theme in order to use the improvement made in APEX 5.1. This has to be done by going in the shared component theme visualisation and click on the refresh theme. This will upgrade the already used UT with 5.1 capabilities. There is lot’s of new capabilities and would wait until the final rollout date to do some tests on my side.

Another session I followed was “APEX, Meet the Rest of the Web – Modern Web Technologies in Your APEX Application”. It was good to know how to create a search like google with auto-complete support depending on the value entered in the search field. Presenter also showed us how to quickly integrate google charts using APEX JSON packages. He also showed us how to integrate google map, showed us how to call Facebook and Twitter API in our application in order to follow twits a.s.o. It’s quite easy to integrate Modern Web Technologies in any APEX Application.

See you tomorrow for the last day in Birmingham.