My ODTUG 2018 highlights

ODTUG Kscope 2018

I had a blast! 

Highlights, my personal thoughts and rest

Every time I come from a conference big as this I returned inspired and so energized by sessions I had an opportunity attending and people I talked to. Even during my first leg of flights I already visualize what am I going to blog about and what is so outstanding that people should know about. 

This year is no different and impressions are powerful as like this was my first year at Kscope (and not my 4th).

Praise to ODTUG and APEX community

I think all of us who ever consider attending or who actually got to be at one of KScope's tried to crack it down "Why it is so awesome?!!!!" What is that why we keep coming back? Why you hear only great things about this event? What makes it so different to any other?
 
Not sure what it comes down to but ODTUG has been great bringing us outstanding events year by year. Content that caters for all audiences including technical and training sessions, top-notch speakers, fun factor and above all they put people be the essence of it all. That is why you feel inspired and that is why everyone you talk to feel like your long lasting friend. Not sure if other streams do the same but definitely APEX community does.  

So thank you to the Board, streams and content leads, volunteers and everyone involved in organization. 

Above all thank you to all my new and old friends in the community. 

Presentations
In summary there has been few different focuses across APEX presentations. 

The obvious one is ORDS - this is pretty much 18.1 release flag ship.

Lot of it was involved around Mobile apps development and offline capabilities. Great news is that The Team lead by Shakeeb are constantly improving Universal theme introducing new features like deprecation of Jquery mobile or new swipe gestures, new menus and lists template options, sticky buttons and re-flow reports etc. Making it fun but also more easy to build sophisticated mobile apps. Unfortunately there are no plans for going offline path but in session recordings you will fine several great talks on this subject but none is a silver bullet for our problems.

There was increase number of presentations focusing on JavaScript. Considering all it is not a surprise looking at number of widgets and configuration options that are available to us developers since APEX 5.1. I guess there is no more running away from it but embracing the features and trying not to reinvent the wheels.  

Other sub-topics covered were presentations on Continuous integration and block-chain.

Presentation I personally attended:

• APEX Sunday Symposium
• Turning APEX into Progressive Web Apps by Vincent; great intro if you are after offline capabilities
• Dive into Dyanmic Actions by Jackie; great material for your Dynamic Actions ventures
• APEX 18.1 and beyond by Niels; focuses on requirement that are still outside 18.1 release
• Going Mobile with Universal theme by D. Dral
• Oracle APEX 18.1: The Golden Nuggets by Dietmar; great intro into hidden less known 18.1 features awaiting you
• APEX Community Lunch
• Cross Workspace Application Authentication using JWT
• API economy for dummies by Niels; intro talk to how easily your API's can bring you headaches 
• Advanced CSS Techniques to make your Apps look even better by Maxime probably one of my favorite.
• Building Big things for small screens by Shakeeb; great presentation how 18.1 can build nicely looking mobile apps with few things to look out for

News and gossips

• Oracle APEX MOOC
• Oracle APEX Office Hours
• Oracle XE 18c is coming soon
• Updated APEX 18.1 Curriculum 
• New Oracle APEX certification
• Zero downtime APEX upgrades
• More Font APEX and color shaded icons that will lead into Open Source icon library
• Simplify customization
• Session timeout alerts
• No offline plans
• We still do not know who @APEX_Rumors is :)

Awards

First of all I want to use this opportunity to congratulate all my fellow ODTUG 2018 Leadership Program graduates for successfully completing this year's project. All the hard work we have put into I am sure will be highly beneficial to ODTUG board in the future.  

Personally it was a pleasure working with you all and hope to see you guys at one of next Kscope's in the future. Big humble "Thank you to ODTUG" for this once in the lifetime experience. 

To all people who have not heard of this great initiative, or who are thinking of applying I highly recommend it. Check out ODTUG website for more details and apply for the next years program when enrollments are announced. 

On top of this there was one special award that went out from Oracle APEX team that I think deserves a special mention too. 

APEX Distinguished Community Member Award - Jürgen Schuster

Jürgen, to what is worth, there could have only be one name written on this trophy.  Well deserved and we all highly appreciate all the hard work, effort, time and enthusiasm you kindly invested in #orcleapex community (podcasts, stickers and apex.world etc...). Thank you my friend.

Not to forget, congratulation to all newly elected Oracle ACE's too. 

The fun part

 

Next step

I know where to find you next. See you in Seattle!

  
Other great reads 
 by Adrian Png
 by JMJ Cloud

Happy APEXing,
Lino

Oracle APEX Interactive reports and google maps integration

Oracle APEX Interactive reports and google maps integration

 

Great way to extend your IR functionality 

GEO location data viewed on a map?

Recently I worked on APEX project that I thought would be cool to show case here purely to demonstrate scaling ability of APEX and one of its core components -  Interactive reports.

Problem: key requirement users to report using maps.

Idea was that they would filter out the data prepare all the columns etc ...and than per each column they would be able to categorize before showing it on a map. 

One way would be to custom build you filters and based on it drive the map data. But we figured why would we reinvent the wheel?

Hope this give you enough insight to why we opted to go with mighty Interactive reports - purely because we had API access to user report data. This was a key driver for us :)
 

Before further reading there is an excellent blog post by fellow APEX-er Adrian Png where he went into more details of how to setup and live feed your maps data. Great read and another awesome post by Adrian #hugefan. Also there are heaps of Google maps APEX plugins around for you to start playing.

Straight difference to how Adrian's team stored the data was, we were purely working on simple LAT and LONG that were saved in database tables. There was no use of SDO_geometry and all config that comes with it. So we could say this would be another use case.

Our technology was basic: Oracle APEX 5.1 and Leaflet JS library so in theory it should work with any version of APEX as long as IR are there. 

For start a demo that demonstrates how IR works with maps using its own SQL data.

Key features:

1. All original APEX IR functionality is intact - giving end users all the freedom to analyze their data
2. Per each column (or most of them) users will be able to show them graphically on a map (for example list all positive screening results in this region or what animals were involved in accident report at xx location)
3. As we filter out our report data sets all map filters will dynamically show only data contained in a 'user view' 
4. There is ability to categorize elements shown on a map as markers with different pins and shapes

How does it work?

All data are stored in collections where using APEX_IR package we extracted report SQL running. Pretty much that is it. Once you have this you can filter down any values you are after to be used in your 'prepare' map section. The rest is pure JavaScript and map APIs.

On a map screen to your fetch data you can use a simple apex.server.process and you are ready to rock and roll.

All in all we had ~ 10 reports where this was used and only regret we have is not being able to utilize Interactive grid functionality. :)

 
Happy APEXing,
Lino