Friday, July 8, 2016

ODTUG KSCOPE 2016...

...was the place to be, at least if you are PL/SQL or APEX developer. Numbers say it all: 350+ presentations, 50+ APEX presentations, Sunday symposium, open mic night, Thursday's deep dive session and many more - all of that in only 4 and a half days. Amazing!

One thing was special there - the APEX community. It look like all those 8 years that I'm working with APEX where gathered in one place - APEX dev team and all popular presenters, bloggers and tweeters that you can find out there when you google about APEX and all of them so kind, friendly and eager to share knowledge.

Also, it was great to see that all those rooms with APEX presentations (at least the ones that I've attended) where so full. I don't have anything against ADF, but it was so sad to see 5-10 people on their presentations while APEX rooms where so packed. It reminded me of many projects in which we needed to prove that APEX is the next step when you want to get rid off Oracle Forms. If only I had that picture then. :)

And the content? It wasn't all about the APEX 5.1 as I've expected. It was on the first day on the Sunday symposium when APEX team talked about the new features in 5.1, but that was only a great introduction for the rest of the week. The only problem was that you have to choose only one presentation per session and sometimes it was really hard. There were 3 to 4 parallel APEX presentations + PL/SQL + ORDS and always something interesting.


I had my presentation on Tuesday at 8:30am, first session of the day. I got some great feedbacks so I suppose it went well. If you want to take a look at the slides you can find them here and you are free to contact me anytime if you need some additional information or explanation.

On the last day we had this deep dive sessions that I've really liked. I liked the content and concept because it was a two hour session divided in 10 minute presentations by some of the best and well known APEX speakers. Short and interesting...and there was a hidden gem from Joel, a feature long awaited, about session isolation across multiple browser tabs. From my perspective one of top features in APEX 5.1.

During KSCOPE I wrote some notes on stuff that I want to explore a bit more so if you want to take a look:
  • Electron.js - extending your APEX apps to desktop
  • Camunda - workflow solutions for APEX apps
  • FlowControl - PL/SQL Open Source workflow solution
  • Nightmarejs - high-level automation library
  • Service Workers - a method that enables applications to take advantage of persistent background processing, including hooks to enable bootstrapping of web applications while offline.


And don't forget to take a look at OraOpenSource project. It was mentioned so many times there. Great project with really nice free products that can be very useful in every APEX app.

To conclude, it's time to plan KSCOPE2017, you'll not regret it.