Carl Backstrom's Blog

Hi all it's been a week now since the end of Oracle World and finally have enough time to write up a brief recap of my experience of OOW.

HOL (Hands On Labs)
I helped out in a couple of the APEX Hands on Labs starting with the very first one at 10:30 am on Sunday and they seemed to run fairly smooth , some computer problems but were able to work through them, and were very well attended. Seeing some of the issues people ran into was very informative. Some are just places where we can improve the Hands on Labs themselves and others were where we can improve product, for that information alone I'm glad I volunteered to helped out.

Sessions (Not Mine)
I almost never have enough time for sessions at Oracle World , mainly because I like working the demo grounds, and usually completely ignore my scheduled demo ground times and just hang out what can I say I'm a people person :D , but I did make it to a few.

I was in Joel Kallman's APEX + Globalization session, which was very well attended, especially for a Sunday. Since globalization isn't something I usually have to deal with I always learn something new from these sessions. One thing I did learn about APEX is you don't have to take globalization into account from the very beginning of development comparative to some other development enrollments, though a bit of forethought helps, but can decide to translate and globalize your applications as needed.

The other session I was able to sit through in it's entirety was Raj Mattamal's Security: Writing Custom Authentication Schemes for Application Express session, and as always Raj put on a very enjoyable and informative session.

In fact if one thing ,at least for me, stands out about Joel's and Raj's sessions it's how well both of them communicate some complex very ideas and how easily some of these complex ideas can be implemented with APEX.

Demo Grounds
The demo grounds are my favorite part of Oracle World. Since I work from home usually most my communication , even with the APEX development team, is email / IM / phone calls. Oracle World not only allows me to remember what the people I work with look like but meet people I know from forums,blogs,etc face to face.

I also like demoing APEX, it's fun to show someone who's never seen APEX just how fast you can build and edit a complete working application , APEX pretty much sells itself in the 5 minute demo, and to see how they react when they hear they already own APEX with their current database license.

And for people that have seen or using APEX already I like demoing the new stuff. This OOW the new stuff was Websheets (interactive reports with built in edit and more) and Dynamic Actions (declarative javascript functionality).

As a developer's working on bugs and functionality on these features sometimes we lose track of how cool/useful/needed some of these things are. But to watch people reactions as we show them the stuff they can't play with yet ;) and to get comments and suggestions about the features (good or bad) really makes it worth it.

OOW recap (pt2) I'll go over the sessions I had a hand in , some miscellaneous events over the week.

The blog post after that will be about our plans with APEX + jQuery , it kinda deserves it's own post.