Well I was at Web2.0 Expo last week and saw many recurring themes with building and deploying applications. Most of which , being biased as I am , I think Application Express is well suited for.
Two of the most often heard were SaaS and Cloud Computing (the cloud!!!) and was wondering if there was any interest of an APEX offering in those contexts.
So being the type of person I am ,I want to hear straight from the people and put this post here on the OTN forums.
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=650092&tstart=0
and this posting on mix.oracle.com
https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/26634-offer-a-saas-cloud-computing-version-of-oracle-application-express
So have at it all comments / opinions welcome
Begin PSA.
This is a quick heads up , if you haven't checked the blogs you link to lately and you link to anything on orablogs.com you might want to remove or change that link.
orablogs.com isn't what you think it is anymore ;)
While the first click through is "probably" SFW any link or popup after that is probably NSWF.
Stupid link farms.
End PSA.
This is one big long rant and bounces around a bit but stay with me :)
I'll admit it I'm a hypocrite when it comes to web development. I'll rant and rave about about standards compliance and the right way to do things.
http://carlback.blogspot.com/search/label/standards
http://carlback.blogspot.com/2006/11/javascript-pet-peeves-for-some-reason.html
Then I'll turn right around and use tables for layout, and add my own namespaced attributes to HTML elements and then tell people not to worry about standards mode and XHTML validation.
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1138556#1138556
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2051001#2051001
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1025081#1025081
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=2271436#2271436
http://carlback.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:561667500346126206#611615600346656142
You might ask how I can do this and look myself in the mirror, especially some of you that have been on the the receiving end of the ranting, well let me tell you there are three very important reasons.
TIME , MONEY , REALITY
TIME and MONEY you never have enough, neither does your boss/company/client/etc. And you need to finish the current project you are on yesterday and get started on the next project the day before that , sound familiar ;)
Getting to 95% standards compliance is easy, that last 5% is what is the killer, and nobody even cares except some buggy W3C validator.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=736
XHTML is not the solution to a problem that concerns anybody except the guys who have to write
parsers that convert markup into DOM trees.
Building a tableless layout is all great and good. Except then you have to spend extra time and effort QA'ing because the different browsers render CSS different, or not at all (more on that later).
Even if the newest browser version renders things better if you are like most people and want to reach the biggest audience then you need to support older browsers for a long time (IE 6 is not going away anytime soon).
REALITY is the 800 pound gorilla and that gorilla's main branch to beat you over the head with is my favorite, the most useful and most ubiquitous piece of software in the world, the web browser.
It's not my fault I didn't do it.
MS did it with IE.
Netscape did it with Netscape. (RIP)
Mozila Group did it with Firefox.
Apple did with Safari.
Opera did with Opera.
And what did they do?
They are the ones that don't render things correctly and even more importantly they don't render consistently , and let me tell you the big secret, they probably never will unless they all decide to start using the same rendering engine, which isn't going to happen, and truthfully shouldn't, competition is good and will result in better browsers. Look how much better IE7 is compared to IE6 and IE 8 just passed the ACID 2 test which is huge, and the reason for these improvements because Firefox is so much better than IE, at least for now.
Don't get my wrong standards compliance is a worthy goal, but like most things in this world it's the journey not the destination that is the worthier part.
As you strive to get to 100% standards compliance your page weight goes down, your CSS gets separated out of the HTML to where it belongs. And the closer you get the easier it is but it's a never ending process, HTML 5 will be here sooner than you know it, and this will start over again.
On APEX's end we will continue to make sure the HTML we generate is as close as we can make it to XHTML compliant as we can while still supporting the widest range of browsers in the easiest way.
PS. NO!!!! YOU STILL CAN'T USE FONT TAGS ANYMORE, THAT IS TOO HYPOCRITICAL EVEN FOR ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
While APEX ships with some built in javascript functionality, and very nice javascript functionality if I say so myself ;). We are definitely not everything to everybody, which is on purpose.
There are so many very good 3rd javascript libraries , and we love our 3rd party javascript libraries , out there (extjs , YUI , DOJO and many more) that we don't want to be making that choice for developers since the proper choice can be different all the way from the image directory level to the workspace , application and even page by page level.
In fact sometimes I feel bad , well not that bad ;), for forcing even our library on developers. In 3.1 our library can be turned on and off on a page by page basis.
But I digress, if you have filesystem access integrating in a 3rd party library is as easy as any other web page you just include in your path.
But if you are in a hosted environment, you need to pick a library or build of a library that is all in one file.
jQuery is a good example of a 1 file library that can be easily integrated into APEX using #WORKSPACE_IMAGES# or #APP_IMAGES# . And I've created a very simple example here to show that it works , http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:151
I'm going to be looking into different ways of including in other libraries that require a directory structure when you don't have file system access, I think XDB might be helpful here, but if someone has already solved this particular problem please comment or blog about it as it will be very helpful to quite a few people.
I'm a huge fan of SVG, the main problem of course that it doesn't run in natively in a certain browser that has a large market share, so much for web standards.
But look at what the SVG can do in this patched version of Firefox that supports the SVG video element.
via : http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/08/svg-video-demo.html
Amazing!
Sure Flash can do the same thing but it's not a web standard.
So someone sent me a link from the Internet Archive for something and I was like hey I want to look at my old sites. Though it looks like the Internet Archive misses quite a bit of the images and flash files but still there was a pretty amazing amount still around.
meetingdoodle.com < I think the name is description enough, a php application that would allow people to upload and comment on the doodles they did in meetings, it would automatially thumbnail and organize them.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010306164224/http://www.meetingdoodle.com/
I have all these images somewhere around 30-40 of them and will have to put them up.
And loungetank.com which has always been my catch all site for anything I want to do, and yes I still have it and no you can't have it because it's mine and I still like the name!
loungetank.com is now APEX based and hosted on shellprompt.com , though there is nothing there for public consumption at moment.
But the stuff that used to be on loungetank is still awesome, at least to me.
There is the alpha of the Geo News Reader I mentioned in my 5 years at Oracle post.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020325231905/www.loungetank.com/geo_news.html the actual running version was much more elaborate, the layout kinda looks like the APEX Object Browser doesn't it :).
And look at at all the different front pages I went through. Since almost everything was built on Cocoon and I was really into building XSLT's
http://web.archive.org/web/20011201045448/http://www.loungetank.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20030201210450/http://www.loungetank.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20030530085533/http://www.loungetank.com/
I still have most of this stuff on ZIP disks (remember those!!!) and now I'm going to have to dig through them to see what I can bring back even for just fun.
Anyway if you've ever had a site that you just kinda forgot about or changed so radically it's not the same site you should take a look for it in the Internet Archive, it pretty interesting seeing all the differences.
Well I haven't bought into the whole Web 2.0 thing, I'm not talking about the technology part of course. I think AJAX and new RIA features are here to stay. They are excellent tools in the toolkit. I'm talking about the social networking part, I've signed up on services like facebook and such but mostly I have people that are already my friends and I have IM or email contact already, and really don't see the need to add random people but hey maybe it's just me, plus some of the hype is really starting to remind me of Web 1.0.
BUT!! I am sold on tagging, I think it's one of the most important ways of dealing with the flood of data I collect, I'm an avid del.icio.us user now , thanks Tyler , and want to tag everything. I want private tags for me and public tags for outside consumption,
I want to tag my dog , good dog or bad dog, I want to tag my nephew mohawk or sans mohawk.
Plus and most importantly I'm really pushing to include tagging into this.
So in the spirit of this , and as a simple testbed, I built a very simple tagging mechanism for the examples on my sample application.
I'm still working all the kinks especially with how I deal with weighting of tags but so far I'm pretty happy with the result.
When I'm finished this will make an nice addition to the examples on my application and hopefully help people find things they need easier. I think it's much more useful than the breadcrumbs which I will probably be removing soon.
Since I don't require logins you could game the system by voting for tags multiple times or even put in ....... lets just say nonsensical tags, but I'll be administering it since I want it to be useful people.
Well have at it.
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:136
Just a quick post. I moved my rss feed to feedburner. I've been mulling it over for a bit and was basically waiting for Google to do it for me since Google and feedburner are same company. But now since they let you redirect the standard blogger feeds http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/07/feedburner_integration_for_blo.php I figured that was close enough for me.
So if you feel the need point your rss readers to here http://feeds.feedburner.com/carlback
If you don't feel the need no worries 'hopefully' the redirection will work as advertised.
Edit:
Looks like there was a hiccup this morning with the rss feed redirect hopefully it is all working now, please feel free to drop a line if it isn't.
That's right people I've I have the hottest new product for the Oracle APEX community available now!
With some all new functionality but with that slick old school style.
You will receive a working AJAX based ranking system, a AJAX based commenting system (aka: shoutbox) and an reworked AJAX Collection Control (that actually works) plus many other features and enhancements.
! BUT THATS NOT ALL !
Starting with this version I'll also throw in a SQL scripts to install and deinstall all the objects needed to support this application , that's right no more hunting from page to page making sure the examples have the proper tables or procedures! You might ask yourself how can this get any better?
! WELL LET ME TELL YOU !
Sample Data! That's right not only do you get the application! Not only do you get the supporting schema objects! But if you act now you will get your very own copy of the sample data as seen on the Original OTN Sample Application
And what would you expect to pay for this? Hundreds? Thousands? No this is provided to you the people for free thats right absolutely free what can be a better deal than that!
Oh and I'll throw in a readme.txt file as well just because I like you ;)
Pick yours up today.
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:22
While I'm not a big fan of Flash it is used on quite a few sites on the web, since I use Linux pretty much all the time though I'm stuck with older versions of the Flash plugin but today Adobe released another beta of the Flash 9 plugin for Linux.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/
