Carl Backstrom's Blog

As Joel blogged here our patchset for Application Express 3.1 is out.

Hopefully this fixes any issues you ran into with APEX 3.1 so we can start on creating all brand new ones in future versions ;)

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

APEX 3.1 is out for download

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/index.html

You can read about the new features here

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/html/3.1_new_features.html

The Application Express instance on apex.oracle.com has upgraded to 3.1

I am currently working on HOWTO's for working with some of the new features in 3.1 , the first one goes over development for Mobile's.

I am also working on my sample application and updating it to take advantage of some of 3.1 features, there have been quite a bit of changes that make those examples much easier to implement.

On a personal note I greatly enjoyed my 2 hours of downtime after code freeze before we started talking about the next set of things we want to get done ;)

The two worst words and the two best words in software development are the same.

Code Freeze!

It's nice to take a step back and catch your breath at the same time there was 100's of more things you wanted to do, well there's always next release when you can get those 100's of things done and worry about the next 100.

Until then ........

Looking good, Billy Ray! Feeling Good, Louis!
http://www.killerclips.com/clip.php?id=43&qid=251


Edit: Per Tyler's comment, before everybody asks when it's going to be out, I don't have any specific dates. It's a day closer than it was yesterday and a day longer than it will be tomorrow, and so forth ;).

The plane - nothing
The automobile - chump change
The light bulb - don't make me laugh

Computers and Electricity only matter because you need them to run this invention.

And the best invention ever made is the Roomba.

I just won some ill gotten Vegas wealth. I rarely gamble ,you can't when you live here, but when you turn a little into alot in less than 10 min it's basically free money and deserves to get spent on something you don't normally get. So after a couple days of thinking about it I decided one of the things I always wanted was a robot and why not one that cleans.

I have an inside outside dog that sheds all the time, and after three days the Roomba has made a huge difference. It might not be for everyone or every house, especially if you have a dog that might think it's an expensive chew toy, mine just looks at it annoyed when it gets near. But for me it's great. If it lasts a couple weeks , just to make sure , I'm going to go buy another one for my upstairs.

Plus it's hackable with an optional serial interface.

Oh I've also named it "Mega Maid"!!! extra points for people that know where that name came from.

EDIT:
Well Doug Gault knew the answer it's from Spaceballs a very very funny Mel Brooks movie.

Well within a couple hours why to do an early beta ,at least to me, is apparent, obviously I left something in that makes the javascript fail , in some cases, in Internet Explorer, no I didn't do it on purpose , though given my well known annoyance of all things IE maybe I did it subconsciously.

Have no fear this will be fixed, in fact it's not to far a stretch to say that it will be my #1 priority for the next build.

Another thing that came up was the new themes, just so you do know I/we do much of theme development after main APEX development is done because themes have don't have a translation or functional impact.

Theme 20 is fairly complete and please test, but as people have rightfully pointed out it is theme 19 is just a copy of theme 17. When done theme 19 will be a generic (very lightweight) mobile theme , we did bounce around building a iPhone theme but the design requirements for that are very specific to the iPhone so wouldn't be as useful for people with other mobile devices, like me.

Not to say you won't see a iPhone theme, I happen to know a guy that has one almost done and will make available to download, after 3.1 is released, but we won't ship it in 3.1.

Anyway keep testing and commenting the more things you can find and/or ask for the more things we can fix and/or enhance.

It's that time again, we need your help to make APEX the best possible product it can be. You can register here to get your own brand new shiny workspace with that new version smell.

Please make sure to enter any issues you find in the feedback application, this is a very early beta so make sure to read through the known issues there before posting. I personally know I have features I am responsible for, that while stable are not done yet.

But what we really want for people to focus on, at least till the next build is the new Interactive Reports. We'd like suggestions , wishlists , bug reports, and feedback both good and bad so we can get this feature working the best it can.

I personally would like some feedback on theme 20 as it is made to mimic the look and feel of some of the new Fusion Applications.

Anyway have at it and and let us know what you think.

Wednesday on Overlook II at 2pm

So unless you were there or heard about it, my presentation at Oracle World blew up in my face. It seems that Ubuntu and the projectors provided don't mix well. While it wasn't a complete crash and burn, it was definetly a emergency landing.

I had to fall back on my slides , and my whole presentation was supposed to be very slide light and demo heavy, and try to describe to people what the demo was supposed to do. I spent more times on product direction / higher level functions and I still filled the hour and not to many people left so I must have been able to pass along some good info, none the less it wasn't what it should have been.

I worked real hard on my presentation so I was pretty mad at myself/ubuntu/the projector/the world.

But this conference has given me a second chance with the Unconference event. Patrick Wolf mentioned maybe I should do it agian at an Unconference which made alot of sense to me.

So I marched up to the signup board put myself in a slot to present.

I worked way too hard way to hard on this presentation for people not to see it..

So Wednesday on Overlook II at 2pm come by and I'll give it a try again, plus I'll be showing 3.1 features on a huuuuuge projector.

So I posted this thread on the forum and the APEX team definitely wanted to get comments on it.

If you didn't know we are all in lovely Reston, VA going over new/improved features for future versions of APEX.

While the big 3.1 enhancement thread has been a great help and discussion point we particularly wanted to get feedback on this posting by Oracle ACE Patrick Wolf.

Please feel free to provide feedback, actually the more the better.

Well I'm sure you've read that Oracle has released the 11g. For me personally the best part of it is that Application Express is installed by default.

That's right!
No more having to beg your friendly neighborhood DBA into installing this extra Application Express thing you heard about because it's installed by default.

This should defiantly improve the uptake and usage of Application Express and shows that Oracle is serious about the future of APEX , though that question hasn't come up in awhile.

I just ran across Songbird.

It's a media player built on top of the Mozilla engine. I've been playing with it for about 2 hours now and am absolutely thrilled with it.

It has some issues playing shoutcast through proxy though that might just be my setup (linux with gstreamer) but without the proxy it works as advertised and with my own mp3's it works great, it has some lastfm / audioscrobbler features but it doesn't look like it play lastfm directly in it, again though it might be something that needs to be setup on my end better.

If your own of those people like me that can't hardly work without music give try.