Father’s day at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008

Together with Aino Andriessen, Alex Nuijten, Lucas Jellema I travelled to New Orleans to attend the ODTUG Kaleidoscope Conference 2008. Today, the ODTUG is starting full speed, no time to relax, but immediately on day 1 three full day symposiums:

• Essbase Developer’s Symposium
• APEX symposium – The seasoning of Application Express – Must hear success stories
• Fusion Middleware Symposium – Best practices

Alex and I attended the APEX symposium (it is still running at the moment). It started on 8:30 AM (10 hours after arrival in New Orleans) with an impressive presentation of Scott Spendolini. Impressive, if the first place because he managed to show us 431 slides in exactly 30 minutes, which we were all able to read. He explained why he thinks the time is right for APEX. When IT was busy solving IT problems (migrations, web enabling) the business created it’s business solutions with desktop tools. And now there is APEX to create a more robust solution for the business solutions without the drawbacks of the desktop solutions.

Mike Hichwa, Oracle Vice President Database Tools, in his presentation announced en demonstrated an interesting new feature: Websheets – web-based spreadsheets for end users. It enables end users to create, maintain, share and store spreadsheets in APEX. It can possibly replace many of the versioning, security  and distribution issues that exist with excel spreadsheets. The APEX agenda for 2009 contains amongst others the folllowing new features: Custom item types, declarative AJAX and Anycharts v4.0 (more advanced charts).

The three client stories we have heard till now have in common that APEX is chosen because it is a tool that can deliver acceptable solutions in a very short time frame (weeks instead of months). And in two of the stories it replaces existing Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel Applications.

In my opinion a great deal of the success of APEX applications is not the tool, but the fact that a good information analysis is performed by the APEX developers. This makes the APEX applications that replace the spreadsheets and access databases developed by the business users are a lot more effective and transparent.

More ODTUG news coming soon…