First impressions of the European Application Express Training

This week Patrick Sinke and I attended the first edition of the European Application Express Training (EAET). With only a few months of experience with Oracle Application Express (APEX) I didn’t know what to expect about this training. Would it be too advanced or was it a good next step to take in learning more about developing APEX applications?

Fortunately, it turned out to be a good next step to take.

In the luxurious Plaza Hotel in Brussels almost 30 people from around Europe met for the first edition of a 3 day course about the advanced features of APEX. Among them were “themes and templates”, “AJAX in APEX”, “using the APEX Dictionary” and “integration of 3rd Party Tools”.

When I started working with APEX I found out that the most useful information about using APEX was not in the User’s Guide but in the many packaged applications that can be downloaded from OTN, the APEX forum on OTN and some weblogs. All these sources contain very useful information, both for beginners as experienced developers, about almost every aspect of APEX but when you just start using APEX, finding the information your looking for is rather time consuming. I hoped that the EAET would give me a good overview of all aspects of APEX, and it did. But I spoke with more experienced APEX developers and they were satisfied about the content of the training too.

In three days John Scott and Dimitri Gielis presented a wide range of APEX functionality in a structured way, always starting with a short introduction of the basics before showing advanced functionality. During the presentations John and Dimitri shared many best practices with the audience.

As a bonus, on the second day in a video-message Carl Backstrom, one of the Oracle developers on APEX, gave a sneak preview of the possible new features of version 4.0, and especially the interactive reports look really good and useful.

Thank you, John Scott and Dimitri Gielis, for presenting your APEX knowledge in a structured way. As always with a first edition of a training, some subjects and presentations need to be worked on, but overall the EAET was really worthwhile to attend.

As said before, for me the EAET came at the right moment, at the right place and it will be really helpful during my journey into the world of APEX. In the near future I will keep you updated about my experiences with APEX in this weblog.