Collaborate 09 - Thursday

The final day… only one session to follow, one session to do and then flight back to Belgium.

The first session of the day was by Francis Mignault. He presented “How to build a multi-tenant SAAS application with Oracle Application Express”.
I liked the presentation a lot. He started globally, but also went into the technical part. He showed some really nice things, like their integration of jquery in their application. Some people have doubts about performance and dynamic sql, but Francis showed once more APEX scales well. He’s getting very good performance on modest hardware and is using dynamic sql a lot. He creates every page depending on the organization. So one APEX application for multiple customers. It looks like they have all their own application, but underlying it’s the same one.

Next it was my turn to present “What happens on an APEX Page?”
I talked about how an APEX page is structured (page - multiple regions - multiple buttons and items and navigation for your page flow) and how an APEX page is working. A lot of people didn’t know (or where not conscious) the page has two phases: a show (rendering) phase and an accept (processing) phase.
You can also view your page in different ways. The picture on the right shows you the page in the Events view. These steps you’ll also see if you run your APEX page in debug mode. At the end I demoed some more advanced techniques; for ex. how you can track things if your page does AJAX. The session got also recorded but it might be hard to follow certain parts (especially demos) if you don’t see what I’m actually doing on the screen. I’m also asked to do a webinar of it, but there is no date etc for it yet.

After having some final lunch we went to the airport. I’m on the same flight as a lot of other Europeans of the conference for ex. Jonathan Lewis, Mark Rittman and John Scott.

I look forward to see my family again…