KScope15 day 1 (06/22/2015)

Session 1 (8:30am-9:30am) Paul Broughton APEX and the Printing Problem: Solved?
Key points:
APEX 5.1 will have printing upgrades.
We are using the best printing option, PL-jrxml2pdf.  We are able to use an IDE report writer and it fits right into APEX/FOEX.

Other options:

• BI Publisher.
• PL/PDF.
• Node.js.
• CSS changes (must create a dedicated page to print), use @media print.
• ORDS.
• Print Server Configuration.
• XLS-FO Editors (www.altova.com/XSL-FO, sourceforge.net/projects/wysiwyg-edit/)
• Jasper Reports.
• PL-jrxml2pdf.

Session 2 (9:45am-10:45am) Scott Wesley Evidence-Based APEX: Building Better Practices
Key points:

• Use COALESCE instead of NVL.
• Use Administration - Monitor Activity - Most Viewed Pages over All Applications to prioritize which pages to tune (simplistic).
• Use Administration - Monitor Activity - Page Views by Weighted Page Performance to prioritize which pages to tune (considers how long the page takes to load).

Session 3 (11:30am-12:30am) Dick Dral Developing Single-Page Applications in APEX
I found a diamond in this presentation when he demonstrated mobile speech to text and specifically how he was able to parse the conversational speech and place each important part of the sentence in each specific field.   I plan to use this same methodology in a future Vireo mobile application.

Key points:

• SPA = Single Page Application
• Performance and performance only, as you eliminate all page refreshes.  Page refreshes take a lot of time, certainly through thin lines.  This is interesting, as this is how we already develop most pages in Vireo (using FOEX).
• Interesting mobile time entry by drawing the arms of the clock

Session 4 (2:00pm-3:00pm) Tim Gorman Hands-On Training: Oracle Database Security: Frustrating the Patient Intruder
I was not prepared for this presentation, as I had not previously downloaded the developer VM (6GB).  Tim did have a few flash drives, but none of them worked.


APEX Open Mic Night (8:00pm-10:00pm)
It was great to see other developers applications.  One never has a good perspective on your own application until you experience other applications.  Next Kscope I plan to demonstrate Vireo, as I believe everyone would have been interested to see the combination of features it brings to the table.

It was great to see two other FOEX applications.  Thank you to Niels de Bruijn for showing off his family tree application, which is available free-of-cost.  That night I downloaded and installed it on my Oracle XE/APEX 5 server at home.