Our seminar took place Wednesday the 23/04. The blog have been under construction for a while, so therefore this late post

The seminar went very well. There was 55 participants. Some of them were from Logica, so there were around 50 customers which we were extremely happy with. We did a mix of demos to showcase APEX and lessons learned, which went down well. Anthony Rayner from Oracle UK made a general introduction to APEX. Anthony did a good job and showed a lot of demos. He ended the presentation with talking a bit about the future for the product , with the 3.1.1 patch that has just been released and 4.0 coming at some unknown point in the future. Anthony had some inside information from the development team, so the presentation was full of disclaimers You can read about some of the things to come on David Peake’s blog.

Anthony Rayner

I followed Anthony with some examples and lessons learned. I love APEX and believe you can use it for all sizes of projects. It scales with the database so performance is not an issue. But you have to take the issues listed below into account before jumping the APEX train:

• Version control is not supported
• Web Service support is very rudimentary especially compared to JDeveloper
• Exception handling is not possible

The last one being the biggest issue since I firmly believe in keeping as much business logic and constraints in the database. Currently you cannot catch exception raised ex. by a trigger in the application. Luckily it sounds like this will be fixed in 4.0.

It might sound like a negative start but I think I got my message across. APEX is great but it should not be used for all situations.

Peter Lorenzen

After lunch we had an hour of ask the expert, where Anthony backed up by me was answering question from the audience. I like this since we might not have been talking about issues that the customers want to hear about. It gives them an opportunity get the information they want. Some of the audience did not like the session since it quickly became very technical. We knew that the audience was divided in two groups, technical and non-technical and the non-technical did not ask any question. We have been talking about that maybe we should have split the session in two, a technical and a non-technical, so we might do that next time

Erik Birklund Andersen from Logica ended the day with a roundup and giving a perspective on the business opportunities we see with APEX. The presentations can be found at here.

All in all a great day.

Anthony Rayner, Caroline Koch (Oracle), Peter Lorenzen, Erik Birklund Andersen

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