APEX Alpe Adria

In April Przemysław Staniszewski and I had lectures at APEX Alpe Adria conference about Advanced usage of plugins we use in our commercial projects and Making Oracle APEX global. The conference took place in Zagreb, Croatia at 11th of April.

Despite it is quite new conference (second edition) and it is one day event, it was organised very well by Aljaž Mali (@AljazMali), Dario Bilic (@gospar) and Peter Raganitsch (@PeterRaganitsch). We got to Zagreb with direct flight from Warsaw (as other participants from many European countries) so it was really easy to get there – no stops, no trains etc. Tickets for audience were around 30 Euro which is pretty cheap compering to quality of presented content (you can check full agenda here) and well organized conference & food.

During that one day we could participate in 3 streams where we had listened various lectures about Oracle APEX and related technologies like ORDS, Oracle DB and PL/SQL. Of course, the conference wasn’t about lectures only, but networking!

The main guest was the father of APEX – Mike Hichwa (@mikehichwa1). He did good opening lecture summing up lifespan of APEX and giving us hints in what direction APEX will be going.

Mike willingly spoke with everyone who had questions about Oracle APEX and I have used this opportunity to discuss new features of upcoming APEX v19.2 – ie. Enhanced LOV pop-up – and my other contributions to Oracle APEX community – Pretius plug-ins.

As every conference APEX Alpe Adria has ended with closing party (in prestige club in the center of Zagreb) where we had even more opportunities to push networking even further!

Next day occurred for us with small surprise – we had an honor to be guests in Juergen Schuster’s (@JuergenSchuster – the man behind APEX World) podcast called “The Oracle APEX talkshow”. It was 1 hour and half of talking about Pretius, my plugins and Przemek’s involvement in Oracle APEX community (APEX Translate). If you are interested to learn more about the podcast, you can listen it (or download mp3 file) from Juergen’s site as “Second Line of Defense: Przemyslaw Staniszewski & Bartosz Ostrowski”.  If you want to learn more about Pretius contributions to Oracle APEX community you should definitely listen it!

APEX Connect

The second conference we had participated took place in Bonn, Germany from 7th to 9th of May. It was quite important conference for me and my colleague Adam Kierzkowski (@kierzkowski49) because we had submitted our plug-ins to APEX Competition 2019 which results were announced before conference keynote speech.

This year we hadn’t lectures (but we had in previous editions) but we had plenty of time to fully satisfied our need for networking and learn from Oracle APEX lectures that we have missed earlier.

But first things first. I have won the competition with my recent plug-in APEX Enhanced LOV item!

If you are interested why, you should look at photo taken during lightning talks where Ronny Weiß (@Ronny_Weiss) has summed up the plugin.

If you are interested in giving it a closer look you should visit github repository, read about the plugin capatibilities and see the plug-in in action in demo application.
The plugin is released under MIT license so you can use it in your projects too!

APEX Enhanced LOV Item is powerful combo-box to select singular/multiple values in two modes: autocomplete and popup report. The plug-in provides high customization possibilities through its attributes.

My colleague Adam Kierzkowski (@kierzkowski49) also managed to climb the podium pretty high with his plugin Pretius Flexibile APEX Dashboard. He did good job placing himself in TOP 5! Congratulations Adam!

Pretius Flexible APEX Dashboard is a simple plugin that enable end-users to customize their dashboard layout. The intention was to provide users similar region manipulation possibilities that application builder provides to APEX developers.

If you think you need some custom solution for your Oracle APEX application you should definitely contact us!

At the conference we were able to make new contacts with other Oracle APEX developers from not only Europe. I had possibility to discuss my winning plugin with Oracle APEX Team (Anthony Rayner @AnthonyRayner, John Snyders @J_Snyders and Carsten Czarski @cczarski) on how the plugin should evolve according to APEX roadmap (accessibility, Interactive Grid support, Universal Theme integration and others).

“Enhanced LOV popup” functionality that will be presented with upcoming Oracle APEX 19.2 is already available in my plugin (starting with version 5.1) with more customizable attributes like templating autocomplete results or custom PL/SQL search logic!

Oracle APEX development team is very approachable and if you gonna attend any conference you should take advantage of speaking directly to people that are creating tool we – developers – use!

So, year 2019 started for us very well, a lot of things already happened but we are not done yet! This year Przemysław Staniszewski and Rafał Lenczewski will be attending ODTUG Kscope 2019 in Seattle, Washington. Przemek will be giving two lectures for Oracle APEX track about making Oracle APEX global and testing APEX applications with utPLSQL.

If you are going for Kscope 2019 make sure to high five them! If you are going to POUG 2019 in Wrocław, Poland you will be able to find us there as well. We gonna have lectures about Oracle APEX and you will be able to drink free beer because we are one of the sponsors.

See you at the conferences!