This past week, I had the privilege of attending Montreal Oracle Developer Day, hosted by Insum.
It was a full day with 2 tracks, covering a multitude of topics.
It started off with a bang with Joel Kallman, Director of Software Development for Application Express, delivering his keynote ‘Oracle APEX 5.1 and Beyond’.
What I particularly enjoyed about this talk was how it positioned Oracle APEX beautifully on the technological spectrum somewhere between the ‘no-code/little flexibility’ and the ‘high-code/unlimited flexibility’ platforms.
Let me first clarify what I mean here: Oracle APEX absolutely has unlimited flexibility. I am referring specifically to the amount of coding required to deliver rich, beautiful and functional applications.
The APEX team never seem to tire of delivering new tools and feature sets that help us developers look like absolute rock stars to our clients. A fan of Font Awesome? The APEX team has done one better with Font APEX. Visit apex.oracle.com/ut to get a detailed view of all the Universal Theme and Font APEX has to offer. A button generator? With ANIMATED icons? Squeeeee!!! Need I say more? I don’t think so..
You must also visit apex.oracle.com/lowcode to get a better sense of how quick and easy the team has made it for a developer with little more than an idea, to deliver a fully functional application complete with access control, feedback, user profile management, activity monitor, home page, and much, much more, in a matter of seconds. Don’t want to be looking up syntax for constraints, foreign keys, inserting dummy data for your great ideas? Use Quick SQL to easily generate code using simple to learn short codes.
Basically, this session demonstrated how, with VERY little code, you can knock your customers’ socks off and deliver feature-rich, beautiful applications in a matter of minutes. Ok, let’s be fair and call it hours.
After the keynote, I was full of the warm and fuzzies, eager to learn more.
And then it happened. Vincent Morneau presented his thoughts on Modern Javascript in APEX.
Ok, kidding. But only just.
Vincent is Lead Front-End at Insum Solutions, so let’s just say he knows his stuff. He walked us through his thoughts on jQuery, discussed synchronous and asynchronous execution, the Promises construct, aaaaand… I’ll just stop there. It was a highly technical talk aimed (I think) at extremely proficient javascript developers that want and need to take their APEX apps to the next level.
And that is what I loved about the day, and what I absolutely love about developing with Oracle APEX:
There really is something for every level of developer, and it just depends on how far you want and need to take things. Is it fair to call Oracle APEX low code? I believe it is, absolutely. The wizard-driven interface, use of Universal Theme and it’s unlimited customization options are there make our lives easier.
But do you want or need to deliver knockout applications (shoutout to Jorge Rimblas for his talk on Knockout.js and how to integrate it into your APEX applications), and take things beyond the simple (yet powerful) Dynamic Actions? You absolutely can and must, and at this point, the sky is the limit.
If you need any further proof, the Hackathon Projects that were presented sealed the deal.
–> An app to track bear sightings using OpenCV? APEX has you covered. (Monty, I agree with you, that animal looked bad#@$, I’d call it a bear too)
–> An app to measure SENTIMENT across your Social Media feeds? APEX has you covered
–> Restaurant Management? Yep.
Having worked and developed with APEX since 2004, this tool and the team that develop it never cease to amaze me, and I very much look forward to the exciting things ahead.
