APEX Alpe Adria is regional a Oracle APEX conference organized by APEX enthusiasts from Slovenia, Croatia and Austria. Since 2018, they have joined efforts and hosted this conference on a yearly basis (except 2020 and 2021), every year becoming more and more successful. This year’s edition took place on April 21 in Zagreb, Croatia, and gathered 250 attendees from 19 countries!
Many of the speakers from the conference were Oracle ACEs, so today we would like to highlight their sessions and see the conference through their eyes, because they sent us lots of pictures! Based on their feedback, it was an exciting APEX conference, all packed in one day, including a nice party by and for the community.
Dimitri Gielis, Oracle ACE Director
Dimitri is the founder and CEO of United Codes, a company specializing in Oracle Application Express. He’s also the founder of APEX Office Print (AOP), APEX Office Edit (AOE), APEX Media Extension (AME), APEX Project Eye (APE) and Plug-ins Pro. Dimitri is a frequent presenter at all the major Oracle User Group conferences, and received several awards, including Oracle APEX Developer of the Year.
During APEX Alpe Adria, Dimitri hosted two sessions:
-
Building a search engine for your APEX app
In APEX 22.2, a new component called Search Configurations arrived in Shared Components. This can be referenced from Search regions to add declarative searches in your application. This new search becomes very powerful with Oracle Text which is pre-defined.
-
Generating, Viewing, and Editing documents in APEX
Dealing with Office documents or PDFs and wondering how to get the most out of them in Oracle APEX? This session shows how you can use APEX Office Print (AOP) and APEX Office Edit (AOE) in Oracle APEX. Generating documents based on a template you create yourself, without ever leaving your APEX app, isn’t a dream any longer, but a reality!
Lino Schildenfeld, Oracle ACE Pro
Lino is an Oracle APEX consultant with 15+ years of experience. He is AUSOUG Connect APEX content chair, webinar organizer, speaker at numerous conferences, and an APEX blogger. Here is what he presented:
-
JavaScript in APEX for PL/SQL developers
For some reason Oracle developers either love JavaScript or we try to avoid using/learning it. This is across the board first hand experience. In this session we will try to look into pure concepts, clarify, close this gap and show why we all should be opened to using it.
Niall Mc Phillips, Oracle ACE Pro
Niall is an Oracle PL/SQL and APEX expert who has been using PL/SQL web technologies since 1995 and Oracle APEX since 2005. He is the organiser of the Swiss Oracle APEX Meetup group and has presented conferences on APEX, Oracle Multimedia, Oracle Text, and more.
He had two sessions at APEX Alpe Adria:
-
Getting to grips with JSON in the database
With Oracle 21c and 23c, JSON in the database is now a reality. Mixed relational-JSON databases are on the verge of becoming mainstream.
In this session, using practical examples in the Oracle Cloud, he presents: generating JSON objects from relational data using SQL and PL/SQL, using JSON objects in PL/SQL, presenting JSON objects as relational, manipulating and updating JSON objects from PL/SQL and indexing JSON data.
-
APEX security scanning – what can we learn from it?
He explores options on latest version of APEX SERT and APEX Sec tools and sees how these can help us in understanding of core APEX Security flaws we as developers open during everyday development life cycles. Presentation is demo-based and is intended for audience of all levels.
Plamen Mushkov, Oracle ACE Associate
Plamen has over 13 years of experience as an Oracle PL/SQL and APEX developer, having created applications for the financial industry. He is passionate about Oracle APEX and loves exploring all the features of the Oracle Database and APEX new releases.
-
The customer is happy… and they want more. Here is what we did and why
A holistic discussion of the platform design and development decisions that were made to build a modern customer portal for mobile and desktop in APEX. He shows the focus on the strengths of APEX for this project and the decision-making process for when they deviated from standard APEX components and methods.
Richard Martens, Oracle ACE Director
Richard has been involved in information technology for more than 22 years. He has been responsible for major European multilingual websites and has been working with the Oracle database since 2000. With APEX, he combines the things he loves most: the Oracle database and web technologies. Richard is a board member of the smart4apex cooperative.
Here are his sessions:
-
APEX, PLSQL and RESTful services I: Publishing Secure Services
When designing and creating Restful services we should start with security in mind.
That should definitely not stop at creating a client-ID and client-Secret. Sure they are the first hurdle in strengthening your services.
Oracle APEX offers role-based authorisation on components. You can hide and prevent certain components from being displayed or executed.
This functionality can (and should) also be applied to ORDS services. This session explains and shows best-practices when publishing with security and authorisation in mind.
-
APEX, PLSQL and RESTful services II: Consuming Secure Services
Consuming Restful services can be done in a number of ways.
All of these techniques have advantages and disadvantages. Some will fit better in your project than others.
This session will show a number of techniques to make Restful HTTP requests.
It will also show different techniques on interpreting the data that the services offer.
And because we promised you some images, here they are – many thanks to all the ACEs mentioned above for sending through their photos!
Last, but not least, a big “thank you” to all the organizers and the speakers for a successful event! And thank you to the ACEs and our colleagues who sent us the photos for this article!
Looking forward for APEX Alpe Adria 2024!