Scott Spendolini's Blog

I'm excited to announce that Sumner Technologies, LLC in conjunction with ODTUG will be sponsoring a 2 or 3 day ApEx Training Conference sometime in early 2007. This training conference will be held in conjunction with Steven Feuerstein's PL/SQL conference. ( http://oracleplsqlprogramming.com/opp2005.php ) Very few details have been worked out yet - heck, we don't even have a real name! What we do know is that we're targeting sometime in February 2007, most likely in San Francisco. The conference will also have some members of the Oracle ApEx Development team participating. I do not know how much it will cost at this point, either. The format will likely be 1/3 lecture, 2/3 hands-on training. We have not finalized a list of topics yet. Please reply on this OTN Thread and let us know what you'd like to spend some time on - from themes to security, or anything in between. Our thought was to cater to the more advanced users of ApEx, but I'd be interested to see ...

Warning to those easily offended: There's a bad word on the following link. Don't say that I didn't warn you! I stumbled upon this little gem: Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design I thought about a few recent projects, and it's scary how accurate it is!

This photo was taken outside my house, just across the street: I've been told he's been up there for some time now, and when the wind blows down, you get the smell to prove it.

Today was the 1st day of ODTUG where I did something other than speak for 5 minutes or down a couple of beers. I hopped on the Metro from Vienna ( Virginia, not Austria ) and was downtown well before the general sessions started. Unfortunately, I had to miss them, as I needed the time to polish off my presentation for Wednesday, "You can't do THAT with a Browser!" I led a panel of myself and three others (Michael Snyder & Greg Jarmiolowski from CASETech, and Patrick Cimolini from the Cayman Islands Government) on Application Express. We played to a room of about 40 or so people, and took questions right until the end. Perhaps Patrick's experiences with ApEx were the most impressive. From seeing a couple of my presentations last year, he was able to take the idea of using ApEx back to the Caymans, train his staff, and deploy 3-4 production applications in well under a year's time frame - all with no previous Oracle experience! There were some other great...

The Oracle Development Tools Users Group (ODTUG) just went live with their new site, just about a week before their 2006 Conference . The new site is, of course, running on Oracle Application Express, and is one of my first Internet deployed sites. Over 1,500 documents (presentations, white papers & technical journal articles) are indexed by Oracle Text and available to Full ODTUG Members on the site. Associate Membership is free, and will give you access to a limited number of these documents. The content of the site is managed by the ODTUG folks via a separate ApEx application. This way, they can make changes at any time, and do not require any access to the ApEx development environment. Everything from managing the Banner Ads to adding & managing content is done via this Administrative Console. Check it out and hopefully I'll see some of you at the conference next week!

If you know a thing or two about Football - and by Football, I really mean Soccer - you can win a free year of ApEx hosting, thanks to John Scott of Shellprompt . Dimitri Gielis has put together quite an impressive World Cup 2006 "bracket" application , hosted by Shellprompt. All you need to do is sign up (it's free), enter your picks (no money is exchanged), and go cheer on your favorite team! Drinking a pint of beer from the team's home countries during the match is optional. XM is broadcasting all of the games this year, in both English and Spanish, so I'll be sure to tune in now and then.