Dietmar Aust

Back in 2008 I was invited by Scott Spendolini to speak about my experiences with Oracle APEX at the German telecom shops at the KScope conference in New Orleans.

It was a truly great experience. 

At that time the system I had built was one of the larger deployments of Oracle APEX known in the community serving 6.000 users in the 800 telecom shops in Germany with 400.000 hits per day on the system.

Not only could I showcase what I had built with Oracle APEX 2.2 but I could even get more connected with the Oracle APEX community. It was awesome.

I had the chance to meet many people from the Oracle forums in person, like Scott Spendolini, Patrick Wolf, Dimitri Gielis, Roel Hartman, Karen Cannell, Anton Nielsen, John Scott but also many people from the APEX team itself like Mike Hichwa, Joel Kallman, Carl Backstrom, David Peake, Scott Spadafore and many others.

On this conference you will certainly meet the most members of the APEX team itself. It is a great opportunity to get in touch with the people in person ... this just makes a HUGE difference. So whenever you might need support later on ... your name will be known and people understand that you contribute just as well. It makes a difference !

From that time on in 2008 I got hooked and got more and more involved in the community. Each project became an opportunity to research yet another interesting topic for the next conference.

And I presented each year (I missed Long Beach ... what a bummer :( ) until now ... and I will submit again this week ... because the deadline is coming close ( 14.10.2016 ) !!!

This conference sets itself apart not only by the extremely high class content but also by the social activities, there is soo much going on. They always select really nice locations, everybody is relaxed and has so much fun. The APEX presentations are typically well attended ... even more than from the other tracks.

I can only encourage you to submit your presentation since the deadline is coming up soon: 14.10.2016 !!!

In order to submit a really compelling presentation, please read up these posts for guidance:

• http://spendolini.blogspot.com/2013/11/presentation-advice.html
• http://www.odtug.com/p/bl/et/blogid=1&blogaid=497
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140630141618-4832037-how-to-get-your-conference-abstract-accepted
• http://www.pythian.com/blog/concrete-advice-for-abstract-writers/
• https://chadthompson.me/2012/12/how-to-submit-winning-presentations/

Hi everybody,

I just came back from the DOAG APEX Connect 2016 conference in Berlin ... very nice location, great content and the wonderful APEX community to hang out with ... always a pleasure. This time we felt a little pinkish ;)

As promised, you can download the slides and the demo script (as is) from my site. They are in German, but I will give the talk in June at KScope 2016 in Chicago in English just as well.

Instructions are included.

See you at KScope in Chicago, #letswreckthistogether .

Cheers and enyoy!

Hi everybody,

I just came back from the DOAG APEX Connect 2016 conference in Berlin ... very nice location, great content and the wonderful APEX community to hang out with ... always a pleasure. This time we felt a little bit pink ;)

As promised, you can download the slides and the demo script (as is) from my site.

Instructions are included.

See you at KScope in Chicago, #letswreckthistogether .

Cheers and enyoy!

Hi everybody,

I just came back from the apex.world conference in Rotterdam ... very nice location, great content and the wonderful APEX community to hang out with ... always a pleasure.

As promised, you can download the slides and the demo script (as is) from my site.

Instructions are included.

See you at APEX Connect in Berlin or KScope in Chicago, #letswreckthistogether .

Cheers and enyoy!

Oracle hat zusammen mit der DOAG das Webinar "Modern Application Development" organisiert, darin habe ich auch ein Webinar (auf deutsch) zum Thema "Oracle als REST-Service mit ORDS – So geht‘s" beigesteuert.

Die Folien dazu findet Ihr hier.

Viele Grüße,
~Dietmar.

Hi guys,

here you can find the slide, the config files and installation steps for my presentation at the DOAG conference in Nürnberg on 18.11.2015:

http://www.opal-consulting.de/downloads/presentations/2015-11-DOAG-ORDS-Setup/

Enjoy!

Cheers,
~Dietmar.

Hi guys,

today was the deadline for uploading the four-page abstract / summary of my presentation at the German Oracle conference in Nürnberg:



If you still have to upload yours, hurry up ... only a few hours left ;).

You can have a look here (it is German though ;). 

See you in Nürnberg in November.

Cheers,
~Dietmar.

Hi guys,

in June I gave a talk at the ODTUG KScope conference regarding the optimal setup of Oracle ORDS for Oracle Application Express: Setting Up the Oracle APEX Listener (Now ORDS) for Production Environments

You can access the slides certainly through the ODTUG site. They have even recorded the presentation and made it available to their members.

This seems to be a good investment for $99 per year for a paid membership, because now you also have access to the other content from the ODTUG conferences. I am not affiliated with ODTUG but all I can say is that the KScope conference is the best place for an Oracle developer to learn and connect with the best folks in the industry.

For everybody else who is not (yet) an ODTUG member you can download my slides and the config file here: http://www.opal-consulting.de/downloads/presentations/2015-06-ODTUG-KScope-ORDS-in-production/

Cheers and all the best,
~Dietmar.

P.S.: The configuration is based on the version 3.0.0 of ORDS. You should definitely move to 3.0.1 which is currently available.

But on the other hand I was once again thrown of by another problem with version 3.0.1 running the schema creation scripts for the ORDS schema users (ords_metadata and ords_public_user) .

Thus I have come to the conclusion it is best to do it step by step, the database users have to be created first. You can extract the installation scripts from the ords.war just as well:
- http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E56351_01/doc.30/e56293/install.htm#CHDDIFEC
- http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E56351_01/doc.30/e56293/install.htm#CHDFJHEA

Hi guys,

I have just finished my presentation on the smaller new features of Oracle Application Express 5.0 here at the APEX Connect conference in Düsseldorf ... it was a blast :).

You can download the slides and the sample application here:

Im Rahmen der APEX Summer School 2015 ( Twitter Handle: #apexsummer2015 ) werden wir 9 kostenlose Webinare zum Thema APEX 5 mit den Experten aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum durchführen:



Vielen Dank an Carsten Czarski für die Einladung und Organisation! Nicht zuletzt auch vielen Dank für die klasse Homepage des Webinars, alles 100% APEX 5 out-of-the-box! Ein einfaches und dennoch wirkungsvolles Beispiel dafür, was standardmäßig mit APEX 5 möglich ist:

APEX 5 ist seit letzter Woche produktiv verfügbar und kann hier zum heruntergeladen werden.

Es gibt noch weitere APEX Veranstaltungen, schaut doch mal rein.

Es wird ein heißer APEX - Sommer ;).

Viel Vergnügen,
~Dietmar.

Hi guys,

I had a great time at APEX World in Rotterdam, it was a wonderful event. I could meet up with my friends and learn a few new tricks, too :).

Here are the slides from my presentation about the many smaller new features of Oracle APEX 5.0. And I could only cram like half of the good stuff that I found into this 45 min. session.

About 70 people attended the session and I sure hope they will use some of the features I presented.

Once I clean up my demo application, I will make it available, too.

Cheers,
~Dietmar.

You are using the free tool JasperReportsIntegration from Opal Consulting and you might be struggling with setting it up and integrating it into you own APEX applications?

Now you have somebody to talk to!

Already several years ago I have built this software for my own reporting needs in a project for a client of mine.

Then I wrapped it up, documented it and gave it to the incredible and wonderful Oracle APEX community to help them with their reporting needs as well.

As time went by it would become more difficult for me to make the free time to answer the different questions, keep developing the software and adding new features.

In order to move the free tool forward but also because some people requested a professional support offering, I have finally created one.


You will get:

• Priority email support,
• can schedule support calls via Skype
• and can participate in the monthly (1 hour) conference call to ask all kinds of questions

If you are interested, you will find more details here: http://www.opal-consulting.de/site/products/

So, this is your chance to contribute back and help me to further support the APEX community.

Also, when enough people have signed up for this support offering, I will create a professional version with thrilling advanced features, so that it will be able to use the same APEX integration as the BI Publisher, i.e. using report queries and report templates (not based on RTF but on JRXML).

Hope you find it interesting.


Let me know what you think.

Regards,
~Dietmar.

I have just posted an answer to a question that seems like a bug in the JasperReportsIntegration toolkit, that you have to use absolute paths for referencing images or subreports, which is typically a bad thing.

Don't know exactly why it doesn't work, but there is a workaround for that: http://www.opal-consulting.de/site/jasperreportsintegration-full-path-requirement-and-workaround/

Hope that helps,
~Dietmar.

I have been blogging at daust.blogspot.com for quite some years now ... and many people have rather preferred wordpress to blogspot, I can now understand why :).

It is quite flexible and easy to use and there are tons of themes available ... really cool ones.

The main decision to host my own wordpress instance was in the end motivated by different means. I have created two products and they needed a platform to be presented:

• OPAL:XP
• OPAL:XE

First I wanted to buy a new theme from themeforest and build an APEX theme for that ... but this is a lot of work.

I then decided to host my content using wordpress since I have already bought a new theme: http://www.kriesi.at/themedemo/?theme=enfold

And this one has a really easy setup procedure for wordpress and comes with a ton of effects and wizards, cool page designer, etc.

Hopefully this will get mit motivated to post more frequently ... we will see ;).

Cheers,
~Dietmar.

The Oracle APEX listener is one possible gateway to run Oracle Application Express besides the Oracle http server (OHS), the embedded pl/sql gateway (which is the http server included in the Oracle database as part of the XML DB) and other open source alternatives.

Being implemented as a J2EE application it needs a servlet container to be deployed in. Finally, due to popular customer demands, the Apache Tomcat servlet container is (again) supported. Many customers are using it already for quite a while and I personally had hardly any issues with that.

When you look at the APEX listener 2.0 installation guide you will find a section on deploying to tomcat. There they talk about Apache Tomcat 7 but it seems like version 6 is also supported, I have found the information on Kris Rices blog, he is the development manager of the APEX listener.

This is not really NEW news ;), but I personally had not seen this information before.

Cheers and enjoy,
~Dietmar.

Would you like to upgrade your existing JasperReportsIntegration with the 5.2.0 libraries of JasperReports?

As of now this already seems to be not the most current version, JasperReports has already moved on to 5.5.0. But since I have already created the 5.2.0 package a while ago, I might just post the instructions here. The 5.5.0 version will follow.

Here you go ...

This is an updated version of the original instructions found here: http://daust.blogspot.de/2013/01/upgrading-jasperreports-libraries-to-501.html

Step 1: Download the libary files for 5.2.0
You can download the files here:


 Step 2: Shutdown the Apache Tomcat J2EE server Step 3:  Remove the existing JasperReportsLibraries from your existing installation
Typically, after you have installed your previous version of the JasperReportsIntegration toolkit on your Apache Tomcat J2EE server, the files will be located in the directory $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/JasperReportsIntegration/WEB-INF/lib, for example version 4.7.0 of JasperReports, where $CATALINA_HOME represents the path to your installation of Tomcat.

Then you would have to remove these libraries first. In this directory you should find two files for removal: _jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.7.0.sh and _jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.7.0.cmd, for *nix or Windows respectively. For *nix systems you would have to make it executable, though, e.g.: chmod u+x _jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.7.0.sh . Then you can call it and it will remove all files for version 4.7.0. But it will NOT remove the file for the JasperReportsIntegration and all other libraries which YOU might have placed there deliberately.

You can always find the required removal scripts here: http://www.opal-consulting.de/downloads/free_tools/JasperReportsLibraries/ .

Whenever I release another package, the removal scripts for that package will be shipped as well.

Step 4: Install the new 5.2.0 libraries
Now you can just copy the new libraries from JasperReportsLibraries-5.2.0.zip into $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/JasperReportsIntegration/WEB-INF/lib.
 Step 5: Start the Apache Tomcat J2EE server again
Now you system should be upgraded to the most current JasperReports 5.2.0 !

Just drop me a note when you need updated libraries for a later JasperReports version, etc. I have scripts in place to create a new package of the libraries.

Here you can find the notes from my upgrade (4.5.0 => 4.8.0) on Linux to illustrate the process, I hope it makes sense:

**
** download the libraries from:
**  http://www.opal-consulting.de/downloads/free_tools/JasperReportsLibraries/4.8.0/JasperReportsLibraries-4.8.0.zip
** to /home/jasper/JasperReportsLibraries

cd /home/jasper
mkdir JasperReportsLibraries

** unzip them
cd JasperReportsLibraries
unzip JasperReportsLibraries-4.8.0.zip -d JasperReportsLibraries-4.8.0

** stop tomcat server
/home/jasper/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

** remove libraries of current jasper reports release
cd /home/jasper/tomcat/webapps/JasperReportsIntegration/WEB-INF/lib
chmod +x _jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.5.0.sh
dos2unix _jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.5.0.sh

./_jasper-reports-delete-libs-4.5.0.sh

** copy libraries of the new release to the WEB-INF/lib directory
cp /home/jasper/JasperReportsLibraries/JasperReportsLibraries-4.8.0/* /home/jasper/tomcat/webapps/JasperReportsIntegration/WEB-INF/lib

** restart tomcat
/home/jasper/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

Cheers,
~Dietmar.

In diesem November werden Denes Kubicek und ich wieder einen Kurs zu Oracle APEX in Bensheim abhalten:

Oracle APEX 4.2 New Features und Tipps aus der Praxis
Wir werden diesmal viel über den APEX Listener, Einsatz von jQuery und über Restful Web Services reden und natürlich, praktisch üben.

Darüber hinaus gehen wir auch das Thema Mobile Development an und geben einen Überlick über die 100+ neuen Features, die sich auch in diesem Release wieder geändert haben. Mir gefällt besonders, dass durch diese vielen kleinen Verbesserungen die Transparenz in der Applikationsentwicklung nochmals erhöht wurde.

Gerade die Packaged Applications liefern viele gute Beispiele, wie häufig verwendete Design Patterns in der Praxis moderner umgesetzt werden können.

Dieser Link informiert Sie über alle weiteren Details zum Kurs.

Viele Grüße,
~Dietmar.

Am 19.Juni 2013 findet die nächste DOAG Development Konferenz in Bonn statt, diesmal mit dem Thema:
„Agile and Beyond – Projektmanagement in der Oracle-Softwareentwicklung“Das Motto der zweiten Auflage der Community Konferenz steht fest: Die effektive Durchführung von Softwareprojekten steht thematisch im Zentrum der Konferenz für Entwickler, Softwarearchitekten und Projektleiter.

Gerade Oracle APEX eignet sich hervorragend für die agile Durchführung von Softwareprojekten, ich habe damit seit Jahren hervorragende Ergebnisse erzielt. Mit Oracle APEX kann man in extrem kurzen Iterationszyklen von 1-4 Wochen sehr beachtliche Funktionalitäten implementieren. Gerade die Lieferung von Funktionalitäten in kurzen Abständen hilft, das Vertrauen der Fachseiten zu gewinnen. Dennoch gibt es einige Fallstricke zu beachten, damit auch alles rund läuft ;).

Weitere Informationen zur Konferenz finden Sie hier.

Bitte beachten: der Frühbucher-Rabatt endet heute!

Viele Grüße,
~Dietmar.