Okay, I have been agonizing over the past few days on what to share about my first Kscope experience.  I had originally intended to write a short post every night about the day's event but by the end of the day, it seemed my brain was fried and the posts probably would have been some nonsensical blubbering.   

I had heard many times before that Kscope is THE conference to attend if you are an Oracle APEX developer and now I can confirm that assertion.  I had wanted to go to other Kscope conferences but was never in a position or worked for a company willing to offset any of the costs of conference.  This year I decided that I would force myself to go.  I did that by submitting and having an abstract accepted to present at the conference.  

I had originally planned to make my flight plans to arrive on Sunday but found a good deal to fly in on Saturday night which made it possible to attend the full first day.

Sunday

Kscope begins with the Sunday Symposiums.  The APEX track symposium is a day dedicated to session from members from the APEX Development Team.  It seems one reason they do this is so that these highly desirable presentations are not in direct competition with other speaker presentations.  This was the first time I had attended a presentation by a current member of the APEX Team and at Kscope we had a full day of these presentations.  

The day began with a presentation from Mike Hichwa titled "Oracle Database Tools".  A few bullet points from his presentation:

  • In the early days of APEX, application development was simple.  Now application development is much more complex with the need to have security, integrations, sharing, etc.
  • He still loves to develop and pointed out some of the features of SQL Developer he developed along with some of the new packaged applications included with APEX 4.2.2.
  • Oracle's dedication to cloud computing.
  • APEX Listener - needs to be renamed so if you can think of a good name let him know.
  • Oracle Forms is not going away.
  • Oracle 12c will be the biggest (in terms of impact?) database release since Oracle 7 (and the introduction of stored procedure/packages).

Mike's presentation was followed by a presentation, "Technology for the Database Cloud" by Rick Greenwald, outlining the current state of the Oracle database cloud and its future.  Oracle believes the cloud will be "massive" and is committed to its growth and expansion.

After a short break, Shakeeb Rahman presented "Developing Great User Interface with Application Express".  Shakeeb seems to be the master of building responsive applications with APEX (and theme 25).  There is a valid emphasis that the design of the application should be considered from the start of a project and not until near the finish line.  We had lunch and then a couple more presentations, "How Do We Build the APEX Builder" by Vlad Uvarov and "How to Fully Utilize RESTful Web Services with Application Express" by John Snyders.

The final session of the day was an "Update from APEX Development" by Joel Kallman.  Joel gave a review of what the last year of APEX looked like.  Some of the things that were APEX related in the previous 12 months included:

Joel then reviewed how Oracle internally uses apex.oraclecorp.com for a multitude of APEX applications worldwide.  He had contacted various owners of the different workspaces/applications used and asked them what they used APEX for, how the work was done previously, and the benefit of using APEX.  Joel shared his results of the various applications used with the common theme that before the work was done manually and took x amount of hours, and now with the APEX application they have reduced the work required by as much as 95%.  Very informative to say the least.

Kscope, by far, is the best technical conference I have ever attended.  

Continued in KScope13 Thoughts - Part 2