Friday, July 2, 2010

Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG) Kaleidoscope 2010

The ODTUG conference (June 27 - July 1, 2010) brought many in the Oracle development community to Washington DC (my fair city) for a week of sessions, hands on labs and general socializing. Speaking with ODTUG organizers attendance was way up, even when many user group conferences are down. Speaking for myself I thought the buzz and ambiance was exceptionally positive.

For the Oracle APEX tracks the week started off well on Sunday with a full day Oracle Application Express Symposia; that walked through the process of building an application starting with the Data model, moving into application development, building plug-ins, performance tuning, user interface design, printing, security and globalization. The week continued with two full tracks dedicated to Oracle APEX, and a database track with lots of SQL, PL/SQL and SQL Developer content. It was a big success by all accounts. It is also worth noting that Symposia featured Oracle SQL Developer Data modeler, as well as Oracle SQL Developer. Both tools available on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) here.

On Monday ODTUG President Mike Riley noted that the Oracle APEX team timed the release of Oracle APEX 4.0 the week before ODTUG from maximum effect (which is true, we worked real hard to make this date). From the Oracle Database Development tools perspective Oracle APEX was the biggest draw accounting for about 28% of all sessions / events. The Oracle SQL Developer, SQL Developer Data Modeler, and SQL Developer Unit testing were also well represented with both user sessions and hands on labs.

I enjoyed, not only my keynote address which I co presented with Oracle APEX development manager Joel Kallman (which I was pleased filled two rooms to capacity), but mostly the opportunity to talk to the developers. I filled a full notebook with success stories, enhancement requests, and ideas on how we can better advance database tools. It was an international event with a large number of attendees from all over Europe.

For the Oracle APEX community attending ODTUG the talk was all about the 4.0 release; many had seen various early access releases, however many were surprised with the elegance, depth, and ease of use in dynamic actions, Interactive Reports, and Plug-ins. Many presentations highlighted the speed at which developers can create database centric applications and I attended packed (as in standing room only) presentations that highlighted team development, websheets, improved charting, RESTfull web services, and modernized user interface themes.

My congratulations and thanks to hard working organizers of this years ODTUG and I look forward to next year's ODTUG in Long Beach CA.

1 comment:

  1. Mike,
    Thank you and the entire APEX development team for all the great work in the 4.0 release as well as the presentations done as a part of ODTUG. Your team made this the most useful conference I have attended and we hope to use everything we learned in the next few months.

    A lot of us (14 developers/managers) have made nice careers working on APEX (almost 90% of the time) and we owe you and the rest of your team a lot.

    Thanks Again

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