ODTUG Kscope 2014: Wednesday

The morning started nice, ODTUG organized breakfast with country themes. There were tables for Australia, Canada and The Netherlands. If you are Dutch you might have expected to have hagelslag or cheese, this was not the case. It was a nice and hearty American style breakfast, eggs, bacon, potatoes.
The first session of the day that I went to was by Nathan Catlow on Oracle APEX Security, an interesting topic.
Nathan pointed out that by far the most common security has to do with Cross Site Scripting (XSS). This can lead to data protection issues, account compromise and attack of other applications.
Regarding injection attacks, Nathan pointed out that substitution variables (&P...) in comments are also prone for Injection attacks.
Very good advise to upgrade to at least APEX 4.2.1. There are vulnerabilities in the APEX framework which are fixed in this release.
The next session was another one on APEX Security by Tim Austwick, this time with a focus on SQL Injection.
Lots of practical information regarding SQL Injections. After listening to this, it makes you wonder how secure applications are. On the other hand it is good to known that I implement loads of their advise already. :)
"Pins Polygons and Perspectives: Visualizing Geographic Data in APEX" by Christoph Ruepprich was next.
One of the mapping apis that I never heard of was LeafletJs. Looks really nice, yet another thing to put on my to-do list.
After lunch I attended Jonathan Lewis' session on the Cost Based Optimizer for Developers. The session was very well attended and the content was superb.
According to Jonathan Oracle must obey your index hints, but only if you get it absolutely correct. If you tell the wrong path, you left out information (hint missing) or if you tell Oracle to do something "illegal" than Oracle will not follow your hints.
John Scott did a presentation about NodeJs. You can expect to see a lot of demos when John does a presentation and this time was no exception. Besides the installation of NodeJs, he also installed node-oracle for the connection to the database.
Demos included Grunt, Mail-listener2, Officegen and pdfkit. In one word: awesome.
The last session of the day: Dimitri Gielis on his way of developing APEX applications. A very useful tip that Dimitri shared was to create a template application so you can have a nice starting point for the application. You define the basic building blocks (like global page, lists, administration page, include font-awesome) and export the application. Then go to the internal workspace and add this application as template application.

Tonight there is the traditional party, this time it will be at the Seattle EMP (experience music project). Just realized that there is an Oracle link there... (emp as the table in the Scott demo schema - just the geek in me I guess). ODTUG has a reputation to uphold regarding the parties, so I expect a lot from it.