ODTUG KScope14 Sunday APEX Symposium

The ODTUG Kscope conference always starts with a full day symposium. There are several specialized tracks going on, and I attended the APEX track (mainly).
The room was packed, I would estimate around a 175 delegates.

Joel Kallman started the day with an overview of the history of APEX, including a video of Steve Balmer being very enthousiastic about APEX. He also told a bit about the background and how some features evolved throughout the years, like Themes and lessons learned with the packaged applications.
Joel showed a couple of videos demonstating the Page Designer vs. the current wizard driven style of development. Loved the new video with the song "Everything is Awesome" to show of the productivity-boost by using the Page Designer in APEX 5.0.
Deployment also gets easier with APEX 5. Now you can associate the database objects with your application. The DDL is then generated, so you don't have to go to external tools to get the DDL.
Joel also shared a story on the usage of APEX as mission critical application. There was a large customer who experienced a production outage on a mission critical application after an upgrade. Turned out to be a database bug (outline),but it shows that APEX is being used by large organizations and in mission critical applications.
One of the last things Joel shared was that APEX will get more marketing in the future to get more companies using APEX.
Next up Patrick Wolf about the Page Designer. The demo's that Patrick did really showed how the Page Designer improves developer productivity.

After lunch Shakeeb Rahman gave some insight in the process that was taken by the redesign of APEX 5. He also spend a good amount on the Universal Theme, especially on Theme Styles and Template Options.
Without touching any HTML create a new look for your applications by using Template Options, very flexibel. Just by changing some options, you can change your applications dramatically
Font Awesome is included standard, 400 icons to choose from which can be easily incorporated. For now there is no quick-pick available, but a future release might include that as well.
All the templates and regions will be shown in a sample application,like the eight permutations of a list template. Unfortunately this sample application is not yet available.
With Theme Styles it simply a flip of a switch to change the color scheme of your application. Currently Universal Theme 42 comes with Blue (Default) and Red.
One more thing: Universal Theme Roller, and again the song "Everything is Awesome" is played.
The Universal Theme Roller works (more or less) like the jQuery Themeroller, but now on your own application. Of course Shakeeb picked Orange for the demo. The changes made in the Universal Theme Roller popup where shown live in the application (using Less) and the setting stored in the browser.
The CSS can be saved to a file and included in your application. Hopefully there will be a possibility to save the CSS directly in your application.
The Universal Theme Roller is not available in the EA2, but they are working hard on it to include this.
Jason Straub did a presentation on APEX and the Multitenant Architecture of the 12c Oracle Database. This session was at the same time that the USA played Portugal in the world cup, still the room was quite busy.
The session started with an overview of the Multitenant Architecture, followed by all the different options that you have were to install APEX. There are a lot of different scenarios with copying and moving PDBs between different Oracle 12c databases. Thankfully Oracle provides a lot of scripts which help you with all of these scenario's.
And that wraps up the first day of ODTUG KScope14.