Old Handwritten Book by Kiwihug}

It's funny how JavaScript's 20th birthday was not as spectacular as it's shorter-named bretheren. When I first learned JavaScript in the late 1990's, I wasn't too excited as I was about Java, for two reasons most web developers know about JavaScript: weakly typed and non-standard browser implementation. The latter has been addressed by ECMA, but does that mean our code can now be more predictable and consistent?

The beautiful City of Vancouver (in British Columbia) played host to the North American Node.js Interactive 2017 conference earlier this month. That close to my backyard, it was simply inexcusable not to attend! I wasted no time in getting the support of my employer and am glad I did. Here's a little summary of my experience and what I learned at the two-day conference to share.

Earlier this year (2017), I had the privilege to share with the community, some of the work and experiences I gained helping to build some of the blocks that form the foundation of apex.world. In my presentations, I had shared some of the challenges I had integrating RESTful web services with Oracle Application Express (APEX). A crippling issue involved the use of Oracle Database Express Edition (Oracle XE) and communicating with web services over a secured protocol. The by-product of that experience led to the development of a simple Node.js application, which I named Suez.

Running a production application on an Oracle APEX instance? Then read on!

Making sure your application is up and running 24/7 doesn't need to be a daunting task, plus it may not even cost you a dime! UptimeRobot provides 50 free monitors that can poll your servers using the smallest interval of 5 minutes. You can easily monitor websites and receive multi-channel notifications of downtime. No excuse!

Before I begin, I just wanted to be absolutely clear that this post has nothing to do with Apple's nifty tool for sending out large email attachments.

In my previous post, I shared an approach for creating your very own Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance on a small budget. Briefly, the solution involves using Vagrant to create a very affordable virtual machine (VM) on Linode's pool of servers and run the OXAR build script, to setup the APEX instance very quickly and painlessly.

However, all that power (and savings) comes with great responsibilty.