Here’s my first contribution to the annual ODC Appreciation Day that was initiated by Tim Hall three years ago.

The product feature that I’d like to pay special tribute to this year is Oracle Multimedia (OMM). By now, I believe most would have heard that OMM has been deprecated. Mike Dietrich made special mention of it in a blog post earlier this year, with some clarity as to exactly when we can expect to see this useful feature go away for good.

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At Kscope17, I presented a session on various techniques for capturing and manipulating images. For those of who attend either in-person or the follow-up webinar, you might recall I briefly talked about image recognition and how they can be integrated with an Oracle Application Express solution using third-party JavaScript libraries.

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It’s not unusual for an established principal investigator (PI) to have desks and shelves full of books, journal articles, grant applications, graduate student theses etc. Often, they’d also have a mountain of such material in electronic form and stored on desktop hard drives that sometimes get forgotten. It takes an extremely good memory to remember which articles are relevant to a particular keyword you might be interested in.

Thankfully, there’s Oracle Text (and Oracle Application Express (APEX)) to keep you sane!

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In a flash, it has been almost three years since I left the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, so it’s no surprise that a recent tweet caught my eye and tugged the memory chord. I was introduced to Oracle Application Express (APEX) on August 26, 2010. A year (and a major release) later, I had the opportunity to demonstrate it’s capabilities with proof that it could help improve productivity in our research centre. As a sidenote, back then, attendees receive DVDs full of developer software goodies. APEX however, didn’t need much, just check out the hands-on lab requirements below.

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ICYMI (in case you missed it), a team from Oracle has been hard at work these few months churning out a bunch of Vagrant configuration files and scripts that help you provision some really cool virtual machines (VM), powered by Oracle Enterprise Linux. At the time of writing, here are some of the cool VMs you can build:

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That’s right! Here’s the customary post-Kscope article. This year though, is one Kscope to remember! Along with other Oracle Application Express (APEX) community members, I had the surprise honour of joining the ranks of the Oracle ACE Program. And so I wanted to start off by first thanking newly-minted Oracle ACE Director Opal Alapat. Last year, I had deep suspicions that she was responsible for my ODTUG Volunteer Award. Then came the ACE Associate nomination.

Opal, if you are reading this: THANK YOU!

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Updated June 4, 2018

• Added settings for social sign-in with Microsoft OAuth2.

The much anticipated Oracle Application Express version 18.1 was announced on May 24, 2018. Since early this year Monty Latiolais has been posting a monthly series of blog posts on Power Ranking Oracle APEX 18.1 New Features. My personal favourite is Social Login, but unfortunately it never made it to the top, even though it should!

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In a previous article, I had demonstrated how one could use Vagrant to deploy an OXAR virtual machine directly to Linode.

With Digital Ocean (DO) lowering their prices to match Linode’s, I thought it would help the community if I created a similar set of instructions to deploy OXAR on DO. I took this a step further and have provided a branch on the Github repository with a modified Vagrantfile.

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ICYMI, early access for Oracle Application Express was opened for workspace requests erlier this month. Like every other APEX fan out there, I was of course eager to get my hands dirty. Guess what was the first upcoming feature I took for a test drive?

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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?

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