Tomorrow and the day after there’s an APEX SIG meeting in Quebec and Montreal. David Peake will talk about the benefits of the next release of Oracle Application Express, 4.0, for mission critical systems. Because David is talking, this probably will be a well visited event in both Quebec and in Montreal. Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard and his colleagues will have their own session during this Oracle APEX Special Interest Group meet up.

At their booth, Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard will make a draw from business cards people turn in to win the best price ever to be imagined: my book! Because Louis-Guillaume helped with the book by doing some of the tough reviews I had to wrestle trough, he has a great insight in what the book offers to developers who want to convert from Forms to APEX.

I really do think it’s a great initiative and am curious how the day was and who ended up winning one of these great prices!

Yesterday, at Oracle OpenWorld, David Peake gave the presentation on Oracle Forms to Application Express conversion. For me, as author of a book about the subject, there wasn’t much to learn over there, but it was great to see that a lot of people are interested in the subject. David and Hilary Farrell showed that the most important thing, as I personally have mentioned before, is that you can manage large conversion projects inside of the tool.

David also pointed out that there wasn’t any chance of conversion in a one-click notion, but it’s good that that’s not there. When we take a look at real conversion, as I did in my own presentation on monday, productivity and project management on a Forms to APEX project, are the largest challenges. It’s not the complexity of the Forms itself, that’s just the cause of the problems that are to be expected.

After David’s session I had some great chats with people that are experimenting with conversion from Oracle Forms to different platforms and technologies. And, you know it, I personally prefer Application Express as the next Forms. If only it was because the technologies are very alike and people can start developing APEX within a few days.

After an exiting day at Oracle OpenWorld yesterday with announcements about a new Oracle Partner program, the new Exadata Database machine, some toying and hassling towards Big Blue (IBM) and numerous drinks and chats during the Connect opening ceremony, we arrived at day two of Oracle OpenWorld 2009. For me, it promises to be a big one. A few months ago, as most of you know, my book on Oracle Forms to Application Express came out.

Today is the day I can finally show off a hard day’s (or: six months) of work to the public. At one ‘o clock I have a special session at the Oracle Unconference in Room 3. This is located at the third floor of Moscone West. During this session I will talk about productivity in a Forms to APEX conversion project. How can we make sure this type of project will be successful? And how can we track our progress and deliver the application without having to worry about unforeseen problems? You’re welcome to join me, all Oracle OpenWorld attendees can go to the Unconference sessions.

At three ‘o clock the next big thing happens, at least for me, at the Oracle Book Store on the second floor of Moscone West I will have a signing session of my book. Really am wondering who is reading (and / or buying) my book. How much interest is there in Oracle Forms to Application Express conversion? Feel a little bit weird about doing this, but we’ll have a blast!

See you at Moscone West this afternoon!

Next week, on tuesday the 29th, I will be hosting a special night for the Oracle Gebruikersclub Holland (Oracle Users Group The Netherlands) about Oracle Application Express Forms Conversion. During this session I will be talking about the bigger question in Forms Conversion: How do we actually do a successful and affordable conversion project?

The tooling is, of course, one large part, but certainly not the biggest. But we can use this tooling Oracle provides for us to create and manage our project, to make sure we don’t overlook anything and to ensure we make the right choices. On this 29th of september I will try to show what a successful project means and when we know we are managing it correctly. This means that it will be an interesting night for both technicians and the people responsible for the project.

A few moments ago I got the news that already 75 people signed up for the session, this means that we only have room for 25 more… So sign up, while you still can!

On tuesday the 29th I will be hosting a special theme meeting for the Oracle Gebruikersclub Holland (OGh) at the headquarters of Oracle The Netherlands in De Meern about Oracle Forms to APEX conversion. The central question we will try to answer during this evening-session is ‘How can I successfully do an Oracle Forms to Application Express Conversion project?’.

This means that I will not only discuss and show how the Forms Converter in APEX 3.2 works, but that we will also discuss and look into ways to do these kinds of projects successfully. What does it take to do a project? What are the problems and challenges we will face during such a project and how can we overcome them. In which ways can we make sure we do the right thing and don’t overlook anything. How can we make these projects small and understandable and how can we create the right balance between conversion and redesign?

As a member of the OGh you can enroll for this session on their website.

The Dutch based computer and software related online bookstore computer collectief just put my book online a few days ago. Comcol.nl offers, since 1979, over 10.000 computer and software books and has a lot of knowledge about combinations of books. For most of the Dutch people in software development comcol.nl is a familiar name. That they put my book in their collection feels like an honor, because they tend to put books in their store only if they are convinced of the value of it. Together with the mention of my book in the Amazon.com list and the extract on themeswiki.org completes the picture that over nine months of hard work really got appreciated. This gives me enough motivation to keep investing time and effort in writing and talking about subjects like this.

On the Themeswiki.org website they have put an extract of one of my chapters in my book ‘Oracle Application Express Forms Conversion’ online. First I was a bit confused; is this an example of book-piracy? Do these guys just take a book out of the shelves and copy and paste a bit onto their website? Until I noticed that the wiki page mentioned me and Packt Publishing as the copyright owners. With a quick email I got the confirmation that it was legit. Although the title is a bit weird, (Customizing APEX using APEX? What’s that about?) it can be a very helpful part of the book. It describes the actions you need to take after conversion of you Oracle Forms applications into Application Express. Some actions are still needed to make you application look good! The wiki describes some of the steps you can take in order to make the pages look nice, like the menu on the home page, the lists of values and the titles of pages. Of course, it’s just a small part of an actual Forms Conversion project. In the book itself there are a lot more steps described and on formsconversion.nl we can discuss a lot more information!

Yesterday one of my colleagues has forwarded me an email that he got from amazon.com. In this email the largest web based bookstore in the world created a lot of awareness about my book. This is, of course, very cool for me, and the amazon.com customer. Below you can read the email they have send him:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated “Pro Oracle Application Express (Expert’s Voice in Oracle)” by John Scott have also purchased “Oracle Application Express Forms Converter” by Douwe Pieter van den Bos. For this reason, you might like to know that “Oracle Application Express Forms Converter” is now available. You can order yours for just $35.99 by following the link below.

Oracle Application Express Forms Converter

Douwe Pieter van den Bos

To learn more about Oracle Application Express Forms Converter, please visit the following page at
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847197760/ref=snp_dp

The website I mentioned earlier is build to support the book that just got published last week. The FormsConversion website is a place where people interested in the subject of Forms Conversion Projects can communicate with each other. It’s not a forum, it’s not a blog; it’s a community that has been build to interact. So I will personally not post anything on this site, but certainly will help people with any struggles they encounter, I will not work on administrating and moderating a blog and forum that already exists, but I will provide and participate in a platform where we can share knowledge, ideas, experience and fun. This is probably the most important part: the website will go on where the book needed to end. The website will be a place where we can share these things with each other. It’s not about hands-on knowledge, but about best-practices. Go to the FormsConversion website, register as a user, you can edit your profile, create a group or just join a existing one, add your twitter to your profile, you blog, start a discussion, post comments, become friends, share files, photo’s, presentations, everything you want. We now have the possibility to really interact with each other, not just tell each other what to do. Have fun!

We all love quick. That means, I love it when stuff goes fast, I’m supposed to be a bit impatient. That’s also one of the reasons why I love Lean. This, and the fact that it just works better, defines how I started off the new website to support questions about my book, discussions and success (or: unsuccessful) stories about Forms Conversion. I thought about it and decided that it would be best to have a platform on which readers, users, everyone who wanted, could interact with each other in order to learn, understand and grow in knowledge. This meant we needed a website that works like a social platform, not a static blog, forum or such. I found it and went along. Because the functionality is most important and I personally really believe in Agile software development, I just put the first iteration ‘Live’. This is the living proof that a website doesn’t need to take months to be implemented, not weeks of discussion on what functionality needs to look what way. I know this website isn’t the prettiest girl in class, but she certainly works it out like the cheerleaders in the front row. The coming weeks I will put time in it, but that will come as it comes. Please provide me with feedback and tips on how to improve this. But remember: everyone can create a website in a week, with no more than 6 or 7 hour of work in it.