Friday, June 27, 2008

APEX rocks --> APEX workshop @ Logica Arnhem

Well, yesterday I hosted my first APEX workshop from a teaching perspective, and I must say it is a whole different experience then being the attendee. Luckily Roel Hartman (we hosted the workshop together) and I had prepared the workshop properly.

First off, I gave a presentation about APEX. My focus was especially set on "seeing the point" about what APEX is, does and what it is intended to do. This combined with a healthy summary of features and architectures made the presentation quite long (about 50 min) but it was the minimal version, because I wanted to put so much fun stuff in that APEX has to offer. I just couldn't decide what to scrap!
I must say, the presentation went as expected, and the reaction afterwards were very positive, so thanks for the compliments.

Next up, was the workshop. We created a beginners workshop, for people who had never before worked with the magic of APEX. There was little or no experience with HTML_DB or APEX in the room among the attendees, so I was a bit nervous about the complexity of the workshop.

Apparently I forgot how easy it was to start working with APEX, because people were flying through the workshop! Luckily, somewhere in the middle they reached some more complex material, which provided the attendees with some more challenges.
The feedback we received on the workshop was again, very positive.

Finally, after some quick&clean application building, Roel gave his presentation about the ODTUG'08 Kaleidoscope where he attended earlier this month. A lot of cool new features / directions came to light, creating a bit of a buzz followed by a good discussion among the attendees.

Yes it was happening, the healthy addiction of APEX found some more hosts once more!!

This workshop created a lot of enthousiasm among the attendees, and I think almost everyone wanted a follow up workshop with more details. This is (again) a clear case of how low the threshold is that APEX has when people are just starting to create some application with it.

In case you haven't noticed yet, APEX rocks!