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So I am starting an internship this week, I will be working on making some changes to an existing Oracle Apex web app which they use for tracking and metrics. In particular, they don't have very granular authorization set up, meaning that either you have full control or you don't. They want me to come up with something to set up access for non-tech users like the business, for example, and limit their rights to the system.
How hard is apex to work with? I looked into it a bit, it does seem fairly straightforward, but is there more to it that I am not aware of? Also, I am a little surprised that there is no built in functionality to let you set up complex permissions?
I've been working in Apex since August now, and did 4 years of Oracle Forms before this, so PL/SQL wasn't an issue for me. HTML and Javascript i also knew, just not as in-depth, but i believe i've picked up nicely so far.
What i'm doing at the moment is migrating a bunch of old Oracle Forms to Apex. So far my experience is that it can be very easy and fast to pump out the basics, but making your pages more dynamical or user-friendly can eat away some time. Still, the framework is very solid, save for some niggles. For example, they have a javascript api, which handles a lot like jquery. I can mostly get done what i want to, and i think the most time i've "wasted" so far, has been getting javascript code to work the way i want it.
Recently i've also been implementing some authorisation, and i must say it isn't really that hard! You can provide some authorisation schemes, and simply apply those to pages, regions or items. I of course don't know what you really mean with 'complex' permissions ;) There is always the possibility of using the APIs and do manual calls to verify authorisation.
If you're really totally new, then simply head over to apex.oracle.com, and take the 2-day developer guide to get a quick feel for the environment. You'll have to request a workspace, can do the exercises, and play around a bit.
We were looking at apex a year ago. And canceled. It's easy to make standard things, but it's not convenient to develop something specific. May be, we were looking not very properly, indeed.
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When migrating Oracle Forms and Reports, there are several options for that :
ADF
APEX
Yor suggestion ...
Which one do you think is the best in terms of business continuity and also ease of technological transition? Do you have experience in such migrations?
At the end, I would like to know if it would be necessary to migrate or just keep "Oracle Forms/Reports"
Regardless of what tool vendors might say, this is going to be an exercise in rewriting your application.
So the real questions is, why do you want to do this? Oracle are continuing to support Forms for some time yet. There are plenty of things we can do to modernize our Forms applications whilst retaining our investment in the existing software. I urge you to look at Mia Urman's presentation Give Your Forms a Facelift: Tips and Tricks for Forms UI Modernization which she gave at a UKOUG event I helped organise a couple of years ago.
If your mind is absolutely set on a re-write you'll find APEX is the easiest path for developers with a Forms/ PL/SQL background.
Update for 2018:
Oracle have been getting back behind Forms. The 12c release had over 100 new features. Okay, some are quite minor but it's a clear statement of intent. Find out more.
It's a big "it depends". ADF is a comparable alternative, while APEX is easier to learn and find resources to build.
The developer tools statement of direction is a great place to start and a while ago I provided my own commentary (http://www.grassroots-oracle.com/2012/03/on-oracles-statement-of-direction-for.html)
i think you should also check oracle JHeadStart , as mentioned in the documentation :
JHeadstart Forms2ADF Generator; creates ADF Business Components and a
JHeadstart Application Definition file based on Oracle Forms files
Hope that Helps .
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I've been working in this company for about 8 months now and i'd like some advice how to tell my collegues that what they write is bad practice. Let me give a little introduction first.
The company im working at allows its customers to setup questionairres/surveys. The current code is about 5 years old (or older) and they've made a new platform which supports mobile devices. This platform is relatively new, but i've noticed something which i call 'bad practice':
They simply do not seperate code and html. Everything is dynamically build up using 1 single c# generaing class, which blurts out html, script tags, inline css "style='position: relative;'" and so on.
My main question is:
How do i convince my colleagues and especially my IT manager to keep these seperated.
It's bugging me a lot, but maybe i should just let it go. We simply do not have the resources for it and im probably not the person to make any calls about this. I just dont get how come the programmers who made this new 'platform' didnt think about this.
We also have lots of coding problems:
Different versions of jquery and mootools are being used throughout our applications
There's loads of duplicate code
CSS files being included after each other have stuff like '!important' in them, and some are being overwritten with each include. For example: 'Master.css', 'another_file.css' both declare the exact same css rules.
Please help me out to convince my IT department theyre doing things too unorganized, write unmaintable code and simply have no standards anywhere without sounding like a whiner. Don't get me wrong, i love my job, but it's really working on my nerves. If things don't work they do a little dirty hack on a hack on a hack and things will get more messy by the day.
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I'm primarily a server-side developer - not even web server stuff. But I'm finding more and more that I need to mockup user interfaces. This is in part to more senior roles doing overall product design, but there is some personal interest as well.
I'm wondering what would be a good UI toolkit to learn. I won't be making production user interfaces, and doing them as web apps would just be fine. I've been leaning towards learning jQuery as it has a graphing library I like to use (flot). Someone else at work is suggesting EXT-GWT.
Is there anything else out there? For straight up mockups I use Balsamiq, but sometimes I want to go a little past plain mockups and add some functionality.
Thanks.
If you're just after GUI libraries/frameworks, have a look at GWT and Vaadin.
You might want to also look at something like WaveMaker, which is a rapid application development platform. As well as allowing you to mock up simple GUI's it should make it easy to add in functionality as well.
I haven't used anything a lot except jQuery.
It has been great especially when you start using the UI and theming which makes quick work of standard things. It'd be a problem if you wanted anything outside the box because then you'd have to find a plugin or write your own. (both of which are fairly easy IMHO.)
If you use ExtJS, they also have a designer: http://www.sencha.com/products/designer
Even if you just go with ExtJS, Senchas has a lot of widgets that make prototyping much easier. ExtJS 4 will be shipping in a month or so. I'd start with it.
http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-4.0-beta3/examples/
You can check out ForeUI. It makes working prototype and run as DHTML in browser. It's quite easy to learn and use.
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I am the sole software developer in a company and I answer directly to the owner of the company. We also use the services of an outside developer. The owner isn't a developer but 'wrote software in qbasic' many years ago. He has reasonable abilities to spec projects. The outside developer doesn't answer directly to me, and my boss is really a micro-manager and wants to keep it that way.
The outside developer likes to use layers of abstraction (frameworks and wrapper classes), but has implemented them when I was stuck on months-long projects. When I return, the boss now wonders why it is so time consuming for me to do maintenance on projects (including one that I initial wrote from scratch).
I'm unhappy reverse engineering his code and I'm having trouble articulating the fact that I must learn a complete different interface from code that looks alot different than what I wrote in the first place. At the same time, the outside developer looks like a hero. Suggestions on how to articulate this to a technical/yet non-technical boss and how to put a lid on this happening in the future?
At the risk of sounding patronising, be careful that it is not just your perception of what you think your boss is thinking, which may be quite far from the reality.
Your boss may be wanting you to explain the situation not because he does not trust you, doubts your competency, or wishes to belittle you; but rather to understand where the difficulties are so that he can make an informed business decision on whether it is worth you reverse engineering this code- or perhaps be better to leave it as is and move on, on different aspects of the project.
Being honest and explaining that you have limited experience with these frameworks/wrapper classes may "buy" you time to not only learn these frameworks (which will hopefully benefit you greatly in the future), but may also mean that you are appearing to embracing and extend upon the other developers code, which is good team spirit if nothing else.
At very least, ask your boss to ask you if there are aspects of your explanation that he needs further clarification on. Keeping nice clear lines of communication will help everybody move forward faster.
Hope that helps!
Gav
I don't know if you can get away with this with your boss.. I could with mine, but not everyone can.
First, this has to be done respectfully, and the suggestion I'm about to give should be within the scope of a longer discussion. When it comes to the point of having to explain the difficulty of working with this developer's code...
Type up a paragraph in English, have someone type up the same sentence in some language your boss does not know. (Chinese, Spanish, Klingon, whatever.) Give your boss a (language) - to - English dictionary and explain that while you are technically capable of translating this outside developer's code into something useful, it takes time, just like it would take him time to translate from (language) to English using the dictionary.
Perhaps this would work best in the context of trying to establish standards for working with outside agents and potential new hires.
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Does anyone know of any software or a good way for developers to build up a knowledge base of business rules that are built in to the software for help desk to use?
We already have a helpdesk software but we are not looking to replace this.
A wiki is definitely the way to go. Processes change, sometimes frequently, and in a fast-paced environment like a help desk a tool that allows quick, easy access and management of that type of content is extremely important to allow people to do their jobs effectively.
One of the greatest benefits I've found is the heiarchical sturcture of many wikis, allowing employees to find the correct content from a number of different customer angles.
Can you be more specific?
This may fall under "policies and procedures" management software. Here are some:
http://www.softscout.com/software/Human-Resources/Policy-and-Procedures.html
I'd like to find one that's more wiki-like or easier to integrate into a a website serving as a more general company knowlege base.
I would recommend a wiki wiht a "Wiki Gardener" role- someone who cleans up the duplicate entries and sorts.
Wiki technology with a Rich Text Editor option would useful if your Support Desk are not totally technical.
Having some structure is imperative, developing something in any Wiki that makes sense to the general editing populace, and has a low threshold to get from reading to editing. You will also possibly need a migration strategy for taking hundereds of little notes into something more readable and searchable.