My professional career started at Oracle Hawaii straight out of the University of Hawaii. I learned most everything I know on the job at the mercy and benefit of my clients.
Fresh out of college, my first project was to create a registration application for PBEC(Pacific Basin Economic Council) in 2000 using Oracle WebDb. I remember approaching my colleagues with fear, asking them what they thought was the best approach. What resulted was an Oracle WebDB application that executed a simple loop after a bar code scanner scanned an attendee's badge. It worked! At least for our test run...
When the actual conference started and rubber hit the road, the page failed to refresh quickly enough to check the PBEC guests in. The lead technical consultant quickly built a Solaris based program to replace the WebDB program and my first application experienced a quick and silent death.
Since then I grew as an Oracle developer, and grew with a product called Oracle Apex. WebDB became HTMLDB and then Oracle APEX. During the first iterations of Oracle HTMLDB, myself and my colleagues used a homegrown product called the "Framework." The Framework was an application platform developed by my senpai(teacher), Alan Larsen. After my epic failure on the PBEC project I was placed on a custom Oracle web application project with my senpai to build a custom training application using the Framework. The Framework was a table driven application platform that leveraged Oracle Web PL/SQL to rapidly develop database driven web applications. Sound familiar? The Framework allowed us to quickly create list reports, edit forms, tabbed navigation, and security for a database centric web applications. At the time, we could easily develop an Oracle database centric web application 5-10 times faster than anyone on the island.
In 2004, Oracle re-branded WebDB to HTMLDB. Major changes were made to the product, but like any new product it was full of bugs and quite unstable. It ran on a bastardized version of Apache which suffered from major issues with memory leaks. As a result, the Oracle Apache web listener had to be rebooted daily. It wasn't all bad though, because during the early days, Oracle did not wrap any of their HTMLDB code. My job became digging into the HTMLDB code to see where we could integrate our Framework functions into HTMLDB and vice versa. This is where my real education began. I learned all about PL/SQL arrays and different intricacies of PL/SQL coding. I took to the discussion forums and found with delight that I was able to interact with such talented developers as Scott Spendolini and Dimitri Gielis. I spent the next 7 years developing custom applications using the Framework and Oracle's htp packages mixed with Orace Portal and HTMLDB.
2007, Oracle released Oracle APEX 3.0. After evaluating the product and the new features I decided that it was a prudent decision to convert all my Framework clients to use Oracle APEX. It was a no brainer. All my colleagues had left Oracle Hawaii and I was a team of 1 supporting an application framework that provided the same functions as a product supported by a team of professional developers.
2008, with a heavy heart I decided to leave Oracle Hawaii. I took pride in working for Oracle and being the sole developer for the local practice. I moved to a local consulting company that was building a custom HR application for a state agency using Oracle ADF and JHeadstart. It was an exciting and challenging experience. Oracle APEX was still an immature product and questions of user load capacity and functionality prevented us from using it on the project. 2 years later Oracle released APEX 4.0 which represented a great leap in the development platform, but it was too late. I spent the next 4 years developing in Oracle ADF and Jasper reports. I learned a lot about object oriented programming and explored development on other platforms including the development of mobile applications. In the process I lost touch with the Apex community.
2011, I completed our ADF project and was ready to move on. I was presented with an opportunity to fill a position at Pearl Harbor. I have been there ever since and have started to become more involved in Oracle APEX development to support operations.
Oracle APEX has changed quite a bit since I started working with it and now it's a legitimate application development platform. Because of this I've decided to become more involved in the development community to learn and expand on my APEX knowledge. I look forward to supplementing and enhancing my skills from all the talented developers in the APEX community.
I named my blog Mostly APEX because I do have interests including but not limited to sports, technology, food, and adult beverages. You might very well find my posts to include or be strictly about one of these topics. (Update: Then I found out that I subconsciously stole my site name from Scott Spendolini. Oops! My bad! Simply Apex it is!)
Kampai! (Cheers!)
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