There is a demo application out there for Oracle XMLDB, called XFILES, that demonstrates the Oracle XML database functionality. During Oracle Open World 2008 I attended a presentation of Mark Drake, Sr Product Manager XMLDB and Carl Backstrom, called “Oracle Application Express and Oracle XML Database: A Match Made in the Database“. Mark had build the XFILES demo application, until that time, with the tool-set he knew best, Java/JavaScript & PL/SQL.
In his final/last post on his blog site, called OOW recap (Pt 2), Carl described this session and the XFILES demo application:
The session I helped out with a bit was Mark Drake’s Oracle Application Express and Oracle XML Database: A Match Made in the Database. This session had it’s beginning’s way back at Web2.0 Expo where Mark and I shared a demo booth. XMLDB has a standard sample/demo called XFILES which is a simple yet full featured file management system using all XMLDB features. But it requires using a java server and is kinda slow , well I think it’s slow but I might be biased.
So I was like hey Mark! you should build this in APEX since we are both built in features of the database. And lo and behold the his session was born. I helped on and off with building the demo application , and it was a big learning experience, both with the features XMLDB provides as well as were APEX does not leverage them well, something we will be working on improving.
Mark at OOW asked if I could sit in so if there was any specific APEX questions, and hey I’m a people person so of course I said yes. The session was very well attended with many people in the audience already familiar with APEX and/or XMLDB. Mark covered the basics of XMLDB and I quickly went over APEX basic’s and then it was all demo.
I really think the application demo and explanation of how things were created was a hit, it showed the power of XMLDB as well as how APEX can leverage it’s features directly out of the database. Just the number of hands that came up with people saying things like
- Hey I just built that a month a go and yours is cooler.
- Hey I need to build that in the near future and these are great ideas.
- Hey can I have that application?
shows that this session hit a sweet spot. A couple things I got from this is that people like that APEX can directly leverage built in database features and want more of it easier, and secondly I need to really make time to clean up that XFILES application so it can be a packaged application.