Marcel Van Der Plas - Oracle APEX Cookbook

Marcel van der Plas was born in 1969 in Eindhoven and still lives there. He has been an Oracle Consultant for over 15 years. Marcel has worked on many projects with Oracle Designer, Oracle Forms, and Oracle Reports. Later on, he became interested in APEX and did some projects with APEX. Marcel has been working on an APEX project for an electronics company for over 2 years.

Marcel currently works for Ciber. Other companies he worked for are Atos Origin and Whitehorses. For Whitehorses, he wrote some articles (White books) about Oracle.

Marcel wrote the Oracle APEX 4.0 Cookbook , Packt Publishing , with Michel van Zoest. You can find APEX blogposts from Marcel at http://orclapex.blogspot.com. Besides that, you can follow Marcel on Twitter (@whmvdp).

Michel van Zoest is a consultant with years of experience in building web applications using Oracle technologies such as Oracle Web Forms, Oracle Designer, MOD_PLSQL, ADF, SOA Suite, and of course, APEX.

He is one of the first Oracle Application Express Developer Certified Experts in the world. He has used his APEX knowledge in projects for companies ranging in size from a single employee to large multinationals. His experience in these projects has been used in the realization of this book.

Michel currently works at Whitehorses in the Netherlands and runs his own blog at http://www.aboutapex.com. He also blogs at the company website on http://blog.whitehorses.nl and he regularly writes White book articles (in Dutch) for Whitehorses.

You can reach Michel on Twitter at @mvzoest or e-mail him at <>.

First of all, I would like to thank my co-author, Marcel van der Plas. Thanks to the easy way that we could work together, the writing of this book has gone as smooth as possible.

I would like to thank the people at Packt Publishing for offering me the chance to write this book. It has been a long process with a lot of hard work, but I'm very happy with the result. I also would like to thank Douwe Pieter van den Bos for introducing me and Marcel to Packt Publishing and his invaluable help in the early stages of the book.

Furthermore, I would like to thank all reviewers for their hard work in reviewing our drafts. This book has become so much better; thanks to you guys.

I would also like to thank my employer, Whitehorses, for the support that I have been given.

And last but not the least, I would like to thank my family for their love and support. Without the help of my wife Jamila and the "dikke kroelen" from my daughters Naomi and Aniek and my son Kris, this result would not have been possible.

Learco Brizzi started working with the early versions of Oracle Forms (3.0), Reports (1.1), and Designer (1.2.1), after he received his Master of Science degree in Information Technology in 1993. When WebDB was launched, Learco took the first steps in building Internet applications. When APEX (HTML DB) hit the market, he saw the potential of this tool and built a complete music download store with it in 2004, including integration with reports and payment service providers. This was one of the very first serious applications ever built with APEX. Nowadays, Learco is dedicated to APEX and PL/SQL development.

He is a very enthusiastic technologist, trainer of advanced APEX courses, organizer of seminars, board member of the OGh (the Oracle user group in the Netherlands), and member of the editorial committee for Oracle magazine OGh Visie . For OGh Visie , he's responsible for the yearly APEX World event that had about 300 attendees in 2013. Since 2013, he's also a member of the APEX Feature Advisory Board.

In 1999, Learco started his own company, Itium, that specializes in Oracle technology and launched the APEX plug-in website for community APEX plug-ins: http://www.apex-plugin.com. He is the co-author of the book Oracle APEX Best Practices , published by Packt Publishing .

In May 2010, Learco was awarded the Oracle ACE membership.

You can contact Learco by e-mail <> or Twitter (@LBrizzi).

Benjamin Kweku Intsiful is a Ghanaian-born technologist who has been working with Oracle products since the turn of the century. During his years working with the retail, government, finance, and construction sectors, Intsiful has actively researched and applied cutting-edge technologies from the Oracle product range and Microsoft paradigms.

His current tool of choice is Application Express (APEX) involved with projects, creating applications pushing the growing limits of this ever-maturing product in Africa.

He is a certified Oracle Application Express expert, which he proudly highlights in his portfolio.

Past experiences are heavy with PL/SQL, Microsoft C#, and Active Server Pages. Notable projects include Voters Management System (VMS) for the Electoral Commission of Ghana. He has participated in a core team of developers for a complex forms project at the Nation Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) of Ghana.

He is keenly interested in researching and sharing product knowledge on new and sometimes under-utilized but useful functionality at user group events.

Occasionally you'll find him in the OTN forums, PL/SQL Challenge, and Top Coders, exhibiting his skillsets or blogging at www.bkintsiful.blogspot.com.

I would like to thank the Almighty God, who made this possible. I would also like to thank my mum and family for supporting me through thick nights when I was stressed, but kept me company to review this awesome book.