Friday, June 13, 2008

The nicest APEX app/features

I'm in the airport waiting for my flight to ODTUG Kaleidoscope at the moment.
It will be a long flight, from Brussels (BE) to London (UK) to Miami to finally arrive in New Orleans!

I'm doing quiet a lot of presentations this time:
- Sunday: Presentation of Use Case with one of our customers
- Tuesday: I'm in the APEX Experts Panel, trying to answer your questions
- Wednesday: My presentation of Charts in Oracle Application Express
- Thursday: APEX vs ADF Shoot-out, together with Lucas Jellema

The last presentation Lucas and I did last year in the Netherlands. We decided to change some things in the presentation. One of them is to include "the nicest app or features in both environments".

So, I thought to ask the community what they think I should show.

Currently the list I thought to chose of:

  • Out of the box in APEX: from raw Data to Application and Interactive Reports
  • "Web 2.0" extensions in APEX: for ex. ExtJS and Dhtmlx
  • Integration with Webservices, Fusion and SOA
  • Extending E-business suite with APEX
    (although I don't have the Oracle Applications Suite running on my laptop, so it will be hard to show)
  • Integration with SQL Developer
I've about 15 mins to show the coolest, nicest features or application around, build in APEX. So it's not necessary to show things in dept or explain how to do them.

What features do YOU think make APEX incredible? Feel free to send me some screenshots or even nicer: real demo sites or an application export I can show.

I know a lot of the applications we build are "internal" only, but if you could make a subset of it to just show the cool feature, that's already fine. If you just want to share what you think would be cool to show, just add a comment ... there might be a chance I already did some testing with it.

Thanks... and see you in New Orleans!

5 comments:

Dan McGhan said...

Good luck with your presentations! There are many things that stand out in ApEX, but one seemingly simple one I didn't see you make mention of was the ability to create calendars via a simple SQL query.

I love this and have not seen it in any other environment. The text displayed can be anything, including HTML links that can kickoff all kinds of workflows!

Regards,
Dan

thierry said...

Hi Dimitri,

I just created myself a blog entry about launching an Apex page from an eBusiness Suite Apps form.

Maybe the example suits you.

http://oraclehrms.blogspot.com/2008/06/launch-apex-page-from-your-forms.html

Enjoy your time over there,
thierry

Patrick Wolf said...

Hi Dimitri,

I would go for the Interactive Reports. It shows quite good the power of the existing components where you (as a developer) do not have to develop much but satisfy the end user.

cu in New Orleans
Patrick

Anonymous said...

Think about functional features:
simple development of applictaion by end-users,
using the apex-environment to avoid the use of MsAccess

and so on......

Leo

Anonymous said...

Hi Dimitri,

What seems to drop the J2EE developers on their behinds here is the automated generated client side validation. Where they are clicking windows and changing stuff in XML for 30 to 45 minutes long in a medium sized form, APEX just re-uses the standard database validation! For me one of the essentials in a wow featurette ;)

Also, the centralized way of working is something that's a real advantage. Instead of a humongous collection of files for even a simple application in ADF, JHeadstart, JSF... APEX offers so much more clearity and ease of use. It just makes sense, where J2EE is sometimes frustrating in this area

Greetings,
Rutger