APEX is getting popular

On Tuesday I was in the Netherlands to give a presentation about "The Future of APEX".

The location was astonishing! The place is called Media Plaza and is located at the "Jaarbeurs" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It's definitely an innovative place where you get lots of ideas, so a very good place to talk about Oracle Application Express.

There were 135 people subscribed for this free seminar, so we can definitely say that APEX is gaining a lot of interest. I did a poll about who was in the audience and everybody already heard about APEX! Not everyone worked with it yet and I was surprised there were so little on the latest version of APEX. But that turned out great, as I could show them some cool new features ;-)


We split the evening in two parts. In the first part I briefly talked about my way to APEX, gave an introduction in APEX, but for the most part I did a demo with hints & tips. I like to show things and I think APEX is really good for that.

I created a completely new application and included some of the nicest features in APEX: of course Interactive Reports, but also how easy it is to include images (Blob support), do PDF printing and adhoc changes.

I liked the interactivity with the public very much! For ex. I gave an example where I created a new column in the Interactive Report, called "new list price", basically the list price of a product increased with 10%. At one time a nice lady asked me if the new value is physically stored in the database (which isn't) and how to get the changes in then. I first started to explain how you could do it, but as APEX is extremely RAD, I just decided to do it in front of 135 people. Live demo's is always a risk, but if it works, the public loves it! Doing these little things shows the real power of APEX.


In the second part I talked about the future of APEX or what we may expect in the coming releases. I briefly touched custom item types, new versions of 3rd party products, declarative ajax, improved error handling etc. but most of the time I spend on the Forms migration to APEX tool the Apex Development team is working on (I recorded David Peake's presentation at ODTUG ;-)), the Data Modeling capabilities that will be in SQL Developer and of course Websheets!

Looking at the many questions I got, the feedback afterwards and that people started to be enthusiastic with each other about our lovely development tool, I believe this evening was a success. I definitely enjoyed doing it!