Oracle Application Express (APEX) 4.1 and beyond

The APEX Development team updated the Statement of Direction for the future releases of Oracle Application Express.

As we can read on that page, Oracle Application Express 4.1 will focus on enhancement to existing functionality and additional capabilities to support applications running on mobile devices. Application Express 4.1 is planned to incorporate the following:

• Development for Mobile Applications – Include themes and HTML templates suitable for smart phones and mobile devices.
• Charting - Provide for chart rendering without using Flash (to enable display on mobile devices).
• Error Handling - Improve error handling and user-defined exception processing.
• Interactive Reporting – Allow multiple reports on one page and support pivot queries.
• Tabular Forms – Allow multiple tabular forms on one page and continue to expand tabular forms validations.
• Master-Detail-Detail – Allow the generation of pages to support master-detail-detail relationships.
• Dynamic Actions – Enhance conditional processing and allow dynamic actions to be defined for tabular forms, reports, and buttons.
• Plug-Ins - Add plug-in support for additional components and enhance plug-in definitions.
• Use of ROWID – Allow usage of ROWID for Automatic DML processing (as an alternative to identifying the PK columns).
• Modal Dialogue - Add ability to display a dialog on top of a page (the rest of the page will be grayed out).
• Websheets – Allow for greater control over user interface, new page section types, and enhanced spreadsheet / datagrid integration.
• Data Upload - Enable end-users to upload data into an existing table (within an application).
• Accessibility – Improve accessibility in existing themes and HTML templates.
• Numerous functional and performance improvements.

Great features I would say! For many of the above items we work around them with some hand written coding. As many of you know, I'm a heavy supporter of charts and dashboards and we've already been working on a non-Flash based charting engine for the current release of APEX.

This solution I actually showed at Oracle Open World too. We plan to release these non-Flash based charts soon too, so if you are on APEX 4.0 and you don't want to wait till 4.1 or later, no worries, something is coming ;-)