APEX 4.1 and more

10 days ago the APEX Development team announced an early adopter version of APEX 4.1.

A (bigger) release of a new version of APEX happened in the past in three steps:

1) Beta (Early Adopter) on tryapexnow.com (possibly with some refreshes)

2) Upgrade of apex.oracle.com

3) Download new version of APEX on OTN

Depending the feedback the time between the steps might vary and sometimes some unexpected things pop-up, but I would expect the release of APEX 4.1 around the summer holidays. (note; this is just my personal guess!)

Although APEX 4.1 is not as big of a release as 4.0 was, it will definitely be worthwhile to upgrade once it becomes available. A list of the new features you find here.

All improvements and new features are very useful and make a lot of sense, but if I had to list my top 4 at this stage, these would be:

- Nicer and updated look and feel of the Application Builder: flow got improved, new icons, bug fixes ...

- Tabular Form improvements: validations, processes ...

- Plug-Ins improvements: authorization schemes, increased number of attributes ...

- Better Error Handling feature

I've seen a demo of the upcoming Mobile Support before and if that was already in this build of APEX 4.1 it would have been in my top list as well. Another powerful feature mentioned in the SOD will be Data Upload, that enables end-users to upload data into an existing table.

One feature that was rumoured to be in APEX 4.1, but seems not to have made it in time, is non-flash charts. (on a side note; I don't mind that, as we (APEX Evangelists) offer a non-flash chart plugin for APEX :-)).

Definitely give APEX 4.1 a try yourself and give as much feedback as possible to the APEX Development team (from the APP Builder there is a link to the Feedback app).

If you want to read more about the new Error Handling features in APEX, Patrick Wolf did two blog posts which give more detail: part 1 and part 2.

If you are interested in reading about the new Authorization scheme plugin, check out the post of Christian Neumueller, another member of the APEX Development team who started to blog recently.