My view on APEX 4.2 EA (ready to test)

Things have been busy lately... now being at the ODTUG KScope 2012 conference I'll take the opportunity to do some more tweets and blog posts.

The last week the Oracle APEX Development team made a public APEX 4.2 EA available. You find it on https://apexea.oracle.com/i/index.html
You may also want to read this post to find more details about availability etc.

So what is new in APEX 4.2?

You find a description of all the new features here. 

The top 3 biggest things for me are arround:

• Mobile development
• HTML5 (themes, items, charts)
• Packaged applications

I'll go into more detail in some other blog posts later, but here are already some teasers.

1) An APEX app build by Marc Sewtz, it shows what you can build with the new Mobile Wizards in APEX 4.2.

2) HTML5 chart created by the wizard (based on AnyChart 6 HTML5 charts)

3) An overview of the Packaged Applications (productivity / business apps) that come with APEX 4.2. Soon we can write our own apps and have them included there...

Try APEX 4.2 EA out and give your feedback to the APEX Development team. APEX 4.2 is again a real nice release, so really worth to check out! The entire APEX Builder interface got a complete overhaul.

APEX Mobile in DG Tournament

Sunday night, playing arround with DG Tournament and JQuery Mobile...
After a couple of hours this is the result: http://m.dgtournament.com

The login screen, with the same authentication as the full website (http://www.dgtournament.com)
(you need to subscribe first on the full website, if you don't have a login yet)

When you are logged in, you will see a menu. For now I just added the persons bet ranking.
If I find some more time, I'll probably add a screen to see and update your own bets.

Clicking on the Bet Rank link will give you the ranking of the people with a nice search on top. 

I didn't include a screenshot, but you can also click on a person to get more detail about how many times they played, how many times they betted the correct score etc.

For the (APEX) people interested in how this was created...

Start with looking at the JQuery Mobile Quick Start Guide. For example to add that search on the screen it's super easy... just add data-filter="true" to your list and presto!
The full integration of jQuery Mobile with APEX (declarative; using wizards) is currently planned for APEX 4.2, but next to the manual way of using JQuery Mobile with APEX, you can already tell APEX 4.1 that you want to do mobile development as described by Marc Sewtz in following blog posts:

• http://marcsewtz.blogspot.be/2011/11/getting-started-with-mobile-in-apex.html
• http://marcsewtz.blogspot.be/2011/11/getting-started-with-mobile-in-apex_17.html

Making a mobile version of an APEX app is always fun :-) I only tried the app on my iPhone, so if anybody can try it on Android, WindowsPhone, Blackberry, ... I hope it looks good too.

Hope you enjoy this little mobile extension... at least now you can already see how your rank is without opening up the site on your iPad, laptop or desktop.