Thursday, August 09, 2012

APEX 4.2 EA: App Builder overhaul

This is the start of a series of blog posts about APEX 4.2 (at the time of writing EA).
APEX 4.2 looks completely different from any previous version of APEX.

The Application Builder became a "real" 2012 web application. Behind the scenes a lot of HTML5 and CSS3 features are used, which gives the App Builder a fresh look and feel.

It already starts when you login: the fonts and buttons are bigger and it's just crisper.


The home screen shows new icons, hovering over them highlight the selection in blue so it's clear where you are.


The Application Builder that shows the applications that you have in your workspace looks like this.
I'm unsure how you can change your own application to show another icon, but once Oracle allows to submit our own applications in the Packaged Applications section it will be possible I believe.


The new look and feel when you are in the pages overview of your application


The new theme of APEX itself is applied to all the wizards. The wizards are optimised, so you can get things done quicker than before and only relevant pieces are shown on the screen.
For example, creating a new database application takes not more than 3 clicks and can include an home page by default now.

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6 comments:

  1. Sparky8/23/2012 11:25 AM

    Looks great. I'll be trying that out on an EC2 instance shortly. Hopefully Amazon will upgrade their RDS service to use 4.2 pretty soon after final release.

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  2. HTML5 App Builder9/11/2012 6:46 AM

    Thanks for sharing information regarding APEX 4.2 EA: App Builder overhaul.Was a great read.

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  3. Pat Miller10/16/2012 9:24 PM

    Sparky,
    Now that 4.2 is out I would also like to try EC2 at Amazon since RDS only supports 4.1. Can you point me to any documentation for doing install on EC2. I want to use for a class but last year I had trouble with EC2 instance running out of log file space. I was hoping to use RDS this year, but with 4.2 coming out,looks like EC2 is best option.

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  4. Dimitri Gielis10/16/2012 11:19 PM

    We use the EC2 as well and that works perfectly.

    You basically take an Oracle image and start from that. Next you need to install APEX 4.2 and configure your webserver if you don't want to use the EPG but for example the APEX Listener.

    It shouldn't be to hard, other people did it as well, you can read for example: http://www.inside-oracle-apex.com/oracle-apex-in-the-cloud-it-works-try-it-out/ or google for others...

    Hope that helps

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  5. Randy Whitaker9/03/2014 10:43 PM

    Do you know if it's possible to modify the theme the APp Builder uses? I just want to make certain textareas larger by default, and maybe a couple other tweaks.

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  6. Dimitri Gielis9/03/2014 10:51 PM

    You would need to do it as a browser plugin. An example is the ApexLib https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=APEX_DEVELOPER_ADDON:ABOUT:0:::::

    ReplyDelete