APEX 5.0 (EA): Creating a new application

Lets see how creating a new Database application works in APEX 5.0 and what was changed compared to APEX 4.2.

In the Application Builder you start by hitting the Create button.

There are a couple of improvements here:

• You'll see APEX 5.0 includes a complete new set of icons which are flat and fresh and immediately give you an insight what the button is doing. This is throughout the entire release.
• The icons are now driven by base64 encoded strings in css which is more performant than to call every icon as a separate image (what happened prior APEX 5.0).
• There's a direct link to create a Mobile application

Next we will define the name and id of our application

The improvements here lay in:

• The cleanup of the screen; some options are now moved to an advanced attributes section
• You select the theme already at this stage instead of waiting till the end
• The default theme is now "Blue Responsive (Navigation List)", which makes a lot of sense as its inline with the industry standards to make responsive applications. The "Navigation List" replaces the "Tabs" of before. Personally I already used Lists to do the navigation in 99% of the cases in APEX 4.x, as they are way more flexible than Tabs, and if you want you can give the List the look and feel of a Tab anyway.
• New is the "Theme Style" which has currently two options: Default and Red. So the themes in APEX 5.0 will be easier to change based on a style. The main HTML in the templates stays the same, but with a different css you get another look and feel.

Moving on in the wizard gives the possibilities to add pages to the application.

Improvements lay in:

• The look and feel
• More intuitive icon in front of the page to edit the page (see next screenshot). In APEX 4.x you could edit the page to by clicking on the name of the page. That gave a popup window, where in APEX 5.0 it's implemented as a modal window. This is a good showcase of the new Modal window feature of APEX 5.0 which you can define declarative now (more on that in another post).

The final screen gives an overview of the application and what APEX will create.

As you can see, already in the creation of a database application in APEX 5.0 many new features and small enhancements are included.