KScope14 (Sunday) - APEX Symposium - before noon

Sunday is typically the day where the Oracle development team is on stage to talk about what they do, give insight in the product etc. - for me personally one of the highlights of the conference.

The Awesome Evolution of Oracle Application Express 5.0 by Joel Kallman

Joel demoed HTML DB 1.6 again, the predecessor of APEX - went live in 2004, so 10 years ago (time goes fast!). Next he timed doing development in APEX 4.2 compared to APEX 5.0.  

Conclusion: APEX 5.0 is more productive, efficient, intuitive, modern and easy.

Joel highlighted the other new features in APEX 5.0, most of them I already blogged about or you find them here.

The Game Changed - APEX Designer by Patrick Wolf

Patrick showed the time it takes to build components and items in previous versions of APEX. Next he compared it to how you do things with the new Page Designer in APEX 5.0.

There're so many new features in the Page Designer, just give it a try to explore them. It will take a bit of time to get used to them, but it will be the future. 

Turbo Mobile Development by Marc Sewtz

APEX uses jQuery Mobile behind the scenes. APEX 5.0 includes the latest version (jQuery Mobile 1.4). The philosophy is to create "mobile first" applications.

APEX 5.0 will include a new mobile theme, which support the new jQuery Mobile swatches. It's very easy to use ThemeRoller to create your own swatch and upload the zip in Shared Components in APEX and add a style to the theme and make it active.

There are many more new features in APEX 5.0 for mobile development like for example a new region type called "Reflow table".