APEX 5.0 EA3 released with Universal Theme

Today Oracle released the latest Early Adopter release of APEX 5.0.

The release is packed with new features, but one of the biggest improvements you can find in the UI.

For me the Universal Theme with Theme Roller, Theme Styles and Template Options is the absolute killer feature of APEX 5.0. I can't better describe Universal Theme as how Oracle is describing it:

Universal Theme is an all-new user interface for your applications that has been built from the ground up for Application Express 5. It is a simpler, yet more capable theme that does away with excessive templates and enable effortless customization with Theme Roller, Template Options, and Theme Styles. Universal Theme is the culmination of all of our UI enhancements and aims to empower developers to build modern, responsive, sophisticated applications without requiring expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

The issue with APEX 4.x was the build-in themes became out-dated today, so many of us looked at integrating Bootstrap, Foundation or other frameworks. But APEX 5.0 has send us at WARP-speed to a new UI, suddenly out-of-the-box your applications are modern, responsive, flat, ... everything you can expect from a UI today. Many new components are now part of the UI: like the new Carousel and Cards region are some of my favourites.

If you are interested to know everything about the new UI, Roel and I teamed up with a one-day APEX 5.0 UI Training day.

Happy playing with APEX 5.0 EA3 and don't forget to give feedback to the development team, this is the last time you can before APEX 5.0 hits production.