APEX SIG meeting - latest news

As I posted earlier, we had an APEX SIG (Oracle Application Express Special Interest Group) meeting at Collaborate 08.

David Peake, product manager of Application Express, gave some unofficial insights in what's coming... David just wrote an article on his blog about the Oracle Application Express New Features (> 3.1) 

I guess everybody knew the next release of APEX would be 3.1.1 which includes some fixes for the 3.1 release.

Other things we (as APEX community) requested for a while:  improved Tabular Forms and Error handling, 3.1 updated packaged applications, new white papers... They are logical next steps for post 3.1 (maybe not yet 3.1.1, but 3.2 or 4.0)

The biggest announcement however was the migration of Oracle Forms to Application Express. There were already some rumors about it, but it was never really said. I believe this migration tool and that APEX comes with 11g out-of-the-box, will be the big break-through for APEX.

In December, during the APEX vs ADF shootout, a lot of Forms people were in the room. Before (and still) Oracle marketing is pushing these Forms people to the Java stack, but in my opinion, migrating from Forms to APEX is the most logical step. Will migrating to APEX be a fit in 100% of the cases? Probably not, but the experience of the Forms people is more in line with APEX than with Java.

I'm curious to see how the APEX vs ADF shootout will be at ODTUG. I'm expecting to get a lively discussion in New Orleans as  there will be a lot of passionate and knowledgeable people in the room for both technologies! But I feel confident that the other "APEX-names" will back me up! I posted before APEX vs ADF: Round 2, that picture might become reality. When "they" catch me, Carl, John, Patrick etc will get into the ring ;-) It will be great fun!

NF in Oracle Application Express (APEX) 3.1 & 4.0

The Oracle Apex Development team updated their statement of direction today.

I won't go into much detail on APEX 3.1, the next release of APEX, as the changes are not that big in this release, although some may be very useful.

A bit of comment on some new features of APEX 3.1:

• PL/SQL API to manage a runtime installation of Application Express: this could be very useful, especially for companies providing APEX hosting like us.
  
• Documented and supported Application Express JavaScript libraries: Carl Backstrom already started that here.
  
• Enhanced integration with Oracle SQL Developer for MS Access to Application Express migration: with every new release of SQL Developer you see some more features in that area.
  

The nicest thing however is what they will include in Oracle Application Express 4.0!!

"This release will focus on declarative support for Web 2.0 features in Application Express, as well as the extensibility of the Application Express framework.": Don't you like the sound of that?! That sounds awesome!!

Generally thought: the Apex team listened very well to us, the Apex Developers/Users, which is highly appreciated. Thanks Oracle Apex Development team for that.

My comments on some of the new features of APEX 4.0:

• Interactive reporting region types which native integrate Web 2.0 features to filter, break, sort data: This we could already see in action in one of my previous blog post
  
• Extensible item framework, enabling developers to "plug in" their own custom item types: this will definitely be one of the killing features of this new version! A while ago Carl Backstrom started a discussion about it (initially Patrick Wolf included this in the APEX 3.1 new features thread). You can still leave your comments in the thread Carl started...
  
• Declarative support for AJAX validations: today you could already make the validations in APEX, but the validations required a round-trip to the server. With the ApexLib framework you could avoid this. Some javascript functions would dynamically look at your validations (defined in APEX) and test it on the client side. Getting an improved version (with AJAX) out of the box in APEX 4 is great.
  
• Declarative support for cascading select lists and other similar item types: we demo this often and this is also one of the questions asked by a lot of people
  
• Improved tabular forms, including support for validations, integration with collections, and additional item types: again, asked by a lot of developers, especially people coming from an Oracle Forms/Reports background.
  
• New item/region types, including DHTML calendar and AJAX tree: the tree in the current APEX version does a submit of your page. Also the calendar wasn't uptodate anymore with the current expectations of the web. So it's understandable this is included.
  
• Improved PDF report layout: I hope they look at my improvement for this too ;-) But PDF got only introduced in version 3 and it's already a nice feature, especially when you integrate it with BI Publisher. But yes, other improvements like printing charts and pictures easier would be welcome ;-)
  
• Improved error message handling: we were waiting a long time for this, it looks like somewhere next year we get something with the new version that does the job
  
• Numerous functional and performance improvements: Performance comes definitely from the caching mechanism (already a lot in APEX 3) and from the performance improvement of the 11g database. That's one of the things why APEX is great, as it's running inside the database, with every new release of the database you get so many more possibilities.

My final note on this: Oracle is not guaranteeing it will include all that... nevertheless I would like to thank the whole Apex Development team for this great road map and awesome product!