World Cup 2014 APEX Betting app online

You remember the old days? 2006 ... APEX aka HTMLDB was still the new kid on the block!

To promote APEX at that time I build an Oracle APEX app that allowed you to see the scores of the World Cup 2006. After some feedback I created a betting piece to it... it gained much traction, it even got translated in Chinese! Here's a picture of that time:

Since then every year with the World Cup and Euro Cup I enable the app again. This year is not different... well it is; the app got an overhaul with some great new functionalities. I'll go deeper in some features in another blog post; but the main features are: authentication via Facebook (thanks to Peter) and you are able to create your own groups of people. So APEX R&D can see for example how it plays against our Canadian friends at Clarifit or our US friends at Enkitec :)

You find the new app at https://wc2014challenge.com

Let us know if you like it (or not) :)

Install latest patch of APEX 4.2 (4.2.5)

A few days ago Oracle brought out a new patch for APEX 4.2, this will be the latest version of this build, the next version of APEX will be 5.0.

If you already have APEX 4.2.x installed you can download a patch from support.oracle.com, the patch number is 17966818.

If you have an earlier version of APEX you can download the full version of APEX and install that.

As with other patch sets, this one is not different; it includes some bug fixes, updates in the packaged apps and the introduction of some new apps. You find the full patch set notes here.

Installing the patch in my APEX 4.2.4 environment took less than 15 minutes and everything went fine. 

I recommend everybody moving to the latest version as this is the final build of APEX 4.2.

Update 16-APR-2014: we actually hit one issue, which was fixed by Oracle today. So I would install this additional patch too. In support.oracle.com search for Patch 18609856: APEX_WEB_SERVICE.CLOBBASE642BLOB CONVERTS INCORRECTLY.

APEX Listener => Oracle REST Data Services

Yesterday a new version of the Oracle APEX Listener was released. The new version is 2.0.6... and the biggest change in this release is the change in name. From now on we won't speak about the "APEX Listener" anymore, but we speak about "Oracle REST Data Services".

The name explains more what the piece of software is doing and it will be less confusing for non-APEX people. Many people thought about the Database Listener when talking about the APEX Listener. Or others just wanting REST, don't question the use of APEX anymore.

The "Oracle REST Data Services" still carries the same purpose for us as APEX developers:
- serve as a replacement for the (older) mod_plsql
- enable the RESTful Services in APEX (found in SQL Workshop and Application wizard)

Some help with the Oracle APEX Theming Competition 2014

ODTUG announced a few days ago the Oracle APEX Theming Competition.

Make an awesome APEX theme and you may win some cool prices!

In the Learning Resources on the ODTUG site you will see a reference to my presentation of last year "Advanced Responsive Design in APEX". In that presentation I showed a lot of live demo's from different aspects of Responsive Design: here's a quick overview of what I covered:

I made the RWD demo app available online now, so you can see it in action or you can download the app and install it in your environment (the zip includes the presentation too).

Hopefully it will help some people doing a responsive design theme.

Another tip that might help; make use of SASS or LESS to generate the CSS. There's a great SASS tutorial (video/material) on SASS from Hampton Catlin, the creator of Sass, which explains why and how to use it.

I look forward to the result of the competition. I'm always impressed with what people come up with.

The evolution of APEX Evangelists

Every year we at APEX Evangelists come together to discuss the past and the future of the company.
In the past 7 years a lot has changed; the APEX market changed, the community changed, we personally changed, ...

We really like APEX, we are all passionate about it, we love to have technical discussions with each other and come together to share our thoughts, but we also like our independence and make our own trade-offs company wise.
So we decided to go a different route with "APEX Evangelists". And that’s why we’re now in the midst of transforming APEX Evangelists from a company to a network.
A network of APEX experts. A network without any financial incentive behind it. A network of independent people that are passionate about APEX. A network of recognised experts in the Oracle community. A network with members that can rely on each other and trust each other.

You can also become part of this network, but only by invitation and acceptance by the other members.
We love to compare us with the Oaktable network, which is a network of experts for the Oracle database. We hope that "APEX Evangelists network" will be the same for Oracle Application Express.
The first addition to the APEX Evangelists network is Martin Giffy D’Souza and we hope to grow the network further in the next months.

The new website of APEX Evangelists is live which reflects the network now, you find it at http://www.apex-evangelists.com

If you're wondering what else the future will bring for me, check out APEX R&D, the company I'll move forward with.

APEX 5.0 (EA): CSS Calendar

APEX 5.0 allows you to create a new Calendar type, called CSS Calendar.

The CSS Calendar is based on Full Calendar 1.6.4, at the moment of writing, the current latest production release. The creator of this JQuery plugin, Adam Shaw, is currently working on version 2. A few days ago he released beta 2. It remains to be seen which version of Full Calendar will make it in the final release of APEX 5.0.

Following the wizard in APEX allows us to add a Source for the calendar.

You can just enter a SQL query here.

In the next step you define which column contains your start date, the end date etc.

There are some nice features that come with Full Calendar, for example the integration with Google Calendar and JSON (APEX WebService URL). Another interesting feature is the export to different formats like iCal and CSV.

Finally running the page shows you the new CSS Calendar. You can change the color scheme of the calendar by changing the css.

This CSS calendar is also responsive... when you make your screen smaller the calendar automatically switches to the Week view.

The only thing that's missing with this calendar is a year view... there are people who created extensions for example here and here to offer the year view. Hopefully version 2 of FullCalendar will add the year view native. Wonder if the final release of APEX 5.0 will include the year view too...

APEX 5.0 (EA): Feedback Page

One of the first things I do when creating a new application is enabling the feedback mechanism in combination with Team Development.

Click the Create Page button in Application Builder and select "Feedback Page":

The next step looks like this:

The Page Mode can now be set to Modal, so instead of a popup it will render as a modal.

Note that in the EA1 version there are some known issues with the Feedback Page, which will be resolved in one of the next iterations of EA.

One issue made me think that once I upgraded my applications to APEX 5.0 I probably want to start searching for "apex.navigation.popup.url" and change those to become the native APEX 5.0 modal windows. It's those "small" things like declarative modal windows which make a big difference in development effort and clean code. But more on modal windows in a dedicated post.

I love the Feedback mechanism and how it integrates with Team Development, but if it had one more feature, I would be thrilled. It's great to know session state, it's great people can add a comment, but sometimes a picture shows more than a 1000 words. So if we could click a button that took a screen capture and we could annotate that... wouldn't that be awesome? The result would be an image with the feedback in Team Development.

Some of us in the community build some custom solutions to do that. For example Martin and I "hacked something together" for the OSN-competition at OOW which did the screen capture and annotation, but having such a feature native in APEX and integrated with Team Development would be even better :)

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.

APEX 5.0 (EA): Overview

Now that APEX 5.0 EA is out, it's time to do a deep dive in the new features of this early adopter (EA) release.

Overall this new version of Oracle Application Express tries to put even more power and speed in the development. The UI is made simpler and cleaner with a fresher look and feel.
Not every part of APEX got an overhaul in EA1, it remains to be seen if in EA2 more pages are updated.

I'll update this post with links to the more detailed blog posts of the specific parts.

• APEX 5.0 (EA) Page Designer video's
• APEX 5.0 (EA): Creating a new application
• APEX 5.0 (EA): Feedback Page
• APEX 5.0 (EA): CSS Calendar

So stay tuned... this post is the index for the next series of APEX 5.0 (EA) posts.

APEX 5.0 (EA) Page Designer video's

APEX 5.0 early adopter is about to be released in the public.

Requesting a workspace is not working yet at the time of writing this post, but I expect it can be opened every moment now.

APEX 5.0 carries many new features, one of the biggest is the new Page Designer which should increase developer productivity even more. David Peake recorded some videos, here's the APEX 5.0 Page Designer Overview:



You find more detailed videos for the specific sections of the APEX 5.0 Page Designer on YouTube:

• Tree
• Grid Layout
• Property Editor
• Toolbar

Congrats to the Oracle APEX development team for delivering APEX 5.0! It looks awesome.

Increase post back size in Glassfish

I created a small mobile APEX app for my football team where they can upload pictures to the app.

Sometimes saving the picture worked, sometimes it didn't. If it didn't work I hit the following error: "Post too large". It turned out that my Max Post Size in Configurations - server-config - Network Config - Network Listeners - http-listener-1 under HTTP was set too small.

After increasing it worked like a charm.

Start learning a new Oracle technology

I found it very interesting to read Tom Kyte's New Year resolutions for 2014.

"Learn something new about Oracle almost every day"

"Learn a new technology outside the comfortable realm of Oracle Database".

Resolutions I try to follow myself every year...

I love to try and integrate different technologies with Oracle APEX. Looking back at the last two years, just from the Oracle stack alone, in 2012 I played around integrating APEX with E-Business Suite (see blog). In 2013 I played around with Big Data and Endeca and tried to see how APEX could work with that (see presentation).

But you might wonder, how do you start with a new Oracle technology?

You can download and install almost all Oracle software from OTN for free to try-out.
There's also the Oracle Cloud where you can try their cloud solutions.
But maybe even easier are the pre-built Oracle VMs. A complete environment with all necessary software installed and some guides to get started.


In a future post I'll talk about how to learn different technologies linked to web development. In web development things are changing very fast; new (javascript) frameworks, new insights in web design etc. popup almost every day!

Getting started with Oracle Application Express (APEX)

There're still people just starting with APEX, so here's a quick post which might help them.

On apex.oracle.com there's a nice section about how to get started with Oracle APEX.

I think most important is to just start and play with APEX. Creating an account on apex.oracle.com (which is free) lets you do that, without you needing to set something up, the only thing you need is a browser.

Once you can login in APEX, the 2 Day + Developer's Guide is a great guide to build your first application. It might be hard to understand what you are doing in the beginning, but it gets you started.

To get a bit more background you can read more in the documentation, especially the Application Builder Concepts in the Application Builder User's Guide is a must read.

To get an idea what else you can build, you can watch the demos at the Oracle Application Express Learning Library and look behind the scenes of the sample and packaged applications that come with APEX.

The above will hopefully get new people started. The getting started link of Oracle will give you a lot more guidance what to do next; from watching presentations, reading whitepapers and blogs over to getting training and coaching.

If you hit issues; there's a great community to help you too. The Oracle APEX forums is where you want to go to; there are many peers generously offering help and even the APEX Development team is watching it and help out were needed.

And my final advice; don't give up, it might take a few days to get used to how APEX works, but once you are used to it, it's great!

All the best.

Time to update your APEX development environment

In the last days (and weeks) Oracle has been updating many of the tools a typical APEX Developer uses day-in-day-out.

Here's a graphical overview of a typical APEX configuration:



Following desktop tools got updated:

• SQL Developer 4.0
• my favourite connection to the Oracle database
• a great SQL and PL/SQL editor
• easy to configure the APEX Listener

• SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0
• visualise your schema
• model your ERD

Following server side components:

• Glassfish 4.0
• the webserver where the APEX Listener runs

• APEX Listener 2.0.5
• my preferred way to connect to APEX in the Oracle database

• APEX 4.2.4
• a new patch for APEX was released on Friday, the newest version of APEX is now 4.2.4
• it took about 13 minutes to upgrade from 4.2.3 and it did it without any issues
• next to some bug fixes, many of the packaged applications got updated. There are some new plugins available in those packaged apps; for ex. the fishbowl plugin

• Oracle Database 12c
• This version is already available for some time now, but I guess many people didn't upgrade yet.
• If you are using 12c, there's a nice APEX application "Multitenant Self-Service Provisioning" you can use to spin up new PDB's.

Happy upgrading...

Fix Inbox mail issue in Mavericks

When updating my OS X to Mavericks, the Mail app started to behave differently for my GMail (Google Apps) accounts.

Whenever I moved a message from my Inbox to a folder the message wasn't removed from my Inbox. On the forum and on some sites (e.g. DigitalTrends) the fix they mention, is to check the "Show in IMAP" setting in GMail.

For me that checkbox has always been checked, however the "Show in Label" was set to "hide". When I selected "show", it seems to have fixed the issue for me now too.

The only remaining issue I've with Mail app is the slowness of Sync (retrieving emails).

I switched last week to use Airmail, as Mail had those issues (until I applied the above fix). 

Airmail seems much faster in picking up new mails, even when in the Mail app I click the button to get emails it takes a long time before it finds the new mail.

I'm happy with the above change in the GMail settings, it at leasts fixes the Inbox issue of Mail. If there was a fix for the retrieving mails issue as well, it would be awesome... but so far no luck yet.

Update: MacRumors mentions Apple is working on a fix for OS X Mavericks Mail App Issues.

APEX book: Oracle APEX 4.2 Reporting

A few weeks ago a new Oracle APEX book was released called Oracle APEX 4.2 Reporting by Vishal Pathak.

I was one of the reviewers of the book and I really liked the content. The book covers many different areas of APEX and combines it with other knowledge (SQL, BI, ...). Although most focus is on reporting (Classic, Interactive Reports, Charts, PDF printing, ...) and getting most out of that, it also covers the history and architecture of APEX, the integration with other platforms (OBIEE, webservices) and some options to improve performance.

You find more info about the book on the Packt website.

APEX 4.2.3 available for download

A new patch set of Oracle Application Express (APEX) is available for download, the latest version of APEX is now 4.2.3.00.08.

As we are used to patch releases; it contains bug fixes, updated external libraries and updated or new packaged applications. This release is not different; for example Twitter Bootstrap 3.0 and AnyGantt 4.3 are now included and two new packaged app called Data Reporter and Opportunity Tracker are available.

What's new in this release is that there's special attention to Oracle Database 12c and the new CDB/PDB architecture. You can now upgrade the APEX version in the CDB. You can read more about the upgrade in the Multitenant Installations section.

Don't forget to read the entire patch set notes as they always contain important information about bug fixes, installation tasks, changes in behaviour, known issues etc.

Happy patching!

APEX Mobile - iPhone 5 Web App in Fullscreen

The default Mobile Theme (50) in APEX renders just fine in Safari. It uses the full height of my iPhone 5, but when I added the app to my Home screen and ran it from there, it didn't render in fullscreen mode.

Turns out that the iPhone 5 doesn't like the meta info.
If you take out the "width=device-width" from the meta name="viewport" part it renders in full screen.

Original:
width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no">

Changed to:

Note that you have to delete the icon from your home screen first and add it again after making the above change. (cache issue)

There's a nice post by Kyle Larson which goes into more detail on the above and explains how to work with startup screens on the iPhone 5.

Make APEX Plugin source read/write

I really like the Flot Pie Chart plugin that came with the APEX sample applications (see this blog post in which apps this plugin is used).

But when I wanted to make changes to it, I couldn't... the PL/SQL Code was read-only.

To make the source read/write again you need to delete the reference to the Master Plug-in.
If you export the plugin and open it in your text editor search for "p_reference_id" and set that to null (instead of the number).

wwv_flow_api.create_plugin (
   ...

  ,p_reference_id => null
  ,...

);

In case you wonder why I want to change that plugin; the plugin is great, but there's a newer version available of the Flot Charts which holds some nice improvements and the current plugin is not mobile compatible and responsive.

Upgrade Oracle DB 11gR2 with APEX to 12c

Now that Oracle Database 12c is available I upgraded my VM to try it out. The installation went very smooth and I was up-and-running in no time!

My virtual machine had Oracle 11gR2 installed with the latest patch of APEX 4.2.

Here are the steps I followed:
- downloaded the Oracle Database 12c zip for Linux 64-bit
- unzipped the files
- made sure I had all prerequisites and updated my Oracle Enterprise Linux from the command line with: yum update
- next I wanted to upgrade my current database; from the command line in Linux, went to the unzipped directly and ran: ./runInstaller
- I installed the software in a new directory /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0
- Next I followed the wizard to upgrade my current database

With Oracle 12c APEX will be installed automatically, but the upgrade was smart enough to detect I had a more recent version of APEX and it looks like it didn't touch it. My existing workspaces and applications were functioning just fine after the upgrade.

You find more information in the Oracle Database 12c documentation and the Upgrade Guide.

I wrote another blog post about the new features that will be enabled in APEX when running on Oracle DB 12c. Another recommend read is the full New Features document of the Oracle database.