The presentation by David Peake, APEX product manager from Oracle, highlighted the new features available in 4.1.

• Error handling: a nice way to propagate Oracle DB errors to APEX and handling within APEX. This is by far the best feature and certainly the one to use right away since a number of exceptions are related to integrity constraints.
• Data loading: a new type of page included in the wizard. That will allow the creation of data loading pages within the application.
• Internationalization: a much better interface for the wizard. Loading and publishing a new international version will be much quicker.

There were two other presentations by the people from insum solutions (internationalization)  and momentum technologies (rich UI interfaces for APEX applications).

Most had a desire to explore APEX as a tool since they read a lot about it but were unsure whether they could transition smoothly to developing APEX web applications.

So, the first problem we had is that there is this apparent impression that with APEX it is just a matter of clicking and clicking in wizards and through magic, the application will build itself.

The students were provided with a 420 pages workbook that shows every facet of APEX when designing and building a small Oracle-based application.

The course was 90 hours long and lasted from January to June 2011. Each lecture was 4 hours long and there was roughly 1 hour lecture with 3 hours of lab work. The APEX version used is the 4.X version currently available on apex.oracle.com

I divided the course in two parts with part I designed for APEX introduction and part II being the advanced APEX stuff.

Here is the breakdown for each lecture:

Part I

• Lecture 1: Introduction to apex and schema creation
• Lecture 2: Developing Forms with APEX
• Lecture 3: Items and Components in APEX Forms
• Lecture 4: Dynamic Actions
• Lecture 5: Navigation in APEX applications
• Lecture 6: Validations
• Lecture 7: Computations
• Lecture 8: Security in an APEX application

Part II

• Lecture 9: HTML & CSS in APEX
• Lecture 10: HTML & CSS in APEX II
• Lecture 11: Javascript in APEX
• Lecture 12: Designing themes in APEX
• Lecture 13: Using jQuery in APEX
• Lecture 14: Using Plugins
• Lecture 15: Creating plugins for APEX
• Lecture 16: Designing multi languages applications
• Lecture 17: Processes in APEX
• Lecture 18: Reporting in APEX
• Lecture 19: Using BI Publisher for PDF report layouts
• Lecture 20: Application Export and deployment
• Lecture 21: Migrating Oracle Forms applications to APEX

A number of students quit as soon as we reached lecture 11. What I was told is that APEX did require them to be familiar with a number of technologies (HTML, CSS, javascript, jQuery, BI Published, Apache FOP, theme design, plugin design and last but not the least PL-SQL) and they were not ready for that.

While it was fully understood that the overall objective for the course was to get acquainted with APEX but not necessarily to become an expert in the above mentionned technologies, there is this impression that a number of my students are not ready to jump ship and start developing in APEX.

However, there were some hardcore Oracle Forms developers that performed very well and understand that it is just a matter of time before they are asked to switch to APEX.

Two books were used for this session:

• Beginning Oracle Application Express  by Rick Greenwald – WROX Publishing
• Oracle Application Express 3.2. The Essentials and More by Arie Geller, Packt publishing

I will be posting some of the plugins and the themes that were developed by the students. Some are very impressive.

Some of the notable improvements that can be seen right away are the APEX Builder Dashboards, which  in this version show only the most important information. However, there are other improvements as well that can be seen once you login to APEX.

Please bear in mind that I wrote this post as a way to explain to a friend whether it makes sense to switch to Oracle Apex or Oracle JDeveloper coming from an Oracle Forms perspective.

Good points

• Shared components: excellent repository approach that will boost the productivity of any team. Important stuff that I have been using are: LOV, templates, Lists, application items and globalization.

• Themes and templates: Graphic look for your APEX application. While web purists may look the other way at how Apex provides support for putting together the user interface, I find it very simple and intelligent at the same time. There are a large number of templates for any theme but it is important to realize you do not need to use all of them in any given applications. As such, if it is required to develop a new theme, only a limited number of templates could be designed. There are a couple of articles that have been written on how to put together a new theme for an Oracle Apex application. The best I have seen is from SUMNEVA. Best proof is their website which uses a custom theme. There is another one which got me started and explains the details behind an Oracle Apex theme (see sie-solutions.com)

• Javascript and JQuery: while I was really not very happy in seeing Javascript as a pre-requisite when developing under Apex, it was more because of a lack of understanding of its role in the overall production pipeline. Since we are on a web platform, there are cases where you do need to perform validations or calculations on the client side and in these cases, it is important to understand Javascript and the way to use it properly. An added plus is the JQuery library, included with Apex, is outstanding and provides almost limitless opportunities.

• Dynamic actions: For those that are still not inclined to use Javascript, dynamic actions are another way to provide excellent support for writing client-side behavior.

• Plugins: without them, Apex would be severely hampered, well not entirely true but very useful for integrating external functionnalities. The community does provide a number of outstanding extensions and there are more and more plugins being developed. However, I am still wanting to see Apex plugins developed with Java. That could open an entirely new avenue for Apex. But given that so many DBAs are reluctant to give Java support on the DB side, I believe PL/SQL for now is the only language for Apex plugins.

Bad points

• Application development: while we can regroup pages as a group, the visual layout of the application pages in the Apex IDE is a bit overwhelming. I think a treeview display of the pages with a folder and pages arrangement will tremendously help.

• Application prototyping and branching: since we are talking about a web application, it might be very useful to layout the page navigation beforehand and from there generate just the application skeleton. Something similar to what we have in Oracle JDeveloper.

• Form icons: very confusing icons for the forms and reports. While there is a rich palette of forms and reports under Apex, it is hard for those starting with the tool to differentiate between for example a tabular form and a form on a table with report.

Summary

Well, there are other good and bad points but I tried to summarize the points I have seen lately. Overall, I do appreciate the design behind Oracle Apex and I strongly believe that now is the time to switch to Oracle Apex, at least for those that do not know whether to go to Oracle JDeveloper or Oracle Apex. You will not be disappointed !

• Platform Application Express (10H15-11H15)
• Quoi de neuf avec la solution d’intelligence d’affaires OBIEE 11g (11H15-12H15)
• Stratégie d’évolution Forms 11g Developer/ADF vers une architecture SOA (13H15-14H15)
• Sécurité de l’information avec la base de données 11g (14H30-15H30)
• Meilleures pratiques de migration à 11g (15H30-16H30)

Like the previous years,  I do expect high quality presentations from the Oracle people.  See you there.

The difference between authentification and authorization:

Authentication Scheme: control access to the application. That’s why you have a login page. You can use the application default, the one provided by the database and your own custom scheme.

Authorization Scheme: control access to page items, regions and pages. That’s why you see the authorization link (pages) and security tabs (items and regions ) everywhere when developping your application.

Some of the features that were highlighted:

• Dynamic actions: for people that tend to shy away from Javascript, this could be the answer. Basically, when you need to implement some Javascript scripting, you can do so by going the Dynamic action route.
• APEX Plugins: how they can extend functionnalities in APEX. David  mentionned there are a number of plugins already available but APEX developers should be writing more. It should be noted that APEX plugins are written in PL/SQL.
• Web services: an area where we should be expecting further improvement. Currently, REST web services are favored by the web community.
• Oracle APEX Listener.
• Websheets: it is not clear what directions the APEX team is taking with websheets. These are pages implemented in a wiki fashion but David stressed that they are not aiming for a wiki-like usage.

On my side, the main point that got me really interested in is getting websheets to do things similar to Lotus Notes as I explained in this old post.

The presentation was followed by a roundtable. Experts from sie-solutions, insum and bibliotheque nationale du quebec answered questions from the audience.

Overall, it was a nice event organized by Oragec.

There is also a presentation on APEX on Tuesday Nov 23, 2010 by David Peake, APEX product manager. The presentation will be held at Bibliotheque Nationale. The event is organized by ORAGEC.

For those interested, there are a number of other open source UML tools that can perfectly do the job. Here is the link for a nice list of UML tools.