Oracle Developer Tools and PlatformsBig data Tools and platforms, Oracle Developer tools (Forms, Reports, APEX)

I have been following Oracle Apex since 2004 and while I was no big fan at the beginning, I am more and more inclined to say that there is a case for adopting this tool in a number of cases, especially in situations where budget and time are severe constraints. I will try to summarize my current experience with Oracle 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. Read the rest of this entry »

For those planning to be at the annual ORAGEC here in Montréal, there are a number of interesting sessions. Of those, I will be attending the following sessions: Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the excellent forum over at oracle.com, for those interested in an Apex forum in french, there is an excellent one run by sie-solutions.com over at apexquebec.com.

While Working on setting up an authentication/authorization scheme for an Oracle Apex application, I came across an excellent link   by Duncan Mein here and a step by step procedure by Afaq Ayub here. Read the rest of this entry »

This past tuesday Nov 23, 2010 we had Mr David Peake, APEX product manager, over here in Montreal giving us a presentation on the new features available in APEX 4.X.

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.

For those in the Montreal area, I will be teaching Oracle APEX at college de Bois de Boulogne this coming winter 2011. It is a 90 hours course.

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.

There were very good news yesterday at the APEX presentation made by Oracle and the team behind sie-solutions (website). The most interesting features that will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release were discussed in the morning sessions.

In the afternoon, there were 6 speed training sessions related to the following features:

• Graphic look for an APEX application
• Preparing an APEX application for smartphones
• JQuery in APEX
• Plugins
• Dynamic actions
• How to break down a database using poor programming habits within APEX

For Oracle Forms developers, the most interesting feature is what is called dynamic action, another term for trigger. I already raised that issue in this post a while back. In essence, I was concerned that in order to mimic a trigger behavior in APEX, you had to resort to javascript which a number of people are not comfortable with. Now, with the wizard in the 4.0 release, you should be able to implement some very interesting features in APEX.

As far as plugins are concerned, it is the way to go if APEX is to grow. However, I raised an issue dealing with the fact that most companies won’t use a plugin unless it is certified free from trojan, virues etc. The reason is that APEX is deployed in the database and as such a well (bad usage) crafted plugin would open the data in the DB to external mining. In this case, I think a plugin store similar to Apple store or Google market should be the way to go. Who is going or willing to manage it ?

Anyway, excellent presentations by the team behind sie solutions.

David Peake, product manager for Oracle application express, has posted an announcement related to the availability of APEX 3.2.

Forms Conversion  is one of the features that is available in this release.

The free hosted “development” environment on http://apex.oracle.com , which is open to all developers, has been updated to APEX 3.2. That should give us an easy way to try out APEX.

I have a couple of hard to convert forms module full of triggers, program units and database calls that I will be running through the converter once I get a free moment. I am too busy now with the release of Frite.

Last week, one of our senior DBAs made a comment  regarding our current migration. Essentially, he was referring to Oracle APEX (formerly HTML-DB) and whether we looked at Forms to APEX conversion.

Management decided a while ago that we will be migrating to Oracle Forms 10g given that the in-house expertise is mostly Oracle Forms.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am back now at testing HTMLDB 2.2 after last year’s tutorial. At any rate, there a number of new features with the tool although it is still missing some very obvious ones.

The most striking one is the lack of stacked, tabbed canvases. When you deal with master-detail forms, it is almost the case that you need to spread out the details info on several tabs (well at least 2 or three tabs). On the otn forum, I have seen that one post requested this feature in the upcoming release of apex 3.0 and another post stated that this tabbed canvas issue can be implemented with some DHTML tricks.

Learning to use Apex is one thing but if that also entails becoming a Javascript, Ajax, DHTML guru, then I guess we are missing the issue at hand which is managing and/or processing the database data.

Going back to Oracle Forms, the onus is on the developers and specifically the people writing the PL/SQL code
and libraries required to implement the business rules. With Apex, it looks like most of the issues that are being raised now on otn deal with the design/interface side of the application. As such, I hope that the Apex team should put all its energy toward resolving/implementing those features that made Forms such a formidable tool.

Last, a google search for HTMLDB/Apex course or lecture notes yields no results at the present time.