Applications & Apps Technology

The early adopter version of APEX 4.0 has been released. Once I sign up for an account I will report back how it looks.
Sign up at http://tryapexnow.com/

I noticed that another blogger has decided to create an APEX application to collate all APEX specific jQuery plugins. I am big fan of using jQuery to extend APEX, so I hope that this idea takes off and we can all benefit.
http://lgcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/07/jquery-plugins-for-oracle-apex.htmlhttp://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=38200:1:0

Today the site has been officially relaunched. Hopefully you like it

For a while now the internet buzz word has been “web 2.0″. Many people new to APEX are keen to see how it can handle these new features. Luckily Oracle has created a page dedicated to this subject. Key points from the site are listed below, to view the full page visit http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/html/web2.0.html
PPR Reporting and ChartingPartial Page pagination of reports is provided by templates included in each theme. These can be easily extended to customer specific themes. To test partial page refresh, simply create any report page that returns enough rows to be paginated. Then, paginate the report and notice

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OracleForums.org is a new site containing forums dedicated to all aspects of Oracle. These include Oracle Application Express as well as SQL, PLSQL, Forms, Reports etc.
If you have a questions about any of the tutorials on this site, then feel free to ask them inside the dedicated APEX forum

You can evaluate Oracle Application Express 4.0 now yourself. Oracle released the Early Adopter version http://tryapexnow.com/ … just got access to the new version and it looks cool so far …
Not all features are available yet (e.g. Websheets) but there are so many other nice things in there that it’s definitely worth to have already a look now.
So try it out yourself and give feedback to the APEX Development team. The more feedback the better the production release

One of my highlights at UKOUG was the presentation of Anthony Rayner about Accessibility in APEX. It remembered me at my youth where my mother (she’s a professor) had to guide a blind person. From that time onwards I really started to appreciate and admire the disabled people and the people around them.
Anthony’s presentation was all about how we can make our websites and applications better, so disabled people can better understand and visualize what is going on on there.
I got a real shock when Anthony started a screen reader (JAWS) and showed us what these people “see” (or better

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It looks like there are 19 new APEX Views (compared to APEX 3.1.2).

APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_DA
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_DA_ACTS
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_FLASH5
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_FLASH5_S
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_IR_COMP
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_IR_GRPBY
APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_IR_NTFY
APEX_APPLICATION_TRANS_MAP
APEX_APPL_PLUGINS
APEX_APPL_PLUGIN_ATTRIBUTES
APEX_APPL_PLUGIN_ATTR_VALUES
APEX_APPL_PLUGIN_EVENTS
APEX_APPL_PLUGIN_FILES
APEX_TEAM_BUGS
APEX_TEAM_FEEDBACK
APEX_TEAM_MILESTONES
APEX_TEAM_TODOS
APEX_UI_DEFAULTS_ATTR_DICT
APEX_UI_DEFAULTS_GROUPS

If you go to Application Builder and select from the right hand Tasks the “APEX Views” link you see a description of all views. For the new views this is the description:
For some reason the Team Development views are not listed in this report.
It’s always interesting to review these views as they give you more insight into your application or to use them to have a look at the application behind the scenes. We have been using them for reporting an application or send automated QA feedback.

The Application Builder and more in particular the Page View has two modes in APEX 4.0.
You can view your page as you know from earlier APEX releases, the Component View:
Or from APEX 4.0 onwards you have the possibility to view your page in a Tree View:
This is my view on it;
- With the component view you to see everything on the page at once. You can just click on a link and it brings you to where you need to be. But you might have to scroll and especially for big pages with lot of conditions and different branches it

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I looked at the package we would be able to use in APEX 4.0 and saw some new ones.
Packages make it possible to do things in your own PL/SQL code which APEX does for you in the wizard. E.g. If you want to call a webservice, you can use the APEX Wizard to set this up, but it might be useful to do that from your own PL/SQL procedure or from a process in your APEX app.
On APEXBlogs.info I had to write a lot of custom code to read the different rss feeds. If the APEX development team opens up

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