April 9th 2013, APEX World took place, one of the biggest APEX only events in the world, organized by the Dutch Oracle user group (OGH). iAdvise was gold partner of this year’s edition. Below is a view on this event from our perspective.
iAdvise booth
The event took flight with the keynote by David Peake, product manager from Oracle. He spoke about Oracle DB 12c, what it is and what’s in there for APEX developers, and some words about what to expect from APEX 5.0. Again, we had to conclude that great things are coming our way in the months to come:
- pluggable databases,
- new column types,
- data redaction,
- new IDE-like view for the page builder,
- multiple interactive reports on 1 page,
- multi-row edit region type,
- enhanced builder security
- and some more great stuff…
But as we are used to with Oracle, it’s all subject to change and might not make it into next release 
More in-depth details and another view on this presentation can be found on Christian Rokitta’s blog.
The only two things David was clear about were:
- APEX 5.0 will focus on improved usability and quality rather than on new features;
- there will be an APEX 4.2.2 release before 5.0 will become available.
Below are our highlights from the presentations we followed.
Transfer Solutions presented their “portal” solution to combine both Forms and APEX applications with one custom single sign-on. We saw some interesting approaches for common issues and found confirmation for our approach in comparable situations.
Rob van Wijk from Ciber presented his white paper “Professional software development using APEX”. Together with his colleagues, he worked out a way to version database schemes and APEX applications in Subversion when all developers are working in their own isolated environment. On top of this, he used Hudson to automate the versioning update-commit process. A must read paper if you consider versioning within your APEX environment!
Regarding responsive web design (RWD), there were two presentations of interest:
Dimitri Gielis introduced how RWD can be accomplished in APEX by using the new built-in grid system and spoke about APEX theme 25 (fully responsive and new in APEX 4.2) but also Twitter bootstrap, which can perfectly be integrated in APEX.
Later on, it was up to CB Logistics, together with iAdvise colleague Stijn Van Raes, to present how they used RWD in a recent project.
Peter Raganitsch and Matt Nolan from FOEX came all the way to Zeist to state that APEX truly is the best successor of Oracle Forms…but not out-of-the-box. In a few demos, in which they combined declarative APEX functionality together with their plug-in framework, they showed how APEX can become a perfect fit for everyone who wants to migrate good old Forms without losing much functionality, usability and maintainability. A bold statement but definitely something our APEX developers will look into.
Roel Hartman showed us what mobile web development with APEX theme 50 and jQuery mobile is all about. He walked through the new item types, lists and buttons and demonstrated how you can easily make your application look better with standard APEX functionality.
Our iAdvise colleague, Karen Van Hellemont, presented with Natasha Van Hoof from the Flemish Government how documents can be generated from the database. Throughout several years, iAdvise gained experience in generating documents with PL/SQL and developed a metadata driven solution with a simple API to re-use it in other projects. The Flemish Government is our first customer to use the complete version of this solution and therefore gave a customer testimonial on their experience with the tool.
The price for most-entertaining presentation definitely goes to John Scott (APEX Evangelists) when talking about HTML5 websockets! The concept of websockets took about 10 minutes. The remaining time was used for demos about what you can do with this. We never heard so many sounds of astonishment in 30 minutes!
For a Belgian-Dutch Oracle consultancy company, this is one of the most valuable events next to Oracle Open World and this year’s edition really showed us that APEX is far from ever going away! It has great potential for a very wide range of businesses and allows both developers and end-users to maximize their needs in every way.
