Tuesday 16 October 2012

Are you still on APEX 3.x?

Oracle Application Express 4.2 is now available to the public, and I thought I'd throw in my 5 cents.

I know a few sites out there still on 3.x, so I thought I'd list a few features that have come out in the past 3 major releases that they're missing out on:

  • Improved Error handling
  • Enhanced Interactive Reports
  • DML using ROWID instead of primary key
  • End user CSV upload
  • Websheets
  • Tabular form improvements
  • Plug-ins
  • Dynamic Actions
  • Team development module
  • Accessibility improvements
  • Application builder for Mobile
  • Responsive Themes
  • HTML5 Charts
  • HTML5 Item types
  • Mobile calendars
  • Packaged applications
  • RESTful Web Services

For me, I think the biggest two are Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions - they're hard to split.

Mobile development is not so much a feature, but a whole new ball game!

As for APEX 4.2, I notice the public release is 4.2.0.00.27, while apex.oracle.com is still 4.2.0.00.22 - so hopefully some of the small bugs I've been encountering have been rectified. I have had to refrain from installing 4.2 on my laptop as I need 4.1 for a side project a little while longer.

Design time bugs can pretty much be ignored - stuff like using previous through the wizards doesn't always behave as expected. Some template tweaks would also be handy, but David Peake mentioned in a recent webinar that this was already being looked at.
Runtime bugs are a little more annoying - for the first time I've been finding intermittent issues in Chrome when IE works fine - usually it's the other way around!
For example, I received a checksum issue on an APEX generated link in Chrome, but not IE.
I'm confident these will be quickly rectified, if not already with the fast uptake and use of this new release.

My presentation at the Perth AUSOUG conference will be talking about an APEX 4.2 application with a desktop & mobile interface - more details to come soon!

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