Monday 24 March 2014

APEX 5 first peek - Features not yet implemented

It's an early adopter release, the APEX team have come a long way, yet there are still goodies to come.

What's on it's way

Some features aren't quite ready yet. Some you'll see, others you'll find out when you click on them - so no doubt we'll see a second, maybe even third early adopter release.

Notifications

The first you may notice if you've had a play is the notification message - this will be much nice once the development team are done.
A bunch more are already listed in the known issues.

Utilised Shared Components

In the current release I use the Shared Components section on the right often to click on templates used by the page. I already miss it's presence as I play around, and I noticed David delicately skipped over this one during two of the videos ;-)
Shared Components used by the page
Early adopter release 2, I guess.

I found a Tags plug-in item type but that doesn't seem to be quite ready. There are a few Region plug-ins built-in that you can play around with already.

What's not included

Some features have been bumped to 5.1, and fair enough - the amount of work it must have taken to get the Page Designer up & running, the team is making sure they get everything right.

Multi-row Edit Region

At the KScope14 conference Karen Cannell hedged her bets and lost - her submittion What the Muliti-Row Edit Region Type Means to You and Your End Users will probably have to wait.
Not that I'm going (most unfortunately), one year I'll make the trip...

To find solace in this, based on what we're seeing with the new Page Designer, I very much look forward to what this multi-row edit region type will deliver. No pressure team...

Wish list

I had a look through my APEX 4.2 Wish List post and I've remembered other features that I've been waiting/hoping/requesting for a while that are still absent. Some of these items are resolved with plug-ins; some have lost proirity; some we won't know until documentation is supplied; some have been nailed; some simply don't exist anymore with the new Page Designer. Some we just won't know until the use case comes up once more.

What I was hoping for though was enhancements to the Build Option infrastructure, thereby aiding release management.

There are currently 59 other features categorised as "Planned" in the APEX Feature Request application. For instance, feature "ACNA" suggests substitution string :APP_PAGE_ALIAS will be introduced in 5.0.
The new features documentation usually covers stuff like this - I reckon there might be a few other new substitution strings.

Other nuggets of gold will surely be discovered over time.

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