Last Tuesday I have met Michael Hichwa at the Apex Roundtable Talk in Stuttgart. He is a great guy who truly loves this product. I am really happy to have chosen Application Express as my primary focus.
Denes Kubicek, Patrick Wolf und Carsten Czarski joined in on the discussion, amongst other Oracle customers that use Application Express a lot.
Mike gave an interesting presentation on the upcoming features. You can see the presentation here. He was also very interested in the projects we did and the enhancements we would like to see.
Lots of interesting stuff will be coming, it is really exciting. The 3.1 release is expected in November, the 4.0 release some time in the first quarter of 2008.
What I am really looking forward is the gradual publishing of an official API for Apex. Then we will be able to programmatically create applications, pages, regions, basically everything. This is a major step forward. It does already work now but is not supported.
Also the Apex team will make the Application Builder more extensible. They will start with custom item types in 4.0. Learning from this they will add more possibilities to add custom region types and wizards in subsequent releases.
He was also demonstrating some of the new features of 4.0, especially the new query report region, which uses AJAX a lot. There is a video done by Carl Backstrom available which shows some of this functionality.
So, lots of great stuff is coming ahead.
Regards,
~Dietmar.
5 comments:
Hi, I wanted to learn more about your comment on "What I am really looking forward is the gradual publishing of an official API for Apex. Then we will be able to programmatically create applications, pages, regions, basically everything. This is a major step forward. It does already work now but is not supported". I need to implement this functionality and was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.
Hi Scott and Nathalie,
it is currently possible to create applications, pages, items, branches, etc. Just look at the export sql file that is generated by Apex.
It uses an internal API to create these objects. Guessing some of the details you should be able to get it working. You should look at the apex dictionary views (APEX_DICTIONARY). There you should find the neccessary details.
Just create a plain page using the Apex frontend. Then create an export file. Look at the code and compare it to the information found in the apex dictionary views. This should get you started.
Nevertheless, I would wait for the publishing of the official API. It will be documented, more easy to use and stable.
The whole process of publishing the API is a bit driven by the SQL Developer integration of Apex ( http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/html/sql_dev_integration.html ) . For this they started to create the first supported packages.
Regards,
~Dietmar.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - it was very useful. I checked out your consulting site, Opal Consulting. I may need some help in the future, are you still doing consulting?
Hi Scott,
sorry, my website is completely outdated, I really have to update it sometime ;).
Yes, I am still doing consulting :). But I try to not get involved in too many projects at the time. Currently I work in a local project for 60% of my time. The rest I spend doing advanced coachings and seminars.
Maybe I can help you with some onsite coaching for a specific project. I just do not work as a full project member currently.
Regards,
~Dietmar.
That's cool, coaching sounds like a good option at the right time. I live in Geneva so it's not so far away.
All the best,
Scott
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