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.
