Oracle Application Express 5 is now generally available! The result of a two and a half year engineering effort, it represents the greatest advancement of Oracle Application Express (APEX) in its 10 year history. Oracle Application Express 5 enables customers to develop, design and deploy elegant, responsive, database-driven desktop and mobile applications using only a browser.
“Oracle APEX 5 is the largest and most important release in the history of Oracle Application Express” said Michael J. Hichwa, Vice President of Oracle Database Tools. “Universal Theme in Oracle APEX 5 dramatically improves how quickly and easily SQL-savvy developers can build Web apps that are both responsive and accessible. Universal Theme enables developers, like myself, to build a robust customized UI without the help of a CSS/HTML guru.”
The marquee features of Oracle Application Express 5 include:
Universal Theme: A Better UI for Your Apps
Universal Theme is an all-new user interface (UI) for your applications. It is engineered from the ground up for Application Express 5. It is simpler yet more capable than previous themes, and can enable effortless customization. Universal Theme can empower developers to build modern, responsive, sophisticated applications without requiring expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
With Universal Theme, there are also several enhancements to the handling of Themes and Templates. This release features: Theme Subscriptions, Template Options, Theme Styles, List-based hierarchical Navigation Menus and much finer control over templates and the HTML emitted by the Application Express engine. It is now easier than ever to control the UI of your application.
Page Designer: The New Intuitive Browser-Based IDE
Page Designer is a new IDE designed to greatly enhance developer productivity for prototyping, design, development and maintenance of Application Express applications. Page Designer offers a visual presentation, including an on-the-fly, intuitive drag and drop interface for rapid development of application pages. The enhanced code editor provides SQL and PL/SQL validation with inline errors, auto completion, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regex support, complete with undo and redo support.
New Application Builder Design
In addition to the new Application Builder UI being designed for easy navigation, simplicity of access for visual design and reduced clutter, it includes a new color palette, icons for easy, visual identification, intuitive workflow-based menus, and improved keyboard and accessibility support.
Mobile Reporting
The new mobile reporting capability allows developers to build reports that can display on nearly all mobile devices. For small devices with limited screen displays, intelligent Column Toggle and Reflow Table Wrap features allow developers to specify the display of important data and hide less important information for easy viewing.
Modal Dialogs
Modal and Non-Modal dialogs enable developers to rapidly define dialogs using standard Application Express pages. To use Modal Dialogs, developers simply select the display type and template of the page, and Application Express completes the process of rendering the page appropriately.
All New Calendar
The new calendar component comes with built-in support for Month, Week, Day, and Agenda views and is much easier to customize. The calendar is based on the popular FullCalendar library and supports drag and drop and time-based events.
Packaged Applications
Oracle Application Express 5 includes a broad collection of Packaged Applications. These are Application Express applications that can be used out-of-the-box and are supported by Oracle. Examples include Project Tracking, Survey Builder, Meeting Minutes, and Group Calendar. There are 19 Packaged Applications in all. Additionally, there are 16 sample applications which are used to showcase the features of Oracle Application Express, from Sample Charts to Sample Data Loading. There’s even a sample application demonstrating the powerful spatial capabilities in the Oracle Database.
“An interesting dimension of the Oracle APEX technology is how cloud-friendly it is. Oracle APEX is browser-based, making developer and deployment access seamless (never leave your browser). Oracle APEX is available in multiple Oracle Database Cloud service offerings today. Oracle APEX is one of the rare database tools you can use equally well on the cloud, your company’s server, and your laptop,” added Hichwa.
Additional Information
To learn more about Oracle Application Express, visit apex.oracle.com. To learn more about Oracle Database Cloud, visit cloud.oracle.com/database.
Thanks to Oracle
https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/entry/oracle_announces_oracle_application_express