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APEX 4.0 New Features

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At OOW some new features of the upcoming major release of APEX, version 4.0, were revealed - ofcourse with all the regular disclamers applied. Here a (non complete) list of the announced features - in a random order:
  1. The option to use an Application Timestamp Format, next to the existing Application Date Format;
  2. The option to use the Client Time Zone;
  3. jQuery will be included in the APEX distribution;
  4. instead of the (horrible) HTML-calendars, the much better looking jQuery Calendar will be used;
  5. the jQuery Calendar will offer an Extensible Item Framework, to create your own calendar types;
  6. ofcourse the famous Websheets;
  7. an Oracle APEX Listener as a replacement for the MOD/PLSQL gateway;
  8. Improved Tabular Forms, thus reducing the need to build these manually;
  9. more JSON;
  10. Dynamic Recreation of Select List (from JSON), used - o.a. - for cascading LOV's;
  11. Namespaced apex.*.*, to reduce the risk of confusing variables in Javascript;
  12. Chainability;
  13. and last, but certainly not least, Dynamic Actions.
At the demo booth I saw a demonstration of these Dynamic Actions: a declarative way to define show/hide and enable/disable of items - depending on other items values. The goal is to reduce the manual Javascript coding. This was just a first example and more functions will be added in the final version. Also the option to create a Dynamic Action for a validation (e.g. P3_ORDER_DATE is not null) will be available in the future!

Reading this everbody screams : I want it and I want it now! But you have to be patient. The 4.0 release is aimed at "early 2009". First we should get our hands on the 3.2 release (this year), supporting the Forms2Apex migration.

Comments

Stew said…
Sounds like pretty interesting stuff - especially the improved Tabular Forms (since they're used so much), Dynamic Actions and the WebSheets.

I hope they also work out the kinks in some of the existing minor features. For example, couldn't they come up with a better interface for editing Standard and Parent Tabs? I was working with them yesterday and it felt very cumbersome. :-(

Thanks for sharing this stuff.
3:06 pm
Roel said…
@Stew
I remember that at one of the sessions someone in the audience also complained about managing tabs. As I recall the development team was also looking into that.
3:30 pm
Anonymous said…
You said...

"an Oracle APEX Listener as a replacement for the MOD/PLSQL gateway;"

... what does this really mean? Any more details on this?
4:10 pm
Stew said…
Roel,

Thanks for the good news on that issue.
5:17 pm
Patrick Wolf said…
Roel,

my impression was that APEX 4.0 is not planned for "early 2009", it's more targeted for summer/fall.

BTW, was nice to meet you!
Patrick
10:42 pm
Roel said…
@Anonymous
Some more info on the Oracle APEX Listener you can find at the forum in this post : http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2791285

@Patrick
Nice meeting again indeed! The "early 2009" is mentioned in one of the presentations of Oracle (with the regular disclaimers..). We'll see...
9:07 am
Stirl said…
Thanks that was very informative.

I cannot wait for jQuery and the jQuery calendars...
10:16 am
Drew said…
More important to me is the output/printing/export capability of the Interactive Reports. They are great but on the display, but horrible upon "download". That feature is supposed to be included in 4.0, export to Word, Excel, HTML, PDF, what is on screen, should be similar to the output.

Anyone know the date yet?
2:46 pm
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