Skip to main content

Collecting ideas for APEX 4.0 Plug-Ins...using Google Wave

By
As you all know by now APEX 4.0 will have some new functionality regarding the creation of Custom Item Types and Custom Region Types. These types will be called "Plug-Ins". The idea is that there will be a public App Store like library where you can up- and download plug-ins.

A snippet from the Oracle Open World APEX 4.0 presentation:
  • Easy way to enhance the existing built-in functionality of Oracle APEX with new item types, region types, dynamic actions, etc.
  • Developers use in similar fashion to native widgets
  • Wizard support and declarative setting of attributes
  • Included in APEX application export
  • By providing this plug-in system in APEX, we want to engage the APEX community to create a rich ecosystem around Oracle APEX.
The APEX Development Team can’t possibly incorporate all the widgets that developers would like to utilize. By using plug-ins developers can readily incorporate additional item / region types to enhance the functionality, appearance and user friendliness of their applications. Once defined, plug-in based components are created and maintained very much like standard APEX components. We believe that the APEX community will build many plug-ins and make them available to others. Much like with the SQL Developer plug-ins it will be up to the contributors whether these are freeware, etc.

In the demo the APEX Dev Team is showing an Amazon style 'star rating' (as an Item Type Plug-In). (like the image above)

So maybe now is time to gather ideas for Plug-Ins (using this cool collaboration tool). So don't be shy and add your ideas about the Plug-Ins you think you could use (or even create yourself !) or are just very cool....

Custom Item Types
  • Amazon like star rating
Custom Region Types
  • Google Wave
  • Google Visualizations
So please add your own ideas to this wave, and let's make collaboration happen...

Comments

Martin D'Souza said…
Hi Roel,

Thanks for starting this. As soon as I can get my wave account I'll post some ideas.

Martin
6:47 pm
Unknown said…
Hmm I must be doing something wrong because I don't see the wave ...

Dimitri
9:59 pm
Tony Fatouros said…
Hi Roel,

Would love to contribute to the Wave but my Google account has not been activated for Google Wave.

Are you able to send me an invite if possible pls.

Thanks.
Tony.
11:31 pm
Roel said…
If I only had some spare invites...
9:24 am
Johannes de Jong said…
Great initiative Roel, pity you exclude non-wave users.
9:43 am
Roel said…
@Johannes: In the end we will all be Wavers... (one goal is also to examine the collaboration possibilities of Wave for these kind of things).
BTW: You can also add your ideas as a comment to this post, I'll take care that they'll be entered in the wave.
Cheers
Roel
9:53 am
Johannes de Jong said…
Hmm all Wavers, don’t let the “paranoids” amongst us hear that hear this.

Not a bad idea to test Wave with your initiative.

I’d like a Google Map (v3) plug-in, but if I look at the Apex 4.0 “brief” it looks like the built-in mapping will be so good that there might not be a requirement to use Google Maps.

Johannes
12:12 pm
Johannes de Jong said…
Hi Roel,

I'm not sure it it can be seen as a plugin but I want to suggest it anyway

How about a plugin for Apex "themes", something similar to Joomla's Morph Toolset, see http://www.joomlajunkie.com/templates/morph/morph.html

Or a plugin that converts Joomla templates to Apex templates

Johannes
8:59 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good o...
1 comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function ...
Post a Comment
Read more