If You Have Oracle Database You Have Oracle Application Express; Use it or Lose it
I’m starting to like Oracle Application Express (APEX) more and more every day.
I have used APEX to build a dashboard to monitor and report on all Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) interfaces with external systems.
I am currently working on another dashboard for EBS concurrent programs. For that one I used APEX charts. They are really powerful and versatile. Here is a tutorial on how to use them.
The best thing of all, if you know SQL and PL/SQL you’ll be up to speed on APEX in no time.
Oracle recently published the Oracle Application Express statement of direction (SOD). I am very happy to see that Oracle continues to invest in the development and support of APEX and that new versions of APEX will be released annually.
In fact, the next new version will be 4.2 and according to the SOD, this upcoming version is planned to incorporate the following features:
- Mobile Applications – Enhanced themes and HTML templates to enable developers to declaratively create mobile applications and/or mobile pages.
- Charts – Incorporate HTML 5 charting capabilities.
- Web Services – Provide declarative specification of RESTful Web services mapped to SQL and PL/SQL.
- Application Deployment – Provide enhanced capabilities for packaging and distributing APEX applications to improve protection of intellectual property rights and ease customization.
Moreover, APEX is included (at no extra cost) with Oracle Database as a standard database component. Isn’t that sweet!
As further proof that Oracle is committed to improving APEX is that the Oracle Database Cloud Service is being built on the multi-tenant infrastructure of APEX, and APEX will be the standard development tool included with the Database Cloud Service.
Related articles:
- Get All the Cool New Features of Oracle Application Express 3.0 in Oracle Database XE
- How to Download BLOB Content as a File Using Oracle Application Express
- Using Web Services in Oracle Application Express [video]
Filed in Oracle on 23 Apr 12 | Tags: apex
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Eddie, great blog! Yeah, ApEx is one of those things that most plsql/sql developers are probably aware of, but haven’t dipped their toes into because it’s “Web” based.
I am intrigued about your dashboard idea to monitor interfaces etc. Would it be possible to share via a series of blogs how you went about building this (leaving out the proprietary stuff)?
This would be a great primer on those of us who get chills with the mere mention of “web”.
Thanks!
Hi Manish, I’ll try to put something together about the dashboard APEX application I built. It’s not that complicated once you know how to build APEX applications in general. In the mean time, feel free to contact me directly with any questions you may have.
Eddie, I have 11G database in out environment. How do I go about making sure Apex is a part of the installed components and if so, how do I proceed to install/use it?
Thanks, Eugene
I suggest you refer to the Oracle Application Express Installation Guide.
Basically, there are two main steps: Installing/configuring APEX in the database and installing/configuring an HTTP server.
For the HTTP server I suggest you go with the Oracle Application Express Listener.
Cheers!