First 2015 post

APEX 5.0 EA 3 overview

General impressions and things to look forward to

Hi all it is good to be back after 2 months of holidays. This year we've taken a bigger break to fill in the batteries for the rest of the year. And as you can see I am straight back into APEX and writing my first post of the year. that is why I will try to keep it short and concise.

Ever since Oracle announced EA 3 is here I applied for a new workspace and wanted to see what new have guys prepared for us this time. To tell you the truth the more I play with it and the more I spend time in new APEX 5 version I love it more and more. 

Page designer - I believe this will be the biggest and the most well accepted change compared to APEX 4.x version. It is almost impossible to foresee all benefits of having such a modern and compact development environment to work in. Definitely the biggest gain so far and once used to the new UI people will love it for sure. Things are well organized you can easily find components and properties, considering it is a web based UI I am truly impressed with work done on it. 

Page Universal theme - Again a big plus and enhancements in UI comparing to 4.x theme versions. Interface seems light, even with few minor places for improvement look and feel is really good, responsiveness of component is great too.

Other things - From first time of running Sample Application you notices changes on all levels. Modular layouts are supported which now definitely looks more professional bringing APEX closer to other popular development tools such as Java and .Net.

More intuitive support for modal windows is now here allowing us to use the advantage of modal windows more than before. Great to see effort done in this space. 

More than one interactive report is now available on a single page. How long have we waited for this to happen? Every person at some stage had a request for this feature so it is nice to finally be able to see it included. From other APEX enthusiast I learned that this feature required some extensive changes of core APEX IR logic which at the end resulted in decommissioning and unsporting of gReport function used by many. Details on this I will try to address in one of my future posts.

  I will mention here my only noticed hick up - when wanting to filter values in IR report by selecting appropriate column I didn't like final look and feel of the menu that comes up. Have a look at this example: 

 By clicking on Customer first name this was the result. 

Even though things look promising I sort of felt it didn't quite deliver. As menu shown seems clumsy and doesn't feel like it fits in well with the rest of the UI which is now really nice. Maybe this can be further improved for final release.

Comparing to Action menu which really deserves every recommendation. 

To finish my post I will also mention that is great to see support for Menu list items which bring a lot for overall impression which for me personally really is good. One can really feel that with version 5.x APEX will make another huge step toward being even more accepted among developer communities and new clients.

APEX 5.x - Impressive, promising and exciting.

Cheers, 

SLino