Oracle & APEX Geekery

    Language : English Paperback : 320 pages Release Date : March 2011 ISBN : 1849681066 ISBN 13 : 978-1-84968-106-3 Author : Mark Lancaster   March 2011 the book “ Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS ”, written by Mark Lancaster, is expected to be published by Packt Publishing, but it’s available NOW already as a RAW edition. RAW? What is a RAW edition? Well, basically, it’s a prerelease (Read As we Write). Some chapters are still missing and no guaranties, that anything you’re reading in this RAW edition will actually be in the final book release. So, this article will be a pre-review. Is it worth reading? I think it is. You will see: for this book, RAW means VERY WELL DONE already. Do be mislead by the title. This book is not solely about how to spice up your APEX GUI with ExtJS. This book discusses application GUI development with APEX in general and extending APEX functionality with ExtJS in particular. What will you learn from the book? Th

Oracle just came with an update on its “ Statement of Direction ” for APEX. Once again Oracle confirms that APEX will continue its efforts to enhance this development platform, which should not be a surprise, but there were often doubts (especially from IT management) whether APEX will be a platform to base long term planning on, preferring ADF as the framework primarily promoted as the-way-to-go. Apex is mature, and will become more mature with the announced enhancements in this SOD.   Oracle continues to invest in the development and support of Oracle Application Express and new versions of Application Express will be released at least annually. So, version 4.1 should not be too far away from being released, as 4.0 is almost half a year “old” now (not taking into account the time the EA release was available). Oracle lists some features planed for the upcoming version, and I just would like to comment on some of them:   Development for Mobile Applications – Includ

Sometimes you get information and you ask yourself: "Why didn't I know this? This would have made (certain) things so much easier!" or "I didn't know I could do this". Well, this just happened to me and after asking a few colleges, I found out: I’m not the only Oracle developer who didn't know this (without being too concerned about the statistical relevance of the sample size, I would estimate that about 80% of PL/SQL developers might not know this). So I decided to write this little post. Consider this piece of code: CREATE TABLE examples (sample_str VARCHAR2 (100)); INSERT INTO examples (sample_str) VALUES ('It''s the little things in life ...'); DECLARE v_stm VARCHAR2 (1000); BEGIN v_stm := 'insert into examples (sample_str) values (''It''''s the little things in life ...'')'; EXECUTE IMMEDIATE v_stm; END; Take a look at the quotation syntax. Most developers will recognize