Pre-Review: Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS : RAW

-

1063EN_MockupCover

 

 

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?

The book will guide you through the whole installation and setup process of your APEX development environment, discussing the different web server alternatives. One of my favorite chapters here is the explanation of how to combine APEX with Subversion as version control system to automate your build process.

If you’re not familiar with Ext you will get an (APEX free) introduction to get acquainted with Ext, starting with a simple hello-world-like example , learn about CSS manipulation, DOM navigation and manipulation, event handling and finally advance to object notation and namespacing. All in about 30 pages, code examples included. Just enough to get stated without getting bored.

Ext offers lots of web GUI enhancements, but to use those in APEX you will have to work with templates and themes. The book explains the of the APEX model, how to create your own template step-by-step and integrate ExtJS into it.

Once familiar to the basics of ExtJS enabled APEX GUI building, you now will go through a number of detailed examples, creating, modifying and enhancing templates with ExtJS and CSS techniques: Regions, Labels, Lists, Button, Popups, Breadcrumps, Calendars and Reports to start with. Next you will get some examples of how to add some more advanced Ext layout elements to your Application, like the Ext.DatePicker, Auto-growing text areas, auto-completing text fields, tab panels, toolbars and menus.

A book about APEX 4.0, especially when covering GUI aspects, should spent some pages on Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions. This book will teach you, how to build your (first?) own Plug-in with a simple example, step-by-step and create a AJAX enabled Plug-in and Dynamic Actions.

So far the well done RAW version of the book. What’s still to come? The Mark Lancaster plans include chapters about:

· Interactive Components

· IFramed Tabs and Popup Windows

· Mixing Ext with jQuery

· Performance tuning your JavaScript

Conclusion

I like this book already. Lots of I’m-going-to-try-this-immediately examples, clear writing, good basics and well explained advanced examples make me recommend this book. You should have some experience with Application Express, experience with Ext is not required.

Pity the complete source code of the examples is not yet available on the Packt Publishing site.

I’m looking forward to the finished version. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the RAW edition of the book. Packt offers a nice deal: buy the RAW version of this book and place a pre-order for the print book right now, with a 40% discount on both.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remember Me - APEX Autologin

-
Image
I promised to publish about this subject to one of the attendees during my presentation at KScope 12 in San Antonio. I used this functionality in my demo application ( FifApex ) and it seems there is interest in how to do this. Most of the public websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon or OTN do have it: an option to stay logged in, even if you closed the browser, so you do not have to authenticate each time you visit the site again. I’m pretty used to it and would be surprised if a website didn’t offer this convenient feature. OK, it’s not entirely secure, but, as I said, very convenient. I’m working on a “consumer” site/application, I’m building it with APEX and I want to offer this “remember me” option too. I knew an APEX based website that does offer this feature ( www.plsqlchallenge.com ) and I had a chat with the developer that implemented it’s login mechanism, Paul Broughton from Apex Evangelists . So, here my thanks to him for the original inspiration.   Oracle
Read more

Tabular Forms on Complex Views - using INSTEAD OF Triggers

-
Image
Creating tabular forms in Apex is relative straight forward. One gets fully generated, instant insert/update/delete functionality. Unfortunately (for the form developer), tables are usually part of a more or less complex data model, which is optimized for data storage, rather then for form-layout. Well, Apex offers some possibilities to the developer to enable tabular forms beyond 1:1 table based. Collections One alternative is to create your tabular form using the Apex Collection API. There is a good article on Martin Giffy D'Souza’s blog describing this technique. This collection-approach basically pre-fetches data into a (PL/SQL) collection from a query/cursor. The “collected” data will be displayed in the form. An on-submit page process will store the data submitted from the form into the collection. After this you can perform some validation before submitting the data to table(s) in an on-submit page process. Database Views Well, I favor an approach that keeps the
Read more

"Who are you?" – client device Categorizr for APEX

-
Image
This article describes a solution to determine the client device category (i.e. desktop, browser or tablet) your APEX application is accessed from. Until recently, building a web application with Oracle Application Express usually meant to build a desktop browser application. But if you look at the growing number of mobile devices, this will change very soon, if not already has for some of you. Being able to develop applications, that can be accessed by tablets or smart phones offers lots of new possibilities. But it also comes with some challenges. Mobile devices are different. Interaction by touch screen, screen size and (non-) support of certain common web functionality (flash, for example), just to mention a few. Oracles announcement to integrate the jQuery mobile framework into APEX 4.2 will help us to deal with many of the challenges, developing for multiple devices will bring. Until now, one of the biggest challenges is, to determine the actual client your application
Read more