Oracle & APEX Geekery

Tonight (CET) the European Football Championship kicks off. As with every EURO or World Championship I’m organizing a predicting game where you (Yes, you too!) can bet on match results FifApex . And again, the website is build with Oracle Application Express. New this year: I created a mobile version of FifApex ( m.fifapex.net ) with APEX and the jQuery Mobile framework. If you want to know how I’ve done this, come visit my presentation at the ODTUG KScope12 conference in San Antonio, Texas , end of this month. Meanwhile, register for FifApex, enter our predictions, and maybe you will be one of the winners of the prizes …     BTW: if you missed the first games: you still can enter the competition AND, from my experience, I can tell you: there is not a lot football/soccer knowledge required for a good ranking ;-).

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 ...