What started on a whiteboard in New York City more than 2 years ago is now finally realized. I and the other members of the Oracle Application Express team proudly announce the release of Oracle Application Express 5.
The official blog posting and announcement is HERE. But this is my personal blog, and the thoughts and words are my own, so I can be a bit more free.
Firstly, I don't ever want to see a release of Oracle Application Express take 2.5 years again, ever. It's not good for Oracle, not good for Oracle Application Express, and certainly not good for the vast Oracle Application Express community. We're going to strive, going forward, for a cadence of annual release cycles. But with this said, I'm not about to apologize for the duration of the APEX 5 release cycle either. It's broader and more ambitious than anything we've ever approached, and it happened the way it was supposed to happen. Rather than say "redesigned", I'd prefer to use Shakeeb's words of "reimagined", because that's really what has transpired. Not only has every one of the 1,945 pages that make up "internal APEX" (like the Application Builder) been visited, redesigned, and modernized, but the Page Designer is a radically different yet productive way to build and maintain your applications. It takes time to iterate to this high level of quality.
At the end of the day, what matters most for developers is what they can produce with Oracle Application Express. They'd gladly suffer through the non-Page Designer world and click the mouse all day, as long as what they produced and delivered made them a hero. And I believe we have delivered on this goal of focusing on high-quality results in the applications you create. I've seen my share of bad-looking APEX applications over the years, and with prior releases of APEX, we've essentially enabled the creation of these rather poor examples of APEX. Not everyone is a Shakeeb or Marc. I'm not. But we've harnessed the talents of some of the brightest minds in the UI world, who also happen to be on the APEX development team, and delivered a framework that makes it easy for ordinary people like me to deliver beautiful, responsive and accessible applications, out-of-the-box.
What I'm most happy about is what this does for the Oracle Database. I believe APEX 5 will make superheroes out of our Oracle Database and Oracle Database Cloud customers. There is a massive wealth of functionality for application developers and data architects and citizen developers and everyone in-between, in the Oracle Database. And all of it is a simple SQL or PL/SQL call away! The Oracle Database is extraordinarily good at managing large amounts of data and helping people turn data into information. And now, for customers to be able to easily create elegant UI and be able to beautifully visualize this information using Oracle Application Express 5, well...it's just an awesome combination.
I am blessed to work with some of the brightest, most focused, professional, talented, and yet humble people on the planet. As my wife likes to say, they're all "quality people". It truly takes an array of people who are deep in very different technologies to pull this off - Oracle Database design, data modeling, PL/SQL programming, database security, performance tuning, JavaScript programming, accessibility, Web security, HTML 5 design, CSS layout, graphic artistry, globalization, integration, documentation, testing, and on and on. Both the breadth and depth of the talent to pull this off is staggering.
You might think that we get to take a breath now. In fact, the fun only begins now and plenty of hard work is ahead for all of us. But we look forward to the great successes of our many Oracle customers. The #orclapex community is unrivaled. And we are committed to making heroes out of every one of them. That's the least we could do for the #orclapex community, such an amazingly passionate and vibrant collection of professionals and enthusiasts.
When anyone asks about the "watershed event" for Oracle Application Express, you can tell them that the day was April 15, 2015 - when Oracle Application Express 5 was released.
Joel
P.S. #letswreckthistogether
Turning customers into rockstars, with Oracle Database, SQL and Oracle APEX.
