An Important Change Is Coming for Application Express 5.2 (if you use the Mobile User Interface)

An important change is coming in Oracle Application Express 5.2.  The mobile user interface (based upon jQuery Mobile) will be deprecated.  The deprecation announcement will be included with the forthcoming Application Express 5.1.3 patch set release.

What this means for you

• If you have applications developed with the mobile user interface based upon jQuery Mobile, they will continue to function in a supported fashion in Application Express 5.1.x.  Premier Support of Oracle Application Express 5.1.x continues until December 2021.
• New mobile applications should be created using the Desktop User Interface and Universal Theme (Theme 42) and not the Mobile User Interface & jQuery Mobile-based theme (Theme 51).
• Existing mobile applications should be migrated to the Universal Theme if you want to run them on Oracle Application Express 5.2 and later.

Why is this happening?

The last stable version of the jQuery Mobile library was released on October 31, 2014, and it only provides support for jQuery versions 1.8 through 1.11, and jQuery 2.1.  Patches are no longer provided for these versions of jQuery.  Application Express 5.2 will ship with jQuery 3.2 (necessary for us to adopt the latest Oracle JET libraries).  jQuery Mobile will not function properly with jQuery 3.2.

While we will make every effort to devise a way to include the necessary libraries for jQuery-mobile based applications in Application Express 5.2, that may not solve all problems entirely, especially when we try to include the data visualizations via Oracle JET, which have different dependencies.  We do truly strive to ensure backward compatibility of APEX applications across upgrades.  It's of paramount importance to us, and we spend a lot of time and energy ensuring that stability, operation, look and feel remain constant across APEX version upgrades.  But in this specific case, there doesn't appear to be a practical solution.  We're in a box.

There has been some recent activity in a new version of jQuery Mobile, namely 1.5alpha.  But given the fact that there was a very long hiatus on jQuery Mobile for an extended period of time, and it's unlikely that jQuery Mobile 1.5 will be stable enough by the time Application Express 5.2 is released, we collectively decided to announce depreciation of the Mobile User Interface based upon jQuery Mobile.  We literally spent months researching and contemplating this dilemma.  It's unfortunate.  The positive angle, though, is that we're in complete control of the Universal Theme and should not encounter similar issues with Universal Theme-based applications in the future.

How do I share a URL to my APEX application?

What is the URL for my APEX application?  If I want to provide a URL to my APEX application to others, what URL do I give them?

Great questions!  I see this done incorrectly all the time inside of Oracle.  A person new to Application Express (APEX) will create an application or install a Productivity Application, run it, copy the full URL, and include the full URL in an email.  I encountered this today in an email, for me to complete a Global Tax Survey via an APEX application (let the good times roll!).  The URL provided was:

https://server/ords/f?p=23828:2:113570213685366:::::

Wow, that sure looks complex!  However, it's unnecessarily complex.

The syntax for the entry points into the APEX engine is well documented.  Interpreting the above URL and the colon-separated arguments, it means:

• 23828 - Application ID
• 2 - Page ID
• 113570213685366 - APEX Session ID
• ::::: - null values for the rest of the arguments in the URL

However, let's evaluate each one of these values in reverse order and assess their necessity:

• ::::: - Utterly not necessary.  The argument values will default to null anyway.
• 113570213685366 - Also utterly not necessary.  Assuming the application requires authentication, the APEX Session ID is specific to you, and only you, and only at a specific moment in time.  You'll notice that if you give this URL to someone else, they'll be prompted to authenticate, and then get an entirely new APEX Session ID.  Why include it if it's going to change anyway?
• 2 - There is a Home URL to every application, so if you're including the starting Page ID in the URL, then it's redundant to include the Page ID again.  It's not necessary.  Additionally, if this is not the same Page ID which is specified in the Home URL, and you have Deep Linking disabled (the default), your end users are going to end up accessing your application via the Home URL anyway.  This is another reason not to include the Page ID in the URL which you share with others.
• 23828 - This is the only value that is absolutely necessary.  This is the ID of the application you wish to share.

Thus, the URL that I received in email could have been provided simply as:

https://server/ords/f?p=23828

I don't fault new users to APEX for doing this.  It's not obvious.  But now, hopefully it is!