Oracle APEX development and multiple developers/branches

Today, I observed an exchange inside of Oracle about a topic that comes up from time to time.  And it has to do with the development of APEX applications, and how you manage this across releases and a larger number of developers.  This topic tends to vex some teams when they start working with Oracle Application Express on broader development projects, especially when people are not accustomed to a hosted declarative development model.  I thought Koen Lostrie of Oracle Curriculum Development provided a brilliant response, and it was worth sharing with the broader APEX community.

Alec from Oracle asked:

"Are there any online resources that discuss how to work with APEX with multiple developers and multiple branches of development for an application?  Our team is using Mercurial to do source control management now. 

The basic workflow is that there are several developers who are working on mostly independent features.  There are production, staging, development, and personal versions of the application code.  Developers implement bug fixes or new features and those get pushed to the development version.  Certain features from development get approved to go to staging and pushed.  Those features in staging may be rolled back or promoted to go on to production.  Are there resources which talk about implementing such a workflow using APEX?  Or APEX instructors to talk to about this workflow?"

And to which I thought Koen gave a very clear reply, complete with evidence of how they are successfully managing this today in their Oracle Curriculum Development team.  Koen said:

"I think a lot of teams struggle with what you are describing because of the nature of APEX source code and Database-based development.  I personally think that the development flow should be adapted to APEX rather than trying to use an existing process and apply that for APEX.

Let me explain how we do it in our team:

• We release patches to production every 3 weeks. We have development/build/stage and production and use continuous integration to apply patches on build and stage.
• We use an Agile-based process. At the start of each cycle we determine what goes in the patch.
• Source control is done on Oracle Developer Cloud Service (ODCS)  – we use git and source tree. We don’t branch.
• All developers work directly on development (the master environment) for bugs/small enhancement requests. We use the BUILD OPTION feature of APEX to prevent certain functionality from being exposed in production. This is a great feature which allows developer to create new APEX components in development but the changes are not visible in the other environments.
• For big changes like prototypes, a developer can work on his own instance but this rarely happens. It is more common for a developer to work on a copy of the app to test something out. Once the change gets approved. it will go into development.

From what I see in the process you describe, the challenge in your process is that new changes get pulled back after they have made it to stage. This is a very expensive step. The developers need to roll back their changes to an earlier state which is a very time consuming process. And… very frustrating for the individual developer.  Is this really necessary ? Can the changes not be reviewed when in development ? Because that is what is proposed in the Agile methodology: the developer talks directly to the person/team that requests the new feature and they review as early as on development.  In our case stage is only for testing changes. We fix bugs when the app is in stage, but we  don’t roll back features once they are in stage – worst case we can delay the patch entirely but that happens very rarely.

There is a good paper available by Rob Van Wijk. He describes how each developer works on his own instance but keeps his environment in sync with the master. In his case too, they’re working on a central master environment. The setup of such an environment is quite complex. You can find the paper here: http://rwijk.blogspot.com/2013/03/paper-professional-software-development.html"

If you're new to the APEX community, here are some tips to get engaged

Last night (January 6, 2016) we had our first-in-2016 APEX Meetup meeting in Columbus, Ohio, USA.  For being on short notice, we had a nice turnout, and I was able to distribute the new apex.world stickers.  I was most impressed that a gentleman (by the name of Shannon) drove down from Cleveland, Ohio - almost 2 hours drive each way.  He's been using APEX for all of two weeks, was using it with PowerSchool, and wanted to see what this APEX was all about.

Today, I wrote on our Oracle APEX Columbus Meetup board a short summary of the information we reviewed last night.  For those people who've been doing APEX for years, none of this is going to be new.  But the information I posted may be especially helpful to those who are very new to APEX, or even curious about APEX.  I decided to simply share it again here, in the hopes that someone else just as new as Shannon will find this useful.

--

We discussed a few things last night and I wished to summarize them here:

1)  There are ways to remain connected to the APEX community via Social media:

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/orclapex
LinkedIn:  http://linkedin.com/groups/8263065
Twitter:  The hashtag for Oracle Application Express is #orclapex.  Most everyone who attended last night is on Twitter.  You can follow many of us.  I’m at @joelkallman.  The APEX news is at @oracleapexnews.  If you don't know anyone on twitter, just do a Twitter search for #orclapex.

I’ll be honest - almost everyone in the APEX community is heavily engaged on Twitter, a lot less on LinkedIn, and almost never on Facebook.

2)  You should get registered on https://apex.world

It’s the APEX Community site, written by others in the APEX community (outside of Oracle).  There are jobs, plug-ins, open source, twitter feeds, news, and more.  You should also get registered on Slack, because apex.world is also integrated with Slack.  Follow the instructions on apex.world to get a Slack invitation.  It’s worth it.

3)  I spoke of some upcoming conferences

There is an upcoming conference in May in Cleveland, the Great Lakes Oracle Conference.  Not only will Jason Straub and I be there, doing a couple sessions (about what’s coming in APEX 5.1), but we’re also doing a pre-conference workshop.  There will be other non-Oracle people there presenting on APEX.  You should think about presenting at this conference, and you can submit your abstracts until February.  As I tried to convey to attendees last night, don’t think that you have to submit the most exotic, obtuse topic possible.  How you’re using APEX, the challenges you’ve encountered and how you worked around them, may be a very useful topic.  The conference committee wants to expand their APEX offerings, and I think those of us in Ohio should help them. https://www.neooug.org/gloc/

b)  In June, in Chicago, is the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) annual Kscope conference.   This is the place to be on the planet if you do any APEX whatsoever.  Just in the APEX track alone, there will be 46 sessions over 5 days.  On the Sunday before the conference starts, there will be the Sunday Symposium, which will be exclusively from the Oracle APEX product development team.  From a global perspective, this is the place to be for APEX.  It’s highly technical, and attendees and speakers from around the world assemble here.  http://kscope16.com

4)  How to get started, especially for someone who is new.  I offered a couple suggestions:

a)  Go to https://apex.oracle.com, and scroll down to the "Learn More" section, where there are links to documentation, tutorials, videos, hands-on-labs, etc.
b)  An Oracle employee mentioned that he took the APEX training class on Udemy, and for 7 hours of training, he thought it was pretty good.  I can't vouch for the training, and this isn't an official recommendation, but he thought it was worth his time and money.  He also said that while it's priced at $25, they often run specials for as low as $10.  https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/

5)  Lastly, I showed Oracle’s community site for APEX, https://apex.oracle.com/community

I showed the numerous customer quotes we’ve received, and I put another plea out to attendees that, if you’re using APEX, please consider going through your management chain to get approvals for a quote.  At least ask.   There is no huge legal process involved, approvals can all be done via email.  The hard part is taking time out of your day job and pursuing this at your employer (or customer).  It will be a huge benefit to the entire APEX community.

P.S. I never showed it last night, but ODTUG also has a nice community site for APEX, at http://odtug.com/apex

A Few Resolutions for 2016

Jenny, from the Oracle Database Insider Newsletter, asked a number of us in the Database division at Oracle to share our New Year's resolutions for 2016.  And while I'm a bit reluctant to share this somewhat personal information, I like the fact that publicizing these resolutions may force me to remain a bit more focused on these goals.  So here goes...my resolutions for 2016:

1. Attend an Oracle Real World Performance Training class.  I thought I knew a fair amount about the Oracle Database, SQL and tuning. But at a conference in 2015, I was able to spend some quality time around Vlado Barun from the Oracle Real World Performance team, and it quickly become clear I knew very little compared to these folks. I’m asked to diagnose “APEX issues” all the time, and the vast majority of cases are simply database configuration or SQL tuning exercises.  To become a better database developer, I need to become deeper in my understanding of the Oracle Database and performance.
   
2. Broaden the message of APEX, Database and Oracle Cloud development to those we’re not reaching today.  And I specifically would like to share our message with higher education institutions and students attending university.  Developing Web and responsive applications is cool and I believe the combination of technologies (SQL, PL/SQL, APEX, Oracle Database, Cloud, REST) results in an incredibly rich application development platform.  University students probably think of “big, bad corporate” when they hear the word “Oracle”.  I want them to think “hip, cool, innovative, modern”.
   
3. Be more patient and understanding of those who ask me questions.  I can actually credit a customer (Erik van Roon) who helped me to recalibrate my understanding on this topic.  Sometimes I’ll get questions where it’s clear someone hasn’t done the least bit of research into the topic.  And it was at those rare times when (to a fellow employee, never a customer), I’d reply with a lmgtfy.com link.  But as Erik correctly pointed out - I have 20 years experience, and they don’t.  Arrogance may not be the message I intend to send, but it may very well be the message that is received.  And that’s not how I wish to be perceived by anyone, ever.  Thus - time to drop my impatience and arrogance, for every occasion.
   
4. Spend more time with my family.  2015 was a great year for Oracle Application Express, and I’ve never worked harder in my career than I did in 2015.  But that has a price, and I value the finite time with my family more than anything else.  While I love working for Oracle and I dearly love the team I’m blessed to work with, I value my family even more.  And I need to define a bit more rigid boundaries between work and family time.
   
5. Read a novel.  When I read, it’s usually one of the following:  the Bible, a functional specification, a military history book, a computer programming/Web design book or the Wall Street Journal. My wife is an avid reader and gets such joy from well-written and captivating novels.  I’d like to expand my imagination (and vocabulary), and be able to set aside time for some reading at leisure.
   
6. Learn a language.  I’ve dabbled back and forth with German over many years.  And I know enough German to order food in a restaurant.  But I’m not fluent enough for even the shortest of conversations in German. It’s time to either forge ahead with my self-study of German and practice it with the 3 native German speakers on the APEX team, or simply switch gears and direct my focus to Spanish which is probably much more practical, living in America.
   
7. Exercise at least 3 times a week.  The older I get, the easier it is to gain weight and get out of shape, and the more difficult it is to lose it and get back in shape.  And by "exercise", I don't mean walk around the block.  Instead, I'm referring to something that causes you to sweat - running, biking, jumping rope, or resistance exercises (the Total Gym will work just fine!).  While I fantasize about training enough to run a 1/2 marathon in 2016, I'll be happy enough to just consistently exercise 3 times a week.

These are the goals.  Some are easy.  Some will span the entire year.  I probably won't meet them all, but they're a goal.

What are your goals for 2016?

I Had Low Expectations for the APEX Gaming Competition 2015 from ODTUG. Wow, Was I Ever Wrong!

When the APEX Gaming Competition 2015 was announced by Vincent Morneau from Insum at the ODTUG Kscope15 conference this past year, I was very suspect.  I've seen many contests over the years that always seemed to have very few participants, and only one or two people would really put forth effort.  Why would this "Gaming Competition" be any different?  Who has time for games, right?  Well...I could not have been more wrong.

I was given the honor of being a judge for the APEX Gaming Competition 2015, and not only did I get to see the front-end of these games, I also was able to see them behind the scenes as well - how they were constructed, how much of the database they used, how much of declarative APEX did they use, etc.  I was completely blown away by the creativity and quality of these games.  There were 15 games submitted, in all, and as I explained to the other judges, it was clear that people really put their heart and soul into these games.  I saw excellent programming practices, extraordinarily smart use of APEX, SQL and PL/SQL, and an unbelievable amount of creativity and inventiveness.

I hated having to pick "winners", because these were all simply a magnificent collection of modern Web development and Oracle Database programming.  If you haven't seen the actual games and the code behind them, I encourage you to take a look at any one of them.

I truly don't know how these people found the time to work on these games.  It takes time and effort to produce such high quality.  These are people who have day jobs and families and responsibilities and no time.  In an effort to simply acknowledge and offer our praise to these contributors, I'd like to list them all here (sorted by last name descending, just to be different):

Scott Wesley
Maxime Tremblay
Douglas Rofes
Anderson Rodrigues
Pavel
Matt Mulvaney
Jari Laine
Daniel Hochleitner
Marc Hassan
Nihad Hasković
Lev Erusalimskiy
Gabriel Dragoi
Nick Buytaert
Marcelo Burgos

Thanks to each of you for being such a great champion for the global #orclapex community.  You're all proud members of the #LetsWreckThisTogether club!

P.S.  Thanks to ODTUG for sponsoring this event and Vincent Morneau for orchestrating the whole contest.

If You're In Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Slovenia or Croatia, Oracle APEX is Coming to You!

In the first part of October, my colleague Vlad Uvarov and I are taking the Oracle APEX & Oracle Database Cloud message to a number of user groups who are graciously hosting us.  These are countries for which there is growing interest in Oracle Application Express, and we wish to help support these groups and aid in fostering their growing APEX communities.

The dates and locations are:

1. Latvian Oracle User Group, October 5, 2015
2. Oracle User Group Estonia, Oracle Innovation Day in Tallinn, October 7, 2015
3. Romanian Oracle User Group, October 8, 2015
4. Oracle Romania (for Oracle employees, at the Floreasca Park office), October 8-9, 2015
5. Slovenian Oracle User Group, SIOUG 2015, October 12-13, 2015
6. Croatian Oracle User Group, 20th HrOUG Conference, October 13-16, 2015

You should consider attending one of these user group meetings/conferences if:

• You're a CIO or manager, and you wish to understand what Oracle Application Express is and if it can help you and your business.
• You're a PL/SQL developer, and you want to learn how easy or difficult it is to exploit your skills on the Web and in the Cloud.
• You come from a client/server background and you want to understand what you can do with your skills but in Web development and Cloud development.
• You're an Oracle DBA, and you want to understand if you can use Oracle Application Express in your daily responsibilities.
• You know nothing about Oracle Application Express and you want to learn a bit more.

The User Group meetings in Latvia, Estonia and Romania all include 2-hour instructor-led hands on labs.  All you need to bring is a laptop, and we'll supply the rest.  But you won't be merely watching an instructor drive their mouse.  You will be the ones building something real.  I guarantee that people completely new to APEX, as well as seasoned APEX developers, will learn a number of relevant skills and techniques in these labs.

If you have any interest or questions or concerns (or complaints!) about Oracle Application Express, and you are nearby, we would be very honored to meet you in person and assist in any way we can.  We hope you can make it!

ODTUG APEX Gaming Competition 2015

If you're not aware, there is an APEX Gaming Competition which is already underway, and which is sponsored by the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG).  For those who don't know what ODTUG is, it is an independent user group and community of professionals, with a primary focus on the tools, products, and frameworks to build solutions and applications with the Oracle technology stack.  Although ODTUG is based in the USA, they have members (thousands of them) around the globe.

The purpose of the APEX Gaming Competition is simply to show off what you can do with APEX, and instead of crafting a business solution or transactional application, the goal here is a bit more whimsical and fun.  The solution can be desktop or mobile or both.  Personally, if I had the time, I'd like to write a blackjack simulator and try and improve upon the basic strategy.  I'm not sure that could be classified as a "game", but it would enable me to go to Las Vegas and clean house!

If you're looking to make a name for yourself in the Oracle community, one way to do it is through ODTUG.  And if you're looking to make a name for yourself in the APEX community, one way to stand out is through the APEX Gaming Competition.  Just ask Robert Schaefer from Köln, Germany.  Robert won the APEX Theming Competition in 2014, and now everyone in the APEX Community knows who Robert is!  I've actually had the good fortune of meeting Robert in person - twice!

Yesterday I listened to the APEX Talkshow podcast with Jürgen Schuster and Shakeeb Rahman (Jürgen is a luminary in the APEX community and Shakeeb is on the Oracle APEX development team, he is the creator of the Universal Theme).  And in this podcast, I was reminded how Shakeeb's first introduction to Oracle was...by winning a competition, when he was a student!  You simply never know what the future holds.  So - whether you're a student or a professional, whether you're in Ireland or the Ivory Coast, this is an opportunity for you to shine in front of this wonderful global APEX Community.  Submissions close in 2 months, so hurry!  Go to http://competition.odtug.com

What is the APEX Open Mic Night at Kscope15?

At the upcoming ODTUG Kscope15 conference, on Monday night, June 22, there will be the Monday Community Events.  The Community Event for the Oracle Application Express track at Kscope15 is the ever-popular Open Mic Night.  Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite events at the Kscope conference.

An Oracle employee sent me an email today, inquiring about the Open Mic Night.  This employee, who is a user of Oracle Application Express at Oracle, will be attending the Kscope conference for the very first time.  As I replied to him in email:

Open Mic night will be on Monday evening, from 8:00P - 10:00P.  You would think that most people would call it a day (after a long day), but it's usually a packed room.

Open Mic night is the attendee's night to shine in front of their fellow attendees.  People are given roughly 5 - 10 minutes to show off what they've done with APEX - it's timed.  No PPT.  If you show a PowerPoint, you will be booed.  You're on stage, you plugin your laptop to a projector, and you present on a big screen.  It's just a great way for people in the #orclapex community to proudly show what they've accomplished.  I've seen some extraordinarily creative and professional solutions from our customers.

The time goes by fast, so you have to come prepared.  And the Oracle APEX team usually sponsors the beer for this event, so it can get a bit rowdy. ;)

If you're at Kscope15 for the APEX track, or even half-curious about APEX, it's a "must attend" event.

Here's a shot from last year's Open Mic Night:

Oracle Application Express 5 - The Unofficial Announcement

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

The Ideal APEX Application (When & Where You Write Code)

The real title of this post should be "What I Really Meant to Say Was....".

Bob Rhubart of the Oracle Technology Network OTNArchBeat fame was kind enough to give me an opportunity to shoot a 2-minute Tech Tip.  I love Bob's goals for a 2-minute Tech Tip - has to be technical, can't be marketing fluff, and you have to deliver it in 120 seconds - no more, no less.  So I took some notes, practiced it out loud a couple times, and then I was ready.  But because I didn't want to sound like I was merely reading my notes, I ad-libbed a little and...crumbled under the clock.  I don't think I could have been more confusing and off the mark.  Oh...did I forget to mention that Bob doesn't like to do more than one take?



So if I could distill what I wished to convey into a few easily consumable points:

1. Use the declarative features of APEX as much as possible, don't write code.  If you have to choose between writing something in a report region with a new template, or hammer out the same result with a lovingly hand-crafted PL/SQL region, opt for the former.  If you have a choice between a declarative condition (e.g., Item Not Null) or the equivalent PL/SQL expression, choose the declarative condition.  It will be faster at execution time, it will be easier to manage and report upon, it will be easier to maintain, it will be less pressure on your database with less parsing of PL/SQL.
2. When you need to venture outside the declarative features of APEX and you need to write code in PL/SQL, be smart about it.  Define as much PL/SQL in statically compiled units (procedures, functions, packages) in the database and simply invoke them from your APEX application.  It will be easier to maintain (because it will simply be files that correspond to your PL/SQL procedures/functions/packages), it will be easier to version control, it will be easier to diff and promote, you can choose which PL/SQL optimization level you wish, you can natively compile, and it will be much more efficient on your database.
3. Avoid huge sections of JavaScript and use Dynamic Actions wherever possible.  If you have the need for a lot of custom JavaScript, put it into a library and into a file, served by your Web Server (or, at a minimum, as a shared static file of your application).
4. APEX is just a thin veneer over your database - architect your APEX applications as such.  Let the Oracle Database do the heavy lifting.  Your APEX application definition should have very little code. It should be primarily comprised of SQL queries and simple invocations of your underlying PL/SQL programs.

My rule of thumb - when you're editing code in a text area/code editor in the Application Builder of APEX and you see the scroll bar, it's time to consider putting it into a PL/SQL package.  And of course, if you catch yourself writing the same PL/SQL logic a second time, you should also consider putting it into a PL/SQL package.

There's more to come from the Oracle APEX team on @OTNArchBeat.

Some changes to be aware of, as Oracle Application Express 5 nears...

As the release of Oracle Application Express 5 gets closer, I thought it's worth pointing out some changes that customers should be aware of, and how an upgrade to Oracle Application Express 5 could impact their existing applications.

1. As Trent Schafer (@trentschafer) noted in his latest blog post, "Reset an Interactive Report (IR)", there have been numerous customer discussions and blog posts which show how to directly use the gReport JavaScript object to manipulate an Interactive Report.  The problem?  With the massive rewrite to support multiple Interactive Reports in Oracle Application Express 5, gReport no longer exists.  And as Trent astutely points out, gReport isn't documented.  And that's the cautionary tale here - if it's not documented, it's not considered supported or available for use and is subject to change, effectively without notice.  While I appreciate the inventiveness of others to do amazing things in their applications, and share that knowledge with the Oracle APEX community, you must be cautious in what you adopt.
   
2. In the rewrite of Interactive Reports, the IR component was completely revamped from top to bottom.  The markup used for IRs in APEX 5 is dramatically improved:  less tables, much smaller and more efficient markup, better accessibility, etc.  However, if you've also followed this blog post from Shakeeb Rahman (@shakeeb) from 2010, and directly overrode the CSS classes used in Interactive Reports, that will no longer work in IRs in APEX 5.  Your custom styling by using these classes will not have any effect.
   
3. As the Oracle Application Express 5 Beta documentation enumerates, there is a modest list of deprecated features and a very small list of features which are no longer supported.  "Deprecated" means "will still work in APEX 5, but will go away in a future release of APEX, most likely the next major release of APEX".  In some cases, like the deprecated page attributes for example, if you have existing applications that use these attributes, they will still function as in earlier releases of APEX, but you won't have the ability to set it for new pages.  Personally, I'm most eager to get rid of all uses of APEX_PLSQL_JOB - customers should use SYS.DBMS_SCHEDULER - it's far richer in functionality.

Please understand that we have carefully considered all of these decisions - even labored for days, in some cases.  And while some of these changes could be disruptive for existing customers, especially if you've used something that is internal and not documented, we would rather have the APEX Community be made aware of these changes up front, rather than be silent about it and hope for the best.

From Zero to Hero....In About 2 Hours

This is an example of a real-world problem, an opportunistic one, being solved via a mobile application created with Oracle Application Express.

First, a brief bit of background.  Our son is 9 years old and is in the Cub Scouts.  Cub Scouts in the United States is an organization that is associated with Boy Scouts of America.  It's essentially a club that is geared towards younger boys, and teaches them many valuable skills - hiking, camping out, shooting a bow and arrow, tying different knots, nutrition, etc.  This club has a single fundraiser every year, where the boys go door-to-door selling popcorn, and the proceeds of the popcorn sale fund the activities of the Cub Scouts local group for the next year.  There is a leader who organizes the sale of this popcorn for the local Cub Scout group, and this leader gets the unenvious title of "Popcorn Kernel".  For the past 2 years, I've been the "Popcorn Kernel" for our Cub Scout Pack (60 Scouts).

I was recently at the DOAG Konferenz in Nürnberg, Germany and it wasn't until my flight home that I began to think about how I was going to distribute the 1,000 items to 60 different Scouts.  My flight home from Germany was on a Sunday and I had pre-scheduled the distribution of all of this popcorn to all 60 families on that next day, Monday afternoon.  Jet lag would not be my friend.

The previous year, I had meticulously laid out 60 different orders across a large meeting room and let the parents and Scouts pick it up.  This year, I actually had 4 volunteer helpers, but I had no time.  All I had in my possession was an Excel spreadsheet which was used to tally the orders across all 60 Cub Scouts.   But I knew I could do better than 60 pieces of paper, which was the "solution" last year.

On my flight home, on my iPad, I sketched out the simple 4-page user interface to locate and manage the orders.  As well, I wrote the DDL on my iPad for a single table.  Normally, I would use SQL Developer Data Modeler as my starting point, but this application and design needed to be quick and simple, so a single denormalized table was more than sufficient.

Bright and early on Monday morning, I logged into an existing workspace on apex.oracle.com.  I created my single table using the Object Browser in SQL Commands, created a trigger on this table, uploaded the spreadsheet data into this table, and then massaged the data using some DML statements in SQL Commands.  Now that my table and data were complete, it was now time for my mobile application!

I created a simple Mobile User Interface application with navigation links on the home page.  There are multiple "dens" that make up each group in a Cub Scout Pack, and these were navigation aids as people would come and pick up their popcorn ("Johnny is in the Wolf Den").  These ultimately went to the same report page but with different filters.

Once a list view report was accessed, I showed the Scout's name, the total item count for them, and then via a click, drill down to the actual number of items to be delivered to the Scout.  Once the items were handed over and verified, the user of this application had to click a button to complete the order.  This was the only DML update operation in the entire application.

I also added a couple charts to the starting page, so we could keep track of how many orders for each den had already been delivered and how many were remaining.

I also added a chart page to show how many of each item was remaining, at least according to our records. This enabled us to do a quick "spot check" at any given point in time, and assess if the current inventory we had remaining was also accurately reflected in our system.  It was invaluable!  And remember - this entire application was all on a single table in the Oracle Database.  At one point in time, 8 people were all actively using this system - 5 to do updates and fulfill orders, and the rest to simply view and monitor the progress from their homes.  Concurrency was never even a consideration.  I didn't have to worry about it.

Now some would say that this application:

• isn't pixel perfect
• doesn't have offline storage
• isn't natively running on the device
• can't capitalize on the native features of the phone
• doesn't have a badge icon
• isn't offered in a store

And they would be correct.  But guess what?  None of it mattered.  The application was used by 5 different people, all using different devices, and I didn't care what type of devices they were using.  They all thought it was rocket science.  It looked and felt close enough to a native application that none of them noticed nor cared.  The navigation and display were consistent with what they were accustomed to.  More importantly, it was a vast improvement over the alternative - consisting of either a piece of paper or, worse yet, 5 guys huddling around a single computer looking at a spreadsheet.  And this was something that I was able to produce, starting from nothing to completed solution, in about two hours.  If I hadn't been jet lagged, I might have been able to do it in an hour.

You might read this blog post and chuckle to yourself.  How possibly could this trivial application for popcorn distribution to Cub Scouts relate to a "real" mobile enterprise application?  Actually, it's enormously relevant.

• For this application, I didn't have to know CSS, HTML or mobile user interfaces.
• I only needed to know SQL.  I wrote no PL/SQL.  I only wrote a handful of SQL queries for the list views, charts, and the one DML statement to update the row.
• It was immediately accessible to anyone with a Web browser and a smart phone (i.e., everyone).
• Concurrency and scalability were never a concern.  This application easily could have been used by 1,000 people and I still would not have had any concern.  I let the Oracle Database do the heavy lifting and put an elegant mobile interface on it with Oracle Application Express.

This was a simple example of an opportunistic application.  It didn't necessarily have to start from a spreadsheet to be opportunistic.  And every enterprise on the planet (including Oracle) has a slew of application problems just like this, and which today are going unsolved.  I went from zero to hero to rocket scientist in the span of two hours.  And so can you.

A demo version of this application (with fictitious names) is here.  I left the application as is - imperfect on the report page and the form (I should have used a read-only display).  Try it on your own mobile device.

Is Oracle Application Express supported?

Time to clear up some confusion.

In the past 60 days, I have encountered the following:

• Two different customers who said they were told by Oracle Support that "APEX isn't supported."
• An industry analyst who asked "Is use of Oracle Application Express supported?  There is an argument internally that it cannot be used for production applications."
• A customer who was told by an external non-Oracle consultant "Oracle Application Express is good for a development environment but we don't see it being used in production."  I'm not even sure what that means.

To address these concerns as a whole, let me offer the following:

1. Oracle Application Express is considered a feature of the Oracle Database.  It isn't classified as "free", even though there is no separate licensing fee for it.  It is classified as an included feature of the Oracle Database, no differently than XML DB, Oracle Text, Oracle Multimedia, etc.
2. If you are licensed and supported for your Oracle Database, you are licensed and supported (by Oracle Support) for Oracle Application Express in that database.  Many customers aren't even aware that they are licensed for it.
3. If you download a later version of Oracle Application Express made available for download from the Oracle Technology Network and install it into your Oracle Database, as long as you are licensed and supported for that Oracle Database, you are licensed and supported (by Oracle Support) for Oracle Application Express in that database.
4. Oracle Application Express is listed in the Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Technology Products document.

As far as the customers who believed they were told directly by Oracle Support that Oracle Application Express isn't supported, there was a common misunderstanding.  In their Service Requests to Oracle Support, they were told that Oracle REST Data Services (formerly called Oracle Application Express Listener, the Web front-end to Oracle Application Express) running in stand-alone mode isn't supported.  This is expressed in the Oracle REST Data Services documentation.  However, this does not pertain to the supportability of Oracle Application Express.  Additionally, a customer can run Oracle REST Data Services in a supported fashion in specific versions of Oracle WebLogic Server, Glassfish Server, and Apache Tomcat.  To reiterate - running Oracle REST Data Services in standalone mode is the one method which is not supported in production deployments, as articulated in the documentation - however, you can run it supported in Oracle WebLogic Server, Glassfish Server and Apache Tomcat.

Oracle Application Express has been a supported feature of the Oracle Database since 2004, since it first shipped as Oracle HTML DB 1.5 in Oracle Database 10gR1.  Every subsequent version of Oracle Application Express has been supported by Oracle Support when run in a licensed and supported Oracle Database.  Anyone who says otherwise is...confused.

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 now available!

Just in time for the ever-awesome ODTUG KScope 14 conference...we are happy to announce the availability of Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2.  The response from Early Adopter 1 was overwhelming (with over 4,000 participants), and we look forward to the same great contributions from the APEX community for Early Adopter 2.  You can access the Early Adopter 2 at https://apexea.oracle.com.

As before, the authentication for Oracle Application Express requires an Oracle account.  This is the same account you would use for many Oracle sites, including the OTN Community discussion forums.  If you don't have an account, then simply follow the instructions on the login page to "Sign up for a free Oracle Web account".  However, ensure that you specify the same email address as your Oracle Web account when requesting a new workspace.

The Known Issues will be populated soon, as well the application to review your submitted feedback.  Our team has made tremendous strides since Early Adopter 1, and we continue to believe that APEX 5.0 will become a watershed release for APEX and the community.

Thank you for all of your support.

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 is on the Horizon

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 is on the horizon.  This also means that the current instance of Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 (https://apexea.oracle.com) is going away soon.  This involves deleting the current database and creating one anew.  Nothing will be migrated or saved.  To try out Early Adopter 2, you will need to sign up for a new workspace.  So if you have anything in your workspace in Early Adopter 1 that you would like to save, now is the time to copy it or export it.  Also understand that there is a good chance that application export files from Early Adopter 1 may not import or function properly in Early Adopter 2.

The response and feedback we've received from Early Adopter 1 has been extraordinary.  There were 4,164 workspaces and over 5,200 users who tried out Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1.  The suggestions and bug reports and feedback have all been enormously valuable, and for which the entire Oracle Application Express team is grateful.

Oracle Application Express. Fast. Like a Veyron Super Sport.

A partner from the United Kingdom recently asked me for some statistics about apex.oracle.com, as I had authored something similar in a blog post back in 2009.  This gentleman was proposing a magazine article and sought some updated statistics.  Since I compiled this information for him, I reasoned it was worthwhile to also share this same information with the APEX community.

In the past 7 days on apex.oracle.com:

Total Page Views:              4,875,173
Distinct Applications Used:        5,842
Distinct Users:                    9,048
Total Number of Workspaces:       20,974
Total Number of Applications:     77,478
New Workspaces Approved:             904

As most people know, apex.oracle.com is the customer evaluation instance, for anyone on the Internet to come and "kick the tires" of Oracle Application Express.

However, what I find even more interesting is the internal instance of Oracle Application Express (apex.oraclecorp.com), hosted inside of Oracle for anyone in the company to come along and build applications, requiring nothing but a browser.  It is run and managed by professionals in Product Development IT.  It's used by virtually every line of business in the company (e.g., HR, Product Development, QA, Sales, Marketing, Real Estate & Facilities, Manufacturing & Distribution, just to name a few).  Instead of merely kicking the tires, these are real applications that the business depends upon, even if some of them are opportunistic applications:

In the past 7 days on apex.oraclecorp.com:

Total Page Views:              2,389,593
Distinct Applications Used:        2,023
Distinct Users:                   18,203
Total Number of Workspaces:        2,759
Total Number of Applications:     14,592

And lastly, we have an internal application which is really nothing more than a sophisticated mini data warehouse serving as an employee directory.  Most Oracle employees know it by the name of Aria People.  Tom and others had written this application in lovingly hand-crafted PL/SQL before I even joined Oracle, and we eventually rewrote it in APEX.  As you can imagine, it's used by virtually every employee in the company.  We average 1.4M - 1.5M page views per day.  In reviewing the last 100 days of activity, there was one day (18-MAR-2014) where this application did 3,132,573 page views from 45,767 distinct IP addresses.  The median page rendering time was 0.03 seconds.  In this same application, again looking back across the last 100 days, the busiest hour we had was on 11-MAR-2014, with 171,156 page views in a single hour, from 6,254 distinct IP addresses.  That averages out to 47.543 page views per second.

Oracle Application Express is as scalable as the Oracle Database.  And with some mad Oracle skills, you can scale to great heights.

Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 now available

Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 is now released and available for download.  If you wish to download the full release of Oracle Application Express 4.2.5, you can get it from the Downloads page on OTN.  If you have Oracle Application Express 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 already installed, then you need to download the APEX 4.2.5 patch set from My Oracle Support.  Look up patch number 17966818.

As is stated in the patch set note that accompanies the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set:

• If you have Oracle Application Express release 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 installed, download the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set from My Oracle Support and apply it.  Remember - patch number 17966818.
• If you have Oracle Application Express release 4.1.1 or earlier installed (including Oracle HTML DB release 1.5), download and install the entire Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 release from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).
• If you do not have Oracle Application Express installed, download and install the entire Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 release from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

As usual, there are a large number of issues corrected in the Application Express 4.2.5 patch set.  You can see the full list in the patch set note.

Some changes in the the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set:

1. A number of bug fixes and functionality additions to many of the Packaged Applications.
2. One new packaged application - Live Poll.  This was the creation of Mike Hichwa.  Live Poll is intended for real-time, very brief polling (in contrast to a formal survey, which can be created and administered via Survey Builder).
3. One new sample application - the Sample Geolocation Showcase, created by Oracle's Carsten Czarski, who did a masterful job in demonstrating how Oracle's spatial capabilities (via Oracle Locator) can be easily exploited in an Oracle Application Express application.  Try it for yourself today on apex.oracle.com!
4. A handful of bug fixes in the underlying Application Express engine and APIs.

APEX 4.2.5 should be the end of the line for Oracle Application Express 4.2.x.

Yet Another Post How to Link to Download a File or Display an Image from a BLOB column

On an internal mailing list, an employee (Richard, a long-time user of Oracle Application Express) asked:

"...we are attempting to move to storing (the images) in a BLOB column in our own application tables.  Is there no way to display an image outside of page items and reports? "

Basically, he has a bunch of images stored in the BLOB column of the common upload table, APEX_APPLICATION_FILES (or WWV_FLOW_FILES).  He wishes to move them to a table in his workspace schema, but it's unclear to him how they can be displayed.  While there is declarative support for BLOBs in Application Express, there are times where you simply wish to get a link which would return the image - and without having to add a form and report against the table containing the images.

I fully realize that this question has been answered numerous times in various books and blog posts, but I wish to reiterate it here again.

Firstly, a way not to do this is via a PL/SQL procedure that is called directly from a URL.  I see this "solution" commonly documented on the Internet, and in general, it should not be followed.  The default configuration of Oracle Application Express has a white list of entry points, callable from a URL.  For security reasons, you absolutely want to leave this restriction in place and not relax it.  This is specified as the PlsqlRequestValidationFunction for mod_plsql and security.disableDefaultExclusionList for Oracle REST Data Services (nee APEX Listener).  With this default security measure in place, you will not be able to invoke a procedure in your schema from a URL.  Good!

The easiest way to return an image from a URL in an APEX application is either via a RESTful Service or via an On-Demand process.  This blog post will cover the On-Demand process.  It's definitely easier to implement via a RESTful Service, and if you can do it via a RESTful call, that will always be much faster - Kris has a great example how to do this. However, one benefit of doing this via an On Demand process is that it will also be constrained by any conditions or authorization schemes that are in place for your APEX application (that is, if your application requires authentication and authorization, someone won't be able to access the URL unless they are likewise authenticated to your APEX application and fully authorized).

1. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Items
2. Click Create
• Name:  FILE_ID
• Scope:  Application
• Session State Protection:  Unrestricted
3. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Processes
4. Click Create
• Name: GETIMAGE
• Point:  On Demand: Run this application process when requested by a page process.
5. Click Next
6. For Process Text, enter the following code:

begin
    for c1 in (select *
                 from my_image_table
                where id = :FILE_ID) loop
        --
        sys.htp.init;
        sys.owa_util.mime_header( c1.mime_type, FALSE );
        sys.htp.p('Content-length: ' || sys.dbms_lob.getlength( c1.blob_content));
        sys.htp.p('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' || c1.filename || '"' );
        sys.htp.p('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');  -- tell the browser to cache for one hour, adjust as necessary
        sys.owa_util.http_header_close;
        sys.wpg_docload.download_file( c1.blob_content );
    
        apex_application.stop_apex_engine;
    end loop;
end;

Then, all you need to do is construct a URL in your application which calls this application process, as described in the Application Express Application Builder Users' Guide.  You could manually construct a URL using APEX_UTIL.PREPARE_URL, or specify a link in the declarative attributes of a Report Column.  Just be sure to specify a Request of 'APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE' (or whatever your application process name is).  The URL will look something like:

f?p=&APP_ID.:0:&APP_SESSION.:APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE:::FILE_ID:<some_valid_id>

That's all there is to it.

A few closing comments:

1. Be mindful of the authorization scheme specified for the application process.  By default, the Authorization Scheme will be "Must Not Be Public User", which is normally acceptable for applications requiring authentication.  But also remember that you could restrict these links based upon other authorization schemes too.
2. If you want to display the image inline instead of being downloaded by a browser, just change the Content-Disposition from 'attachment' to 'inline'.
3. A reasonable extension and optimization to this code would be to add a version number to your underlying table, increment it every time the file changes, and then reference this file version number in the URL.  Doing this, in combination with a Cache-Control directive in the MIME header would let the client browser cache it for a long time without ever running your On Demand Process again (and thus, saving your valuable database cycles).
4. Application Processes can also be defined on the page-level, so if you wished to have the download link be constrained by the authorization scheme on a specific page, you could do this too.
5. Be careful how this is used. If you don't implement some form of browser caching, then a report which displays 500 images inline on a page will result in 500 requests to the APEX engine and database, per user per page view! Ouch! And then it's a matter of time before a DBA starts hunting for the person slamming their database and reports that "APEX is killing our database". There is an excellent explanation of cache headers here.

Finally...the official sizing guide for Oracle Application Express

The following question was recently posted on an internal mailing list:

"Is there a sizing/capacity/scalability guide available for APEX?"

I'm always fascinated by this question.  I appreciate the fact that this is a standard, acceptable practice in the industry, and people come to expect it.  How else could architects and planners appropriately allocate resources without some form of estimate?  This impacts capital expenditures and budgets and rack space and energy costs and support costs and human capital.  People seem to be looking for some simple formula like:

(X number of pages in an APEX application) * (Y number of concurrent users) = (W number of processors) + (Z number of GB of RAM)

Voila!  Plug that formula into your favorite spreadsheet and away you go.  Well....if I lured you in with the title of this blog post, I have to be honest - it's all fiction.  There is no such thing.  But why not?  There are a number of reasons.

1. There is no such thing as a representative, typical application.  As I've often bloviated in the past, Oracle Application Express is as fast or as slow as you, the developer, make it.  The overhead associated with the APEX engine itself is fairly static (measured in hundredths of a second). If you have a query that takes 30 seconds to execute and you put this query in a report in an APEX application, you can expect the execution of that page to take just over 30 seconds per page view.


2. What does "concurrent" mean?  Is that the total number of users in an hour?  Total number of users in a 5-minute interval?  Or is that the high-water mark of number of users all clicking the mouse or hitting the Enter key, all at the same time?


3. What is the typical "think time" of an end user?  Effectively, resources are only being consumed when there is a request actively being processed by the APEX engine.  So while the end user is interpreting the results of a report or keying in data in a form, they aren't (typically) making any requests to the APEX engine.


4. How much memory will be consumed by the typical page view?  Does your application allocate GB's of in-memory LOBs, per user per page view?  This would have a definite impact on scalability.

The total number of pages in an application has close to zero correlation to scalability and throughput.  You can have a 1,000-page application, each page with sub-second performance, which will be far more scalable than a 1-page application that consumes 15 seconds per page view.

As the Oracle Database Performance and Tuning Guide states, there are many variables involved in workload estimation, and it's typically done via either benchmarking or extrapolation from a similar system.  But what is "a similar system" for an APEX application?  Does a call-center application at one enterprise approximate the back-office order processing system at another company?

I can understand how a formula can be prepared for a COTS application.  If you're deploying Fusion Applications or the eBusiness Suite or JD Edwards or SAP, those applications are created, the business logic is written, the queries and transactions are crafted, and concurrency has been measured on representative systems for a given workload.  But I don't understand how someone can produce a sizing guide for any application development framework - Application Express, ADF, .NET, Java.  It's like asking "how scalable is C?"

An application that our team wrote and runs for Oracle is quite scalable (the oft-mentioned Aria People employee directory).  Yesterday (05-MAR), there were 2.1M page views on this system with a median page rendering time of 0.03 seconds from 45,314 distinct users.  The busiest hour saw 129,284 page views through the APEX engine (35.9 page views/second).  If another team within Oracle wrote this same system but didn't tune the SQL like we did, is that a reflection on the scalability of APEX?  And if the answer to that question is "no", then is the hardware configuration all that relevant?

Back in 2007, my manager Mike Hichwa took a draft note that I wrote and published an article for  Oracle Magazine entitled "Sizing up Performance".  There is a very simple formula which can be used to estimate the throughput of an APEX application.  This isn't going to help you determine how much hardware to buy or how to estimate the size of your VM, but it will help estimate (in back-of-the-napkin form) how scalable an existing APEX application will be on an existing system.

With all this said, we, on the Oracle Application Express team, have been deficient.  At a minimum, we should have a list of systems developed by our customers, with specific information about the hardware configuration, purpose of the system, and number of end-users served.  Maybe we should also obtain the level of expertise of the developers.  We will gather this information and publish it online (without specific customer names).  If nothing else, this can serve as the foundation for extrapolation by architects and designers.

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 now available

We are quite happy to announce the beginning of the Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter program, at https://apexea.oracle.com.  This is our open-to-the-public beta program where we encourage our customers (new and old), and also those just interested in Oracle Application Express, to kick the tires of our forthcoming release.  Click the big blue "Request a Workspace" button to get started.

You'll notice right away that the authentication for Oracle Application Express requires an Oracle account.  This is the same account you would use for many Oracle sites, including the OTN Community discussion forums.  If you don't have an account, then simply follow the instructions on the login page to "Sign up for a free Oracle Web account".  However, ensure that you specify the same email address as your Oracle Web account when requesting a new workspace.

The list of new features in Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 can be reviewed here.  Not everything is ready for prime time, so these are the features we are specifically looking for feedback.

We plan on having an Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 program.  When that happens, the entire instance will be rebuilt, so don't get too married to any of the data or applications - they will be removed.  Also, there is no guarantee that the applications you create can be imported into any future release of APEX.

The Known Issues will be populated soon, as well the application to review your submitted feedback.  However, we encourage you to use this Early Adopter instance and provide your unvarnished comments.  We still have some miles to travel for Oracle Application Express, but we believe that this will eventually become one of the watershed releases for APEX and the community.

Thank you for all of your support.

Happy Birthday, Oracle Application Express!

Happy birthday, Oracle Application Express!

In January 2004, Oracle Database 10g was released.  And bundled with the Oracle 10g Database distribution was an additional disc called the Companion CD, which included both Oracle HTTP Server, mod_plsql and this new tool called Oracle HTML DB 1.5.  This was the date of the first officially distributed and supported software from Oracle which has grown into today's Oracle Application Express.

To recap the years:

• 2004  HTML DB 1.5 - Initial release
• 2004  HTML DB 1.6 - User interface Themes
• 2005  HTML DB 2.0 - SQL Workshop
• 2006  Application Express 2.1 - Embedded with Oracle 10gR2 Express Edition (XE)
• 2006  Application Express 2.2 - Packaged Applications
• 2007  Application Express 3.0 - Flash Charts, PDF printing, Microsoft Access migration
• 2008  Application Express 3.1 - Interactive Reports, runtime-only installation
• 2009  Application Express 3.2 - Oracle Forms to Oracle Application Express conversion
• 2010  Application Express 4.0 - Plug-ins, Dynamic Actions, Team Development
• 2011  Application Express 4.1 - Data Upload, improved Tabular Forms, Error Handling
• 2012  Application Express 4.2 - Mobile support, mobile and responsive themes, RESTful Web Services

Oracle Application Express has been delivered with every version of the Oracle Database since 2004.  Beginning with Oracle Database 11gR1, Oracle Application Express moved to the database distribution and was treated as a "standard" database component.  Beginning with Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Application Express is installed by default in every Oracle database.  Oracle Application Express is the development framework for both Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall and the 12c Multitenant Self-Service Provisioning applications.  apex.oracle.com, the customer evaluation instance of Oracle Application Express, keeps chugging along - with an average of 1,000 new workspace requests per week.

In 2004 / 2005, customers would "dip their toe in the water" with HTML DB.  Today, Oracle Application Express is an approved development framework in countless large enterprises, managing literally hundreds of applications on a single Oracle Database instance.

To say that Oracle Application Express has matured over the past 10 years can be a bit misleading.  Some perceive maturing as "getting old".  I would much rather characterize this as adapting and evolving...and growing.  The story with Oracle Application Express is far from over.  Not only are there vast improvements which need to be made in the framework itself (especially with respect to developer productivity and enterprise deployment), but we need to improve in many other ways - documentation, examples, videos, communication, usability, and a plethora of excellent customer-provided enhancement requests.  The industry is constantly changing and evolving as well, and Oracle Application Express must adapt and evolve and, in some respects, lead.

For now, though, let me just offer a simple "Happy birthday!"