Apex 5.0 , first contact

Last week Oracle launched Apex 5 (Early Adapters) and I just sniffed around a bit. If you want a test drive go to apexe.oracle.com.

The application builder - interface
The interface of the application builder changed the same way as the change of ios6 to ios7 for Apple-products. More 'simple' icons are used.

Of course I immediately started to create a new application and the first thing I noticed was the (seperate) option to create mobile applications. A real big change I discovered when I edited a page was the page designer. In Apex 3 you had the component view, in apex 4 you had the tree view and now you've got the page designer (lucky me). Now you see how the page will look like right away and you're able to drag and drop items/regions/buttons into place. I think an improvement you have to get used to, but what you see is what you get!

Interactive Reports

it’s now possible to create more than 1 interactive reports per page. However, it's only possible to show 1 interactive report at a time. Developers will need to give endusers the possibility to switch between reports.

A very nice new feature is the new pivot function in interactive reports. Users are now able to create pivot tables on the fly. Great option I missed before.

Tabs-Lists

Until Apex 4.0 the default navigation objects were tabs. In Apex 5.0 as you create an application(with default template) a list is used as default navigation object. This list is shown at the top of the page as a pulldown menu. Good improvement.

I never really liked the tab-implementation (Not dynamically enough) and used my own lists often.

New Calendar

In Apex 4 I used a few times a modified calendar-plugin based on fullcalendar library. I used this plugin because I wanted to be able to show starttime and endtime of events.  In apex 5 this library is implemented by ‘default’.  This is definitely an option I will use on regular base.

This was just a short peek into Apex 5. The next few weeks I will try to describe some other nice features.