Oracle Application Express is an easy-to-use application
development environment built on the Oracle technology stack. There
are two aspects of that previous sentence that you may find
jarring-that Oracle, a company widely known for its database
technology, has an application development environment, and that
Oracle, a company thought of as delivering high-end,
enterprise-ready technology, has anything that is easy to use.
But, as this book will show, the introductory statement is
completely accurate. Oracle Application Express, commonly known as
Oracle APEX or simply APEX, does benefit from the long-established
enterprise-class robustness that is the hallmark of Oracle
technology. The applications you build will be able to support
hundreds of users and many terabytes of data, scalability far
beyond even the imagination of most other development
environments.
And Oracle APEX, with its declarative, wizard-driven
methodology, is truly easy to use. In the course of the few hundred
pages of this book, you will not only learn about how to use APEX,
you will create a usable order entry system. The fast learning
curve presented in these pages is a consequence of many years of
development and refinement of the APEX product, which began life
almost a decade ago within Oracle.
By the end of this volume, you will know enough to create your
own applications, as well as having the knowledge and understanding
of Oracle APEX and the world of Oracle technology to explore
further refinements on your own.
Best of all, you can use APEX with absolutely no cost-either in
a hosted environment, as suggested in Chapter 1, or with a free
version of the Oracle database.
Welcome to the world of Oracle Application Express!
This book is aimed at a particular group of users-those who are
not familiar with Oracle Application Express. The book assumes that
you have a basic knowledge of application development, the type you
could get from playing around with a personal database such as
Access. In fact, this book was written with an Access developer in
mind-an Access developer looking to step up to a more scalable and
reliable environment, with reduced maintenance overhead and greater
integration between application systems.
This book covers the use of Oracle Application Express. Although
the book is based on the 3.5 version, you can use the book with
older versions as well. However, since the book will use a hosted
version of Oracle Application Express, and since both the Oracle
database that support the product and the product itself are
available as free downloads from http://otn.oracle.com, you should
be able to use the latest version easily.
This book is structured to give the reader a gradual
introduction to the essentials of development with Oracle
Application Express. The book contains the following:
-
Welcome to Oracle!-This contains an overview of
Oracle Application Express, as well as instructions on how to set
up a hosted development environment for performing the exercises
used in the book.
-
Jumpstart Oracle Application Express-You will
leap into creating applications with Oracle Application Express and
finish a simple application by the end of this.
-
Extending Your Oracle APEX Application-This
will introduce you to the options in Oracle APEX that let you
ensure that your users will enter correct data while using your
application.
-
Validation, Calculation, Navigation, and
Lists-This continues the exploration of the aspects of
APEX that help you to ensure that data used in your application is
correct. Additionally, this covers basic navigation options for
your application.
-
Reporting and Charting-This covers the powerful
and flexible reports you can create with Oracle APEX, and
introduces you to the graphical capabilities of APEX reporting.
-
Components Working Together-This extends your
work with charts, showing how you can create charts that link to a
more detailed view of the data they represent. You will also learn
how to create a calendar page with links to the data shown as part
of the calendar, and how to add images taken from the underlying
database to an Oracle APEX report.
-
Customizing User Interfaces-This explores
advanced options for customizing user interfaces, on individual
pages as well as across your entire APEX application.
-
PL/SQL-This introduces you to PL/SQL, the
underlying language used to implement your APEX application, and
demonstrates how to use the power of PL/SQL to extend the logic in
your application.
-
Security-This covers how security is
implemented for your APEX environment.
-
Deployment and Administration-This covers the
options you have for deploying an APEX application to another
environment and walks you through one of those options.
Additionally, this introduces you to the administrative
functionality you can use to monitor and manage your APEX
applications.
-
Packaged Applications-This gives an overview of
packaged applications available for Oracle Application Express,
with a more detailed look at a select few.
-
Migration-This describes how to migrate
applications from Microsoft Access to Oracle Application
Express.