Oracle Application Express (APEX) Updates

New APEX Release is Here

Just a few months ago, Oracle released its latest update to the Application Express product.  Here's a look at what is new for Release 5.0.0.00.31:

Features of Oracle APEX 5.0

Prior to this, an update known as the "Oracle Standalone Listener" client made it possible to build an Apex appliance for serving out Application pages and services (API's, web pages, and forms) as an external module from the database hosting the Apex instance. 

If your server resources are not many, you can still install or configure the APEX listener to run on the same server/virtual machine as the database, but now a farm of specialized listeners can also be stood up (behind a load balancer or some appropriate network scaling design) to fit the system's chosen uses.

I drew up this sketch of the relation between a database instance and the supporting schemas it contains. An Apex module layout is the relation between individual Apex applications, workspaces and the database schemas they can connect to.

Oracle Application Express SCHEMA

The version of Apex is not tied to a specific release of the Oracle database, although to install the package associated with this module, your database must be at least Release 9i or higher.  See my profile on Stack Overflow for additional discussions on my findings and interactions with developers regarding the APEX product.


Richard


Here's a look at a past Stack Overflow post I did on BLOB (Large Object) handling between an APEX application form input and the database:

File Attachments Handled With FORM INPUT and OUTPUT Requests

That's it for now!