This session of John Snyders, Principal member of Technical Staff, Oracle, discussed som new functionalities which will be integrated in the next major release of Oracle APEX – APEX 5.0. The goal of this new release is to improve developer productivity. The way to improve it is to provide out-of-box modal dialog, navigation list, CSS Calendar, and multi-row edition. The most important new features will be the enhancement of the application builder in order to get more efficiency.

Application Builder 5.0 new features

  • Code editor improvement

For PL/SQL
– Syntax color
– Auto-completion on available procedure/function and items on page
For JavaScript
– Syntax color
– Auto-completion on Apex API
For CSS
– Syntax color for existing CSS tag

  • Builder improvement

Page designer adds an new “Design view”, restauring the drag and drop feature that was removed from APEX 4.2.

Demonstrations of the speaker

The speaker focused on the new design view functionality as well as on the already existing “component view” and “tree view”. It looks like a conventional GUI editor with drag and drop capability. The new gallery now contains all layout components, message editors and properties editions.

Features worth mentioning

  • Design: It will be possible to abstract the view to hide and show unwanted elements (hide/show item, hide/show button to improve visibility and to be able to easily order elements)
  • Elements will be draggable directly from the gallery and can be placed anywhere
  • The possibility to focus on a specific region (in order to arrange related elements)
  • Via Drag and drop, it will be possible to select multiple elements to reorder or display them into column (col span manipulation)
  • By selecting multiple elements, it will be possible to change properties in one time
  • Duplication of elements or entire regions and contents

For now, it’s difficult to have an opinion on these new improvements and their role in productivity improvement. We will have to test them!