APEX: Meet the rest of the web

In December last year I spoke at the UKOUG TECH 16 conference in Birmingham about integrating APEX with modern web technologies. The presentation was interesting for me to build because I was able to spend some time pushing APEX beyond what is possible using only the declarative application builder tools. I wanted to ask the question: “How can I improve my applications by taking inspiration from existing external applications?”

The first thing I knew I was going to include was some of the work I have carried out recently on improving searching in APEX. By default, we can easily search/filter an APEX classic report by submitting the page and redrawing the report, but I made a few tweaks to improve this functionality and give the users a little extra – something closer to the ‘Google Search’ they were asking for. I have taken this even further since writing the presentation and I will be releasing a blog with my colleague Paul discussing further searching possibilities in APEX.

I also included Google charts and maps as these are pieces of functionality that most people are familiar with – especially the maps, with them being used more and more on mobile devices. Following the same theme, I demonstrated integration with social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter, along with a dropbox upload integration with Oracle packages and APEX.

Finally, I spent some time talking about IoT (Internet of Things) devices. This topic was extremely interesting and quite a rabbit hole once I started looking at what I could possibly demonstrate. I ended up including just a brief overview of what IoT devices were, which companies were producing them and how we can use web service calls to interact with them from our APEX applications. The actual demonstration of this functionality involved talking through short initial PoC I created and I’m planning to delve further into this in future blogs or at upcoming conferences.

If you want to see my TECH 16 presentation in full, then you can watch the recording I made here:

Author: Craig Sykes 

Job Title: Senior Oracle Development Consultant

Bio: Craig is a Senior Development Consultant at DSP-Explorer. Craig has an MSc in Computing Science and is an experienced software engineer, utilising development tools such as PL/SQL and APEX to provide bespoke ERP software to both UK and international businesses. Craig has experience developing solutions to connect Oracle systems to a wide range of existing external applications within business environments.