Inside Oracle APEX | by Patrick Wolf

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

APEX Essentials - Looking for early adopters

drum roll...drum roll...drum roll...

APEX Essentials - A great new tool on the Oracle APEX horizon...

but to finish it I need your help!

What is it?

APEX Essentials is my current working title (might also be the final name) of a new open source project which includes essential Oracle APEX tools for your daily Oracle APEX application development.

The first tool of this collection is

The Oracle APEX Advisor

Ever had the problem that you referenced a non existing page item with the substitution- or bind variable syntax, but you didn't notice because Oracle APEX just returns NULL in such a case without raising an error?

You did some data model or PL/SQL package changes and didn't notice that you broke your APEX application code? If you are lucky you get a runtime error. In some cases you don't event get that. Oracle APEX just ignores your invalid code... See OTN forum threads here and here.

APEX Advisor is some kind of a "compiler"/LINT for your Oracle APEX application. It goes through your applications meta data and performs a variety of checks. Some of them are to find invalid PL/SQL code or invalid references to page items, but others are more kind of "Best Practice" checks like

don't use V/NV in SQL statements
unconditional branches before conditional ones
...

Currently there are a total of 22 checks which are performed! And the good news is that it has a plugin system so that you can add your own QA checks!

Want to take a quick look?

I have set up a demo workspace on apex.oracle.com where I have uploaded most of the Packaged Applications which are provided by the Oracle APEX team. So you can try it online first, before you request a beta copy.

Login with

Workspace: ae_demo
User: guest
Password: 123456

and run the application "APEX Essentials". If you are prompted for a username/password enter guest/123456

Note: Don't change anything in this workspace!

You can also directly run it, but then it's not integrated into the Oracle APEX Builder.

Want to test it with our applications?

The reason why I'm calling out for early adopters/beta testers is that only your real world applications can prove if the tool works or not and if there are still unhandled cases. If you want to participate in the beta, send a mail to beta@oracleapex.info

Ideas to improve it?

Are there some checks which you perform on your application, ... or do you have other ideas how to improve it. Please post them on the following OTN thread.