Last week, I presented at the East Coast Oracle conference (ECO 2017). The official title of my presentation was “Fast App Creation with APEX Blueprints”. If you want, you can download my slide deck here, though most of the information for the presentation was done via live demo, so I’ll sum up the highlights here.
APEX is a “rapid application development” (RAD) tool, and we’ve been working on a pair of new features that make creating an application extremely fast, to the point where you could just about build a prototype application during a meeting with a customer. (I actually did this in my hour-long presentation, starting from an idea suggested by the audience!)
The first new tool is QuickSQL, which you can access at quicksql.oracle.com; it’s also available in the SQL Workshop if you have a workspace on apex.oracle.com–go to SQL Scripts and select the “QuickSQL” button in the upper right. QuickSQL allows you to automatically generate the DDL for tables, packages, triggers, etc., which you can then build an application on top of, using a simple markdown syntax. Some of the features I like best are the automatic generation of constraints (honestly, creating a properly named foreign key constraint shouldn’t take that much verbiage!) and APEX-ready before insert/update triggers. The less I have to type, the faster things go, and the less chance for tyopgrtaphical errors.
The second feature is the new application creation wizard, currently called “Blueprints”–which is also available on apex.oracle.com. I have blogged about them here, so I won’t repeat myself.
I’m very excited about these two new features, and expect them to be fully integrated into one of the next releases of APEX.
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