Since it’s Christmas and things have slowed down, it’s time to knuckle down and work on upgrading to Ext 3.1 (released on 16th December) and do some preliminary testing now that APEX 4.0 early adopter has been released.
So far upgrading to Ext 3.1 hasn’t been smooth, it initially looks like all our component integration which uses the config renderTo is not working, but the bright side is that we’re introducing a new design change which will make the framework more cohesive from an Ext point of view. So hopefully the New Year is going to mean that we’ll be supporting both pretty soon. There’s some pretty cool functionality that’s available in 3.1 compared to 2.2. The end result though, is that a commercial release of our framework will be a little farther down the track than we were anticipating…
As for APEX 4.0 it looks pretty good and is much more functional, pity there’s no new themes available in the early adopter release, would be nice if they had at least one with a similar look and feel to the IDE as it looks much cleaner and more business-like, but hopefully there will be a couple in the official 4.0 release!! Region REST support requires your entire page to be public, not sure if I agree with that but having it there in the first place is brilliant. “Group By” on interactive reports didn’t work as I expected it to (maybe it was me), simply showed me the one column I selected to group by….
I’m also a little concerned about sociability of our existing javascript as APEX defines a non customizable jQuery document.ready function which will cause a little havoc, fingers crossed they provide a switch to easily turn it off for the few who have alot of their own custom stuff in place. Anyway I’m continuing to play with both, it’s a nice Christmas present exploring the goodies in both (for a self confessed geek)!!
But on a whole APEX 4.0 has been worth the wait, I can see my job getting easier by the day, problem is we need to find a commercial competitive edge, and its hard to do that if APEX covers most of the bases. That said I still think that Ext will be the dominant widget company in the web application arena (if they’re not already) so aligning with them is a recipe for success, combining that with the productivity benefits of APEX and the Oracle RDBMS (11gR2 has so much cool stuff) I think we’ve got our competitve edge! ….. as long as too many people don’t catch on 
I attended the first two days at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham and after last attending in 2007 I have to say it was pretty quiet this time round, funnily enough though not for APEX. Our company has a stand there and it was part of my job to at least spend half the day on it, whilst catching a presentation here and there, anyway the point is that a lot of the people were coming up to talk about APEX.
