We’ve bitten the bullet and updated our internal development environments to APEX 4.0 which includes our APEX/Ext development framework. We had no troubles during installation. Post Installation, there have only been a few minor issues which we’ve run into which are:

1. Changing our javascript override for “doSubmit” to “apex.submit”, we use this for upload/downloading multiple clobs and other things….
2. Catering for data dictionary changes for item type “Display As” definitions
3. Viewing session state: collection information does not appear to work
4. We’ve had to move the developer toolbar on page load using javascript (i.e in runtime development mode) as it sometimes overlays important navigation on the page e.g. bottom tabs on a tabpanel etc.
5. That’s it!!

APEX 4.0 is a big jump for the product and personally I must say that the development team has done a fantastic job as we were quite worried about the impact this version would have on all the previous custom development we’d performed against earlier versions. We can breathe easy now  

What’s my favourite part/new feature? Plugins come a close second but my favourite new feature is the ability to create a region within a region. Now you’re probably thinking that I’ve got a couple of screws loose! but for me this single feature has just opened the door for a perfect design for APEX and Ext integration, as we can now build/define page components/templates in the exact same form Ext creates them, e.g. Viewport -> Layout -> Panel -> Form e.g.

Note: the above is just a quick mockup as all regions are defined as “HTML”, normally the region types would reflect their specific type e.g. a Tree would be a Tree, a Form would be a Form etc.

I am a little biased though on the features that I like because I’m purely focused on APEX and Ext, but I’m also spicing things up by using a sprinkling of jQuery here and there, so in the future we’ll be documenting the sociability of APEX/Ext/jQuery, as we’d like to still use some of the productivity gains we get from dynamic actions and the likes.

Finally we’re curious if anyone would purchase a license and support for a commercial plugin, we’re considering building an APEX 4.0 plugin for the Ext Gantt demo with full editing support. Just leave a comment to start a discussion on the (controversial) topic…