Beginning Oracle Application Express

Oracle Application Express is an easy-to-use application development environment built on the Oracle technology stack. There are two aspects of that previous sentence that you may find jarring—that Oracle, a company widely known for its database technology, has an application development environment, and that Oracle, a company thought of as delivering high-end, enterprise-ready technology, has anything that is easy to use.

But, as this book will show, the introductory statement is completely accurate. Oracle Application Express, commonly known as Oracle APEX or simply APEX, does benefit from the long-established enterprise-class robustness that is the hallmark of Oracle technology. The applications you build will be able to support hundreds of users and many terabytes of data, scalability far beyond even the imagination of most other development environments.

And Oracle APEX, with its declarative, wizard-driven methodology, is truly easy to use. In the course of the few hundred pages of this book, you will not only learn about how to use APEX, you will create a usable order entry system. The fast learning curve presented in these pages is a consequence of many years of development and refinement of the APEX product, which began life almost a decade ago within Oracle.

By the end of this volume, you will know enough to create your own applications, as well as having the knowledge and understanding of Oracle APEX and the world of Oracle technology to explore further refinements on your own.

Best of all, you can use APEX with absolutely no cost—either in a hosted environment, as suggested in Chapter 1, or with a free version of the Oracle database.

Welcome to the world of Oracle Application Express!

This book is aimed at a particular group of users—those who are not familiar with Oracle Application Express. The book assumes that you have a basic knowledge of application development, the type you could get from playing around with a personal database such as Access. In fact, this book was written with an Access developer in mind—an Access developer looking to step up to a more scalable and reliable environment, with reduced maintenance overhead and greater integration between application systems.

This book covers the use of Oracle Application Express. Although the book is based on the 3.5 version, you can use the book with older versions as well. However, since the book will use a hosted version of Oracle Application Express, and since both the Oracle database that support the product and the product itself are available as free downloads from http://otn.oracle.com, you should be able to use the latest version easily.

This book is structured to give the reader a gradual introduction to the essentials of development with Oracle Application Express. The book contains the following:

• Welcome to Oracle!—This contains an overview of Oracle Application Express, as well as instructions on how to set up a hosted development environment for performing the exercises used in the book.

• Jumpstart Oracle Application Express—You will leap into creating applications with Oracle Application Express and finish a simple application by the end of this.

• Extending Your Oracle APEX Application—This will introduce you to the options in Oracle APEX that let you ensure that your users will enter correct data while using your application.

• Validation, Calculation, Navigation, and Lists—This continues the exploration of the aspects of APEX that help you to ensure that data used in your application is correct. Additionally, this covers basic navigation options for your application.

• Reporting and Charting—This covers the powerful and flexible reports you can create with Oracle APEX, and introduces you to the graphical capabilities of APEX reporting.

• Components Working Together—This extends your work with charts, showing how you can create charts that link

Beginning Oracle® Application Express

Even if you have limited programming experience, this hands-on guide will get you up and running quickly with Oracle Application Express (APEX). It covers the concepts and practical steps involved in building a web application from the ground up using Oracle APEX. You'll discover how to progress through the complete development process with the help of detailed instructions on creating, customizing, and extending an Oracle database application.

Highly respected Oracle expert Rick Greenwald begins by giving you the necessary tools to build a useable order entry system. He then explains how to enhance the system with reports, charts, themes, and templates. You'll also find out how to use packaged applications and work with multiple applications and you'll learn how to migrate and integrate data with the Oracle environment.

By the end of this book, you'll have a strong understanding of Oracle APEX and the world of Oracle technology, which will enable you to build your own applications and create further refinements that meet your reporting needs.

What you will learn from this book

• Steps to ensure that users enter correct data while using your applications

• The powerful and flexible reports you can create with Oracle APEX

• Advanced options for customizing user interfaces

• lTechniques for using the power of PL/SQL to extend the logic in your application

• Ways to implement security for your APEX environment

• The options for deploying an APEX application to another environment

• How to migrate applications from Microsoft® Access® to Oracle Application Express

Who this book is for

This book is for Access developers looking to step up to a more scalable and reliable environment, with reduced maintenance overhead and greater integration between application systems.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.