Early Adopters 3.1 Now Available

The Oracle Application Express Team is pleased to announce the debut of our 3.1 release for public evaluation.

To access our hosted instance, please register.
If you have participated in a previous evaluation, you will bypass the short survey.
After registering, you will be provided with access to the evaluation instance from which new accounts can be requested.

You will need to request a workspace and then wait on the email notification.

The new feature that we would really like feedback on is our new region type - Interactive Report. This is a new SQL query based region type that lets end-users customize which columns they see as well as column order. End users can also, sort, filter, break, sum, highlight, and add computed columns using simple pull down menus.

The full list of 3.1 features available with this Early Adopters release is:

• Application Builder
  
  • Interactive Report Regions *
    
  • Templates
    
    • Improve Searching of templates
      
    • Replace Templates
      
    • Publish Templates
      
    • Bulk Unsubscribe of templates
      
    • 2 New Themes
    
    
  • Wizards
    
    • Allow for early exit when creating HTML region
      
    • Create Interactive Report Wizard
      
    • Remove 32k limit on Create Application on a Spreadsheet
    
    
  • Addition of Application Groups
    
  • Simplification of Page Group pages
    
  • Addition of Application Date Format
    
  • Support for Declarative Media Type
    
  • Can view existence of run-only application (but cannot edit them)
    
  • Display Application Name in App Builder footer
    
  
  
• Workspace Administration
  
  • Workspace-specific Builder Notifications
  
  
• Runtime Installation
  
• APIs
  
  • Augment APEX_MAIL API to support adding attachments to e-mails
  
  

Please remember, the success of this Application Express 3.1 evaluation depends on user feedback. All participants are strongly encouraged to provide feedback using the feedback application. The link is also available from within the hosted Application Express 3.1 evaluation instance Home page.

Thank You!

The Application Express Team

Statistics on apex.oracle.com

Every week the APEX development team collects statistics on our FREE hosted environment apex.oracle.com

For the Week ending 11/18/2007:
1,647,648 total page views for the week
2,076 distinct applications accessed during the week
2,773 distinct users logged in throughout the week
243 new workspaces approved in the past week

Total Workspaces: 11,290

As you can see from the numbers given, this is a very active APEX site.

You may or may not be aware that when you are within the APEX Development environment then you are actually running APEX applications.
Our development team uses APEX Development and PL/SQL packages, etc. to build the components you use to build your applications.

Keep sending in those details on your large applications!

Hardware
The database server is a Dell PowerEdge 1950, 2 dual-core CPUs @ 2.33 GHz. The machine has 16GB RAM with NAS for storage. I have no details on the Web server machine(s), as these servers are shared by other instances, and not only for apex.oracle.com.

Regards,
David

The Bigger the Better

I'm often asked for examples of "large" Oracle APEX installations.

A friend of mine (Mr. B) is working with a large customer who asked that question of me again ... so I thought I would use this blog to ask YOU for further examples and also relay my answer to these sorts of queries.

What I want is examples of applications with a large number of concurrent users and/or a large number of pages. The more detailed information the better.

{Our policy is to not publicly use any company or organization names unless we have authorization to do so. Further to that, I am always interested in getting new references but that is entirely up to you, so please indicate if you would be interested}

If you prefer you can email me directly rather than replying to this blog.


As for my response to "Is APEX popular and can it scale to support large numbers of users?":

As a starting point they can look at the APEX OTN Page and then Community and Partners where you can see the large number of Consulting companies, Hosting companies, Internet Applications, even Commercial Applications. There is also close to 30 different people blogging about APEX. Some of these sites have very large user bases (Metalink, Think, Ask Tom, etc.)
Oracle has several very large internal sites running Oracle Application Express including sites such as ARIA People Search (also available as a Packaged Application) and sites for tracking customers, etc.

A review of some of our internal lists, on who is using Oracle APEX, reads like a who's who of the Fortune 1000 and also includes numerous government agencies and public institutions. The popularity amongst Universities around the world is growing rapidly as they have discovered what a great tool Oracle APEX is for teaching Web design, SQL, and database fundamentals.

We also have some large customers in the process of migrating commercial Oracle Forms applications to APEX (Some with 1,000's of Forms).

The APEX OTN Forum is the third most popular Forum on OTN behind SQL & PL/SQL, and General Database (http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=18)

Our Packaged Applications are downloaded an average of 3,000 / month.

The free hosted instance on http://apex.oracle.com receives an average of 1.4 to 1.5 million page views a week and now hosts over 12,000 Workspaces.

The number of sessions at Oracle Openworld is growing annually (see earlier blog) which all goes to show how popular APEX has become [15 Sessions, Hands-On-Lab, 2 DemoGround booths, etc.]

To highlight the importance of APEX within Oracle - with 11g APEX is now included in the seed database. Therefore, whenever 11g is installed so is APEX, it is no longer on the Companion CD.

I could go on but you get the idea ... What I really need is some customer details on those big applications I know are out there. Personally I am sick of hearing (from ill informed people) what Oracle APEX supposedly can't do - I want more ammunition on what it DOES do.

So please get back to me with details on those Oracle APEX applications and the Bigger the Better.

Regards,
David