Wednesday, 30 August 2006

Oracle Releases Free APEX Application Express Tool for Web Application Building and Management

Oracle has unveiled a new version of its Application Express (APEX) software, a free tool for quickly creating Web applications built atop Oracle databases.

"There's nothing earth-shattering in terms of improvements, but we've made a thousand small improvements here and there," said Michael Hichwa, Oracle's vice president of software development. "We think this release is much more polished and cleaner."

Oracle Application Express Release 2.2 features several productivity enhancements designed to reduce the complexity of developing and deploying web applications. The new release promotes the reuse of Web applications by enabling users to package applications and dependent objects such as tables, seed data, and images, into a single file. This enables applications to be installed seamlessly into other Oracle Databases running Oracle Application Express. Oracle Application Express Release 2.2 also features an item finder that allows users to search within applications, component-level export, and an Access Control Wizard to control access to applications, among other new capabilities.

Oracle partner Paetec Communications is using APEX as the foundation for the next release of its Pinnacle Communications Management Suite, a suite of tools for managing technology services that runs exclusively on Oracle's database.
"We want to go for minimum-work maintainability. We were focused on life-cycle cost and support of the application," said Larry Foster, Paetec's vice president of technology. Paetec is based in Fairport, N.Y.

"[APEX] didn't have everything we wanted in the beginning, but it's come a long way," he said. Remaining on Foster's wish list is improved graphics support and better tooling in APEX's development environment.
Oracle says it has had 260,000 downloads of APEX since the product's release, and it estimates it has around 20,000 active users. The number of solution providers using APEX is rising.