Apex, a 4GL-for-the-Web…

Until now, Oracle JDeveloper (with ADF) was always positioned by Oracle Corporation as the successor for Oracle Forms.

Now, with the release of Apex 3.0, it is the first time, — as far as I know — that Oracle Corp. considers ‘openly‘ Apex as an alternative for Forms.

On the restyled Oracle Apex Home on OTN, you can find a small comparison between both tools: both declarative, SQL & PL/SQL driven, … Read the rest of the article here.

Especially, pay attention to the “development status” of both products: Oracle forms is in ‘maintenance mode‘, while Apex is in ‘Active Development‘!

Prophetical Gifts ?

Do I have some prophetical gifts ?

Last week I was blogging that we still needed to do a lot of Apex evangelisation …

and see my prayers are heard…

Today a new initiative is launched: the Apex Evangelists.

A great initiative for the European Apex community !!!!

Apex Evangelisation To Do …

As announced in one of my previous blogs our Apex seminar took place yesterday.

More than 50 people registered and came over to the offices at Oracle Belgium to listen to the different presentations, case studies and testimonials. The audience consisted of people with very different profiles: developers, project leaders, managers and decision-makers. We tried to find an equilibrium between the more technical demo’s and the real show cases.

It was not that easy, but – if we may believe the evaluationsheets and the reactions after the sessions – I think we met the expectations of all the attendees.

For those who could not be present, we provide a link where you can download a zip-file with the presentations.

One of the things that striked me the most was the fact that Apex is not yet that well-known as I suspected. We, at iAdvise, are now already working with Apex for almost 2 years; we did different projects. On the internet you see that the community is growing (e.g. Apex on OTN), but not yet in Belgium… Within the audience, there was only two (!) persons (of which one then still of the Netherlands !) who really worked with the tool; in the after-talk one of the people said that she had never heard of Apex before…

So we still have to do some Apex-evangelisation …

There is however one common problem where a lot of people struggle with. The often heard remark was: ”We are now working in the traditional Oracle forms, often still in C/S mode. Which direction should we take? Web-forms, knowing that this technology does not have a real future anymore, Jdeveloper with ADF or Oracle Application Express”.

It is my personal believe that Apex is a very good alternative for Oracle Forms, maybe not for all applications, but Apex is also much-much more than an alternative for excel and ms-access (i.e. the way Oracle originally positioned the tool).

I am curious what other people think about this. Feel free to post your comments …

Apex Seminar

We, at iAdvise, are now working with Oracle Application Express for almost two years. We have a fixed-team of >8 people daily working within this environment and we realized already several projects.

We also want to share this knowledge to the outside world (e.g. by means of this blog). Therefore we organize, together with Oracle Belgium, our second Apex Seminar at the beginning of next month.

The seminar will be in Dutch. You can find the invitation here and, if you are interested, navigate to our registration page. Of course both the invitation and the registration page are developed in Apex, also the mailing we sent out to our customers and prospects.

What will be discussed during the seminar.

After a small introduction of what Apex is, we show how you can extend the standard functionality of the tool with reusable components which make the development process even faster and error prone.

The second part of the session is dedicated to some case studies and a user testimonial of the different Apex applications we have already built with our Apex team.

The user testimonial is presented by Roularta and deals with the project we realized for them (on time and within budget !). For their “Sportmagazine” we created as a replacement for a non-maintainable MS Access application, an editor for entering weekly all soccer-related data. Based on this data we generate (via SQL Word, see previous post) all kind of classifications that need to be published in their magazine.

We will also show some other cases to illustrate and highlight different features of the tool we already used.

The seminar is closed by a speaker of Oracle Belgium: he will give an explanation on Apex 3.0, the future roadmap and the Ms-Access migration facility.

XTra4o – Release 0.9.2 and Help

Last week we made our XLIFF-Translator for Oracle available to the public.

Based on the feedback we already received, we made some changes to the utility. See the About-tab in the application.

We also use this tool to try out some typical-issues-you-need in-every-application.

In XTra4o we implemented two different ways to provide Help to the user.

For every step we provide a visual-aid explaining where you are in the translation process.

For ‘experienced’ users it is possible to disable this help via the User Preferences.

A second way to provide Help is an on-demand approach with context-sensitive help. Clicking on the Help menu will open a dragable window, showing information of the current page.

This help text is fetched from a table which makes it possible to build a simple Apex screen on this table. Now a non-technical person can write the help text instead of a developer, which is always better …

Don’t hesitate to give it a try and provide us some feedback !

Apex: XTra4o

Yesterday we released our utility that helps in the translation process of an Apex Application. We gave it the name Xtra4o which stands for “XLIFF Translator for Oracle”.

XML Publisher (or BI Publisher) also uses XLIFF-files to translate their reports. One day, we hope to extend our tool so it will also be able to support the translations for XML Publisher Reports.

Within our company we already used this tool to translate different applications, but only for the languages English, Dutch and French. Therefore, we currently only provide a default dictionary for those languages.

If the tool will be used for other languages, we will be able, with your help, to extend our default dictionaries in the near future…

Apex: XLIFF Translator, generate the translated file.

The final step in our translation process is exporting the translated data back to an xml-file; i.e. the reverse process of step 1 where we translated an xml-structured file to a relational table-structure.

This time, the relational data has to be converted back to the original xml-structure (similar to the one of the imported XLIFF-file).

We need to recompose the following structure:

By using the standard SQL/XML functions available in Oracle XML DB, it is quite easy to realise this.

Don’t get frightened by the syntax. At first sight, it seems rather complex with all those nestings, brackets, …. But after a while, you’ll notice (that) it can be extremely powerful. Documentation on the syntax, can be found here.

We embedded the above query in a PL/SQL package which we use in the following Apex page:

So, now it is up to you. We made the tool available on the following URL. You first have to register (which only takes about 30 seconds) and then you can give it a try.

Any suggestions are welcome!

Apex: XLIFF Translator, the editor (step 3.2)

The difficulty with editing the XLIFF- file is that you do not know with which item/object the translation text corresponds in your application.

As explained in a previous blog, we discovered a way to link a translation item to a specific apex object type. This information is stored in the flows-table wwv_flow_translatable_cols$.

Therefore we decided to build a GUI-editor on top of that XLIFF-file.

In a first step, we loaded the XML-file as such in an XMLTYPE column, linked with a specific source and target language. By using SQL/XML features and X-Path expressions we extract the data and transform it to a relational structure.

Since all the data-to-be-translated is now seeded in our internal translation table, it is easy to build an user-friendly Apex page on it.

As you can see, we provide extra filtering options including the Apex object type. The screenshot shows only the labels of the tabs in our application.

There is also a small accounting on the work already done: we have already translated 3 of 4 tabs; for the complete XLIFF file, we translated already 175 of 400 items.

We extended the utility also with the notion of a ‘dictionary’. By default we have already preloaded a small dictionary with typical words that we see in every application: create, save, delete, search, home, admin, …

As user, you can extend this glossary with values (business terms) that are often used in your application.

In our example, we can decide to add the translation for “Photos”, “Foto’s” to our dictionary, by clicking on the right-most arrow:

Once added a check-mark appears between the two icons. A small help text on top of the page explains the different icons.

This mechanism can accelerate the translation work to a high degree: you can extend gradually your own dictionary and apply on a regular base those new words to the items that are not translated yet. We also provide a separate tab-page in the application where you can maintain the content of your dictionary.

In a next blog, we will explain how you can extract the relational data back to the initial XML-structure once the translation work is done.