[Music] thanks everyone for joining today's office hours on the beginner's guide to Oracle apex I hope you and your families are healthy and safe my name is Joel Coleman I'm on the Oracle apex team and we're grateful that you're giving us your time today this session will be recorded like all other apex office hours and the recording will be made available later if you have questions at at any time please post these questions in the Q&A section and zoom and we'll ask some of these questions at the end of today okay two weeks ago we had a very popular session with Dan McGann who has worked for Oracle and he's a JavaScript expert and also an apex expert and this is more of an advanced session so certainly not for the beginner but I just want people to know that the replay of this session is now available and I have the URL and QR code here next week the database division is having a six hour consecutive 6-hour webinar called the database house party and if you look for hashtag DB house party on Twitter you'll find everything you need to know about the DB house party this starts next week Thursday June 25th at 9:00 a.m. Eastern which is I think 1300 UTC the focus of this is going to be on data-driven applications and application development the entire series of sessions will weave together a common scenario from architecture to the development of a system to micro services and there will even be a little bit of Apex at the end I'd like to introduce our team member Anthony Rayner from hopefully sunny Plymouth England I first met Anthony in 2008 when he worked for Oracle consulting and he joined the apex team in 2008 and he had actually used apex since its Genesis Anthony has either led or contributed to numerous areas of Apex however you want to measure a person either personally or professionally I think Anthony excels in always we're lucky to have him on the team um Anthony is an architect and a software developer on the team he's not a product manager but it was his idea for today's session and this is a bit out of the ordinary from his his day job but he wanted to deliver a beginner's guide to Oracle apex for those who are curious and those who are just getting started and with that Anthony I'll turn it over to you yeah so here we are so here we are welcome to today's apex office hours the beginner's guide to apex my name is Anthony Reyna I work on the team as Joel mentioned and in today's session we're going to cover everything you need to know to get started with apex so just in case I mention any general product direction I need to show you the Oracle safe harbor slider meet the full stack developer they have it all front-end and back-end coding knowledge and I for design an awareness of usability accessibility they've got DevOps experience they communicate well with the business and they're passionate about helping them succeed but they are a rare commodity and quickly become the most popular person in the business everyone wants their time the requirements for the business quickly exceed their bandwidth IT are overwhelmed and the business are dissatisfied the business needs a way to do it for themselves enter low code so low code promises faster application delivery with minimal code and minimal cost there's a cost associated with every line of code written both now and in the future low code reduces this cost and burden reduces the build up of technical debt and allows the business to solve these problems for themselves without them becoming a problem for IT and here we can see some analyst statements just promoting the success of low code when had some more traditional coding methodologies 10 times faster productivity gains speed of delivery the benefits are clear introducing Oracle apex so apex is a low code development framework built by Oracle it allows you to rapidly build feature-rich enterprise ready desktop and mobile web applications and whilst it's entirely possible to build apps without writing any code or just with low code if you do know a little bit of sequel and a little bit about the database you can really fly Apex will see you down to the ground it makes really fits with the old development style whether that's local code or all the way up to the high control you have the choice so where is apex of available it's available with all supported Oracle database editions and versions and can be run in the cloud or on premises and you're free to move from one to the other so build build on the cloud and move to on-premises the choice is yours and the cost well with always free Oracle cloud or Oracle Express Edition it's free free for you to run production apps in your organization and you if you're interested in always free Oracle cloud please check out oracle calm slash free thank you okay so without further ado let's show you how easy it is to build your first apex application okay so the first thing you can do is just go to Apex Oracle comm and this will give you access to an apex workspace where you can go ahead and get started straight away so go go to Apex to Oracle comm click on get started for free we then have the choice to use the free service in the Oracle cloud or you can go to a peg store called calm and get a free workspace there this is where we'll go now we just fill in some basic details so our first name surname an email address [Music] and the workspace name we can then fill in a few more details which is just are you new to Apex do you plan to use this workspace for training purposes we'll hit next what is the purpose of you requesting this service so you could just put kick the tires you know check it out whatever us and finally there are some terms and conditions that you need to accept so then we click Next and we click Submit request we get the message workspace requested and we're prompted to go ahead and check our email so let's go to my email there we go then you'll get an action required email come through the workspace has been approved and then we go ahead and click create workspace so this is now creating your workspace which is your area where you can start building applications straight away so let's go ahead and sign in the workspace is being created and we'll type in a new password [Music] okay so then we're into the development environment now one thing I should say up front is yeah so we've created a workspace so we've got we've got some where we're waiting where we can go ahead and start using apex um but let's look at the problem we're trying to solve and in this particular case we we've got a spreadsheet and let's have a look at the spreadsheet it's a simple tasks spreadsheet used to track projects tasks within that project there's some dates status code who the task is assigned to and also some financial information cost and budget so this is a spreadsheet it might be passed around between people in the organization it might just be yourself currently that manages that information but you want to create a web application based on this data so how can we do it well with Apex it's super easy so we'll go back to the app builder and we'll click on create' workspace sorry create application on this page you have the option to create a new application an application from a file which is what we're going to do here or a Productivity app and productivity apps are a set of pre-built and sample applications already available within every apex workspace so there are a great way to have a look at what's possible with Apex and also you may be able to use some of the productivity apps or any provided for certain news cases like survey builder for example but here we're just going to create from a file so select from a file we can choose our file and we go ahead and just choose the tasks spreadsheet we just showed you we then come to a page where we can load the data so the first step is that we're loading the data into the Oracle database all we need to do is type a table name a table is just the object where the data is going to be stored so we type tasks and then we can click load data so then apex goes off create the table tasks and insert the seventy-nine rows that it's taken from the spreadsheet we could go and have a look at that table but right now we're gonna go straight in and create an application based on that data so it into the create application wizard we can give it a name called tasks app we can adjust a few things here like the appearance where the menu will be situated we can add additional pages if we wish to we can add certain features to the application and we will go ahead and check all of these features so these are kind of ready-made features that are going to be built into your application right from the start so things like administration access control feedback so being able to collect feedback from users you can just go ahead and check all of these and then you get them for free it's a part of your application so let's create the application so this is now Apex going away and creating all of those pages and everything within those pages and then when that's through we take them back to the back of the app builder home page ok so let's have a look at what has been created so we just go ahead and click run application we type in the username that is our that we provided for our workspace you can add more users to the workspace [Music] there we go so you can add more users in the workspace so you can have multiple users logging in and you can have different access rights for those different users I'll show you those screens in a minute so let's have a look this is a this is the application that we've built we've just typed our tasks so one word we've typed during the creation process other than that was very simple we just uploaded the spreadsheet went through the create app wizard and we've got a functional web application right away but we can show you a little bit of customization that's possible but first we can have a look around the app so we've got a navigation section on the left so that shows you all of the pages within your application there's a navigation bar at the top of things like collecting feedback from your users and then some additional functionality that's always visible on every page we've got some nice charts that have been generated based on the data but again we're going to go in and tweak one of those in a minute just to show you how easy it is to change these things but let's have a look at some of these things in a bit more detail so this is a report it's called a faceted search report and it it's an inbuilt component within Apex which easily allows you to drill down into your data or your users to be able to drill down into their data so we can for example select a project all of the counts get updated here on the Left we can drill down into say Mark Niles open tasks for this particular project we can get rid of that particular assignee so we can drill in and out of our data in a very familiar way like you'd be familiar with the navigation style that's available for example with Amazon we have a list of search criteria or filters or facets speaking in the terminology that we use in Apex on the side of the page and then you can easily drill drill in and drill out of your data to get to what you another type of page or report that's available within application Express or apex for short is the interactive report now the interactive report is again a report of that data so it's a visualization of that data but you can easily format it and enrich that the information that's there and to customize it according to what you want to look at so for example if we wanted to show all of the open tasks we can do this we might want to group by the assignee so we can say let's group by the assignee we can also add information here so for example if we wanted to see the total cost for each assignee we can easily do that with an aggregation so we go to data aggregate and let's say some of cost so then for each break or for each within each group you can see a total for each of the cost and you can equally add a total sum of the budget and other types of aggregate are available now a very nice thing that's also available with interactive reports is the ability for users to save their view of the data so we can for example if we're only interested if we're always interested in open tasks we can go to report select save report and we can just say open tasks and then this will be saved as a saved report so that when your next login you can go back in and you can see that you can select that save report to immediately go to that without needing to redefine a key each time so tons of capability there another thing that's nice to show is computations so you've got cost you've got budget that was in your original data from the spreadsheet but what about the budget - cost so how much is left for this particular task so we can go ahead and create a con and we'll call it budget its cost and we can just select it in this selector here so we can say budget minus cost and apply and there we go so we've got a new column this hasn't changed the underlying data in the table but it's just added this information to this report again which can be saved by the user that's looking at it so they can easily extend format and do all sorts to their data visualize it in different ways just with the power of the interactive report and from a developer perspective all we've done is just created an interactive report based on that tasks table so it's super easy from a development perspective but super powerful from a user perspective also we can go ahead and edit this data so we can say we can go into this form and we can update say we want to make this 6500 cost so it's fully editable the data is edited in the database so it's a single source of data other people logging in will will see the updated data of course so all managed by the Oracle database and available through your apex application okay so that's some of it as a high-level overview of the functionality that's been created from the create app wizard and I wanted to show you a couple of ways where you can extend or customize what's being created by default just to show you how easy it is to change or customize so let's go to the dashboard page and here we've got this end date chart but actually what I'd like to see is project costs so I'm going to go ahead and change this chart definition so I can click the quick edit from the tool bar here and this will take me directly to the page designer and that particular component in page designer page designer is the way that you edit is the way that you edit page is within Apex to give you a quick orientation basically on the left of the on the left of the screen you have a component tree where you can select the components on the page so we've got our page up here and then we've got in the content body we've got the different charts that are on the page so project task name start date end date these are all represented as components in the tree on the left so if we want to edit or update or delete or add we can do so directly in the tree and then make changes on the right of the page we've got the property editor which is where you can see properties which are specific to the component that's selected you can edit one or more components at the same time so that's the property editor also in page designer we have the component palette or the gallery and this is really where you can choose from the available types within Apex so for example here's your interactive report region type we could create one by dragging it onto the page here but for this example all we're going to do is adjust the end a chart that's been created so we'll select the end date we can either select it in the tree or in the layout view here we're going to change the title to be project costs and then we need to go down to the there are other attributes for example you can change the chart type all declaratively so just with the mouse and but here we're going to change the data so what we need to do is just select the tasks table tasks table so we're just specifying the source for the series of the chart and then lower down we can see the important stuff for what's going to be actually displayed in the chart series so here we're going to say ok so we want to see the label his project so we want to see project along the bottom of the jar the aggregation is sum and the value is cost so we want to see all projects and their total cost in a nice bar charm so we'll save those changes rerun the page and then with any luck we should see the updated project costs chart down here so that's all good okay so let's make another couple of customizations we'll go back to our edit page so here we're back in the Edit Page and what we'd like to do is for project if you're creating a new project something that would be useful would be able to either create a new project or pick from an existing project so what we can do here is we can change this into an autocomplete type to allow us to do that so again we'll use quick edit we can go straight to the project item on that page now this is currently a text field as you can see project is selected here and it's a text field we're going to change this to be text field with autocomplete and then page designer is telling us with the read indication that we need to provide a bit more information for this particular setting and because it's an autocomplete it's going to need to pull those values from somewhere and so we can very easily just define a simple sequel query which is to say select all of the unique projects from the tasks table and order them by the project name so just a little bit of C equal there to enable you to get that information from the database so if we rerun this page let me let me go to the crea heat actually so it's more useful so we can we can start typing a new name or we can pick from an existing name so pretty easy just to extend the capability there of that standard page another thing we'd like to do is maybe change the well another thing we'd like to do is add a validation so here for example let's say we would like to not any budgets to exceed 10,000 pounds so in this case we need to add a validation and this is also very easy to do so let's go to this page the field or the item that we need to validate is the budget column so we can select the budget sorry item so we can select the budget item we click create validation let's call the validation so we need to give it a name so that we know what we're valid for validating and let's call it budget less than 10,000 and then we we need to select how that validation is going to run so basically in this case there are some built-in ones like item not null item is equal to or not equal to but in this case we're just going to use a simple small inline block of Peel sequel and I can talk you through this and it's basically a simple if-then statement so if the budget is less than 10,000 we return true so that's okay thumbs up the validation passes however if it isn't less than 10,000 so if it's 10 or greater we return false and the validation will fail and the user will not be allowed to proceed so we can just click the check mark to make sure it's valid PL sequel and then the only thought other thing we need to provide is the error message so this is the message that will display for the user when the validation fails we can save that and then if we go back to our page let's rerun the form and if we try and save with a value greater than 10,000 for budget we should see the validation error message this prompts us tells us what the problem is and then we can go ahead and just correct that nice and easy so very easy to extend and customize according to your specific needs ok so that's a brief demo let us go back to the slides so when building applications with Apex you can just focus on the problem you're trying to solve and let us take care of all of these other kind of important aspects of modern web app development we with the framework we provide this we provide all of this for you personally I'm highly passionate about accessibility and apex and trying to make sure apex is easy to use and accessible for as wide an audience as possible the eventual aim being that we that you can build applications that are highly highly accessible with really minimal additional effort on your behalf so we're getting there and we have other people across our team who are equally passionate about the other areas of the product here so let us take care of how the a of how your app works and whilst you can focus on what your app does so just to show you what's possible with Apex let's take a look at some real-world examples so recently we the Oracle built the therapeutic learning system in under two weeks to help manage and track the effectiveness of medicines in the fight against Koga 19 it was a huge effort certainly not just a one man effort within Oracle involved a large number of people but apex proved itself up to the job of being a being the the framework that was used to build this application and more applications are on the way so and so yeah apex was used for this and was delivered in under two weeks another site is apex dot world this is a community built site and it's meant as a kind of an aggregator for all things apex there's a incredible team of the community behind this it's intended to be for those who are passionate about apex kind of like a single place to go they spend a lot of time moderating and aggregating the information that's out there on the web so this is a really great place to take a look at and it's also a shining example of what is possible with apex because it's entirely built with with education Express another awesome example from the community is farby which is for all a beautiful earth for short built by the apex community to help fight the battle against climate change it's a really an unbelievable piece of engineering so and please take a look at that [Music] NHS York have used apex to track and manage their bed management system works great and allows them to keep track of bed management within the hospital Neath Port Talbot Council in Wales very talented developers over there and they've used apex for some brilliant projects one of which is for incident reporting works on different devices follows the government guide like design guidelines and this bilingual and so it works in Welsh as well as English all possible with Apex and Oracle Oracle runs on apex has literally thousands of applications across the company written by not just IT but by various lines of business helping run the company so as you can see not just the spreadsheet replacement so much more the possibilities are are really wide and buried so another important part of apex is the incredible and vibrant community with around 500,000 developers worldwide and growing all the time they love to learn and share ideas with each other so rather than me tell you about them that's here from some of them now [Music] hello my name is limiter Harris and I'm from Belgium and I just love Apex it all started when I was a little kid and I was working with computers all the time I also really liked data so when I saw the Oracle database in 97 for the first time I was just blown away by what you could do with it you could get so much value out of this data by using a database and then in 2004 I saw apex for the first time it was living in the database and it was the fastest way to bring this data alive just by using a browser by using apex I could show the data in a browser and chart and reports I could even manipulate the data I was just blown away by it I loved apex so much that since the day I never stopped doing anything else I even started a company and with our company we're building applications for other companies we're giving training and consulting we love apex so much that we even build extensions for it our most known extension for apexis apex office print if you didn't check out apex yet it's a really nice tool it's a low code development tool living in the database and it gives you so much value it gives the value that you need for your customers it's not only a great tool but there's also a great community behind it so if you didn't check it out and go and check it out hi I'm Martin I've been using Apex now for well over 10 years I kind of came into it as an accident a former employee asked me to take a look at what the capabilities are and ever since that it's really changed my life for the better so things on how I use Apex I use it really to solve business problems quickly and efficiently these days before when I first started programming and learning about programming I tried to spend a lot of time learning about all the cool techniques and technical aspects of things but apex has really changed my philosophy and view on that as it allows me to focus on the problem first rather than on the technical solution what I really like about apex is if it's a simple problem I can use the low code methodology however if it requires a lot more customization based on business rules and processes I can expand and completely can customize everything I want hi my name is Richard reader and I'm a senior director at Oracle I've worked at Oracle for about 22 years now and I'm delighted that I've been able to spend the last 16 of those working with Apex back in the 90s when I first started I worked a lot with Oracle applications both in internal support roles as well as with Oracle consulting and so I spent a lot of time writing sequel queries against application tables even though it never created my own application I left Oracle for a few years to try my hand at a career in photography but returned in 2004 and at that time I started working with what was then known as HTML DB which of course is now apex it's not an exaggeration to say that it was love at first sight today I've got two people on my team Isabel and JP who develop and support about a dozen apex applications our highest traffic applications has served about 39,000 users over the last five years with about 4 to 5,000 unique users per month that application is used for the distribution of marketing materials throughout Oracle I love Apex it feels more like fun than work apex allows us to do great things as has always been the case APICS allows us to create an application in a short timeframe show it off to people get their feedback make rapid adjustments and then deploy it to a wide audience very quickly the UI always looks great thanks to the meticulous design work of the apex product development team we generally try to avoid doing extensive customizations and rely on the work they've done that way we're able to take advantage of new features as they get rolled out in future releases of Apex best of all we get the opportunity to work with Apex product development team they're a great group of people and they're super responsive to our issues and feedback and they're relentless and making Apex better and better year after year hi my name is Gemma wood and I'm an Oracle apex developer I started working with Apex about 10 years ago my Oracle career originally started way way back and I worked primarily with sequel P or sequel and Oracle forms I then took a short career break and when I returned after a year or so I felt that my skill set was a little bit dated and I was very interested in getting into web development and I dabbled in the past with HTML DB which was the former name for Oracle apex so I decided to give apex a try anyway I instantly fell in love with it and learnt a little bit of CSS at the time a little bit of JavaScript you serve you don't need to learn either of them inside out to get started to make your app sing a little I'm now the co-founder of a software-as-a-service company we have 400 customers in 15 countries and 95% of the application is written in Oracle apex I think the things that I love the most about apex is the ability that you can go from low code to high code for Mach if you if you need to for more complex use cases and just that the speed that you can you can build pages is just amazing in addition to that we have a fabulous user community which is always has involvement from the apex development team so yeah that's what I love about apex so are you gonna join us okay so a big thank you to Martin Dmitri Jemma and Richard there for providing those videos they say it far better than I can and we really appreciate the time you took to do that if you are interested in reading a little bit more about some more of our community we have this article here for developers whose careers were changed by Oracle apex their beautifully written and available via this link so please take a look at that Jemma achi in the bottom right was the lady in the in the video they're on the last video so she gets double bill in today's office hours okay so please take a look at that for some further reading so who is Apex good form really anyone from developer to business user to student to hobbyist so whether it's a passion project supporting startups or helping to run the enterprise apex has got you covered so just a little bit about some more information to kind of help get you started help to get involved with the community and where to get help so let's first take a look at a couple of resources apex to Oracle calm and apex world apex to Oracle calm should be your number one starting point and let's show you some of the things that are there so go to Apex door so here we can see this is where we previously signed up for our apex workspace but we're not going to do that this time we're just gonna have a little look around to see what's available so if we go to this drop down menu at the top there's more information about the platform in general like more information about low code for example then you can also find out specific some more specific information so if you're coming from a forms background and you're interested in modernizing forms applications with Oracle apex we've got some information for you there along with the presentation we believe apex is a great great for apex for modernizing forms applications you can leverage existing skill sets your data is already in the Oracle database and you may even have database objects that you can make use of so apex is a great fit for modernizing your existing Oracle forms applications if you wish to do so also to learn more there's a plethora of information here we've got standard sort of documentation but I wanted to point out under tutorials there's some hands-on labs so they're pre set up tutorials that you can walk through and build applications along with the tutorial and that will expose you to some of the different features and capabilities of Apex so they're a great way to kind of learn a bit more about how it works also here we can have a look at under education there is a certification program if you're interested to become a certified application Express developer we also have a bunch of information available for educators so if you are a teacher perhaps at school or university or college we have a whole curriculum available for you so if I just scroll down to here and this is under the Creative Commons license so you are free to use this curriculum currently it's still using 19-2 which is the previous release we are we will be updating this to 20.1 at some point but it's completely free to use free to distribute free to change and free to deliver within your organization or within your education establishment so a bunch of information available there from apex to Oracle com let's have a look apex world quickly as well so this is the community built kind of portal aggregation site that's available for all things apex there's a whole load of great information here there's a special section just to show how apex was used or is being used to help against the fight of code 19 virus it's unbelievable how much is being built by how many people in all areas in trying to help fight this awful pandemic so testament to the people involved that they have taken the time to build these things it's truly awesome and humbling also here you can see job information so if you're looking for a job in Apex there's plug-in repository so apex has a lot of native capability there are native region types like the interactive report and the faceted search region all of the items so some of what we saw earlier but it's also extendable so there's a plug-in infrastructure where plug-in developers can write their own items or their own regions easily share them on github and via Apex world for other people to use or continue working on and then easy to install in your applications to use so if there's a great deal out the box low code but you can also extend it in these great ways so that's Apex world then to kind of getting involved with the community so we've talked about the incredible incredible community out there and how are you so how can you get involved so let's have a look there all of the we've got residences on all of the the local all of the social media channels so Twitter LinkedIn Facebook there's whatsapp community groups one in India for example as a telegram group and that I'll show you Twitter here quickly so if we go to twitter.com excuse me [Music] so there's two things that are that are interesting to look at from Twitter first of all is the hashtag ORCL apex so ORCL feedbacks and hashtag is a way on twitter if you're not familiar with it to kind of categorize the tweets that you're looking and Oracle's the official hashtag of Apex is our CL Amex Oracle apex for short so this is a really good way to kind of just stay up to date with what's happening in the community one point to note is that you don't need to be on Twitter to be able to search Twitter in this way so if you if you don't want to be on Twitter but you know you do want to follow along with what's happening then you can just go to Twitter com run these searches and you can still follow along very easily it's very useful in for example when there's conferences happening albeit online at the moment but when there are in-person conferences taking place following the O so our CL apex hashtag is a great way to just see what's happening at the conference sometimes people post pictures of the slides that are being shown and you can sort of pick up a little bit on what's happening at the conference through Twitter something that was just you know entirely not possible at all before the advent of social media so it's it's a great resource for that and for staying in touch with people okay so there are Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups as well also on Twitter is this account which is Oracle apex and this is the if you are on Twitter I would encourage you to follow the Oracle apex which is our official Twitter account okay so just finally where to get help so there's an incredible community of people out there and we're a very approachable development team but how can you reach out to us how can we get help so I just wanted to mention a couple of resources there's the official Oracle community forum at apex the oracle.com slash forum and then there's a slack workspace orcl apex slack comm which is not not not run by Oracle again community driven and a great place to ask questions and get access to and to learn from the wider community out there so the forum it's very easy we can just go to Apex the horrible calm / forum and that's a great place to ask kind of probably more involve questions slack isn't slacker as good as it is isn't always great for more involved questions or questions that require a lot of fun a lot of discussion or maybe with some screenshots and such but so there's the forum and this is monitored not just by the apex development team but also the wider apex community really are are prevalent in in responding to questions there but we do monitor it so that's a good place to ask questions also if you go if we go back to Apex Thor world so if you do want to get access to the orcl apex slack workspace here's how you can do it so you go to Apex world you need to register here and then click get your slack invite so your it's invitation only but if you register with Apex world get your slack in right here and then you will be accepted into the slack channel so this is slack here and you can see it's it's really it's used there's high traffic there's over 2,600 registered users and it has these channels so that you can kind of ask questions in specific channels not just in general chat so it's a really fantastic resource and a great thing to not only learn from the community and ask questions but also maybe even start answering some questions on there as well as your as your knowledge progresses so that's where to get help so if we go back to the slides in so what are you waiting for head over to apex to Oracle comm now sign up for your free workspace and let us know how you get on we'd love to hear from you and I think we might have some time for any questions if there are any till yeah Anthony brilliant by the way and I love the videos it's the first time I'm seeing them so there have been a host of questions and answers and just so people know the questions and answers that the whole chat discussion will also be posted along with the replay probably in the next couple days so we really just have I grabbed a few questions because I wanted to make it interesting Anthony and perhaps you can show this person anonymous asked is there built-in functionality just show usage tracking of the apex app like how many users are using the tool and top pages and event could you show that please yes of course yeah let me share my screen again ok so we will go back into the application that we created and if you remember when we created the application there was an option to enable certain features within the app and one of those features was activity reporting so if you enable that when you're creating your application we can go into the administration page in the app and we can see for example top users there's not going to be much data in here at the moment but yeah this will show you basically who is using the application and in which time frame so that's interesting there's also an error log to see errors that have happened within your application which is useful to see it people are maybe running into problems but not communicating them back to you and there's also page performance and page news for examples so you can periodically check your performance reports for example or or if there if there are reports of poor performance in your application which is entirely possible if if for example the query that's querying the data is not written efficiently or in an optimized way then yet you can you can sort of immediately go into this report see ok yeah performance was you know what whatever it was 5 seconds plus and then you you can you know where to look to try and drill down on those performance problems so and there are similar reports available so that's on an application by application basis but also in the work space within Apex there are similar activity reports where you can where you can look at similar things like page performance errors actually active sessions users they're the users that are most frequently using the application that kind of starts yeah all built in and available for you to use okay thanks Anthony and just to augment as well that same performance information is accessible via database views so if you don't like our visualization on it you can create your own apex apps and and and charts on the same data so I have another one for you Anthony and this is from hobbyist Joel and this created quite quite a firestorm on Twitter the other day this is an interesting application it's spreadsheet replacement but can you do real applications with this is Apex only for non professional developers can you do anything of substance with this well I'd say absolutely and then it's not just me saying that you know we've got a whole load of examples of such applications within Oracle to start with so I did touch on this on the presentation but I didn't go into any details on the applications that were there but for example we have a people management system where employees can look up other employees within the company so it's we call it aria people it's you it's one of the most used applications within Oracle I'm not sure of the exact statistics of how many people use it every day but it's Joel may know and it's yet you know highly successful enterprise apex application that's used within Oracle we also have Einstein which is a kind of a community portal type application which diff organizations and communities internally at Oracle use for questions and answers and sharing knowledge again used across the company successful application built with kind of all of them you know it's accessible secure performance has all of these check marks for enterprise ready applications built in and there are countless examples out there if you have a look at built with Apex comm is a community built website and there's a whole load of interesting examples built by non Oracle companies as well so yeah I think those are excellent examples Anthony and Bill with Apex comm is interesting because those are typically applications on the Internet and I would say probably 80% of the use uses of Apex is in back-office and there are a large number of customers out there who have built very large-scale applications a quick one that comes to mind a European insurance company basically took their old Oracle forms application rewrote it with the apex and it is used by both front office and back office employees and it's more than a thousand pages and used by about 7,000 distinct users every day so excellent last one hearing Anthony and if you want I can take this one too and this is from a dica he says or she says with autonomous database the apex version would be upgraded as the database is upgraded what sort of areas do we need to pay attention to you want me to answer this Anthony right please sure so so the one thing I should point out is apex can be upgraded independently of the database the minimum database version today at least 480 X 20 that one its database 11 204 and higher on autonomous database also sorry to complete that thought you can download the latest version of Apex on to your database as it comes out every six months upgrade your version Peck's independently of your database and as long as you're licensed and supported for the database you're licensed and supported for that version of Apex for Oracle autonomous database which runs on the Oracle cloud the version of Apex will be upgraded independently of the database version and in fact the apex 20.1 upgrade is happening very soon and in terms of what to watch out for it's actually a great question obviously you would want to ensure just do basic testing like you would for any web application of you know the functionality in your app but please understand that we invest a lot of time and money to ensure that when you upgrade your version of Apex that everything looks and feels and operates exactly as it did before that we invest a lot of time in this simply because we have thousands of internal customers at Oracle who we upgrade before we ever release Apex and sometimes we break their applications but we fix it rapidly before we ever release a version of Apex and so unlike a lot of the ever dynamic ever-changing JavaScript frameworks out there to us it is a paramount importance that what you built five years ago looks and feels and runs exactly as it did before but remember when Anthony talked about all the benefits you get from this framework whether it be security or accessibility or performance you get all that goodness for free and you don't have to change a single line of your application so what are areas to watch out for I would always avoid using anything that's undocumented any internal variables any internal API is that you don't see documented stay away from that because it is always subject to change and one thing that people always forget when they upgrade their version of Apex is to always I assume most people are using the universal theme to also refresh the universal theme of that application because you'll get all the all the goodness of the next version of universal theme and I think that Anthony I think this is this is brilliant thanks everyone for joining today and thanks Anthony for really all your work in preparing this and really having the inspiration and a lot of the work in in delivering this so I thought it was fantastic thanks everyone for joining us as I said the the replay and the chat should be available online probably in the next couple days and you can go to the website a text at Oracle comm slash office hours or you could always just interrogate Twitter with that hashtag or CL apex and you'll see an announcement there as well thanks everyone and we wish you a great day bye [Music]
