Help on the "latest" content for APEX presentation

Question

Tyler Muth here. It's been way too long since I've been on this forum. Unfortunately my current role doesn't allow much time for APEX projects (all Exadata, all the time). I have to give an apex talk in two days and would love some pointers to the latest "best solution" for a few key topics. The apex community has always been one of it's greatest strengths and I'm hoping for some pointers to community content or just built-in functionality that I may not be aware of. The audience are experienced apex developers (and really sound like they know what they're doing) so their questions are beyond the "spreadsheet to app" demo.
Here it goes:
<li>Deployment in general. Specifically moving the full app vs 1 page. (not sure much has changed here)
<li>Efficient use of Page Zero such as dynamic actions or dynamic tabs
<li>Source code control best practices. I'm pretty comfortable wit this one but happy to see new and creative solutions.
<li>AJAX: They did a lot of their own AJAX code before apex included jQuery. I think they're looking for more use of the built-in APIs
<li>More details on the "Shuttle". Examples or modifications perhaps?
<li>Customized success messages, such as "Record for Melissa updated".
<li>Not interested in mobile at this time.
<li>Charting and any custom examples.
<li>Calendar examples beyond what's in the doc. Possibly updating entries inline.
<li>Recent improvements in built-in tabular forms
What I'm looking for are just links to blog posts or other content on these topics if possible. Yes, I can (and will) google them, but the active people in the apex community probably have a good idea where solutions to some of these topics are. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide and I hope to rejoin this community in the near future as I have a few projects where APEX would be a good fit.
Regards,
Tyler
http://tylermuth.wordpress.com

Answer 1

Hi Tyler,
I’m apologizing in advanced for the short response but I have to go out soon.
Two days seems like a short time to really learn new stuff, but as your audience are experience APEX developers, they might find some of the followings interesting:
*) Deployment – APEX 4.0 introduced the APEX_APPLICATION_INSTALL API (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23903_01/doc/doc.41/e21676/apex_app_inst.htm#CHDIEDJH), which allows you to deploy new applications usinging a command line utility, but still enjoy all the options that were only available in the GUI mechanism (e.g. changing the deployed application ID, default schema, etc.).
*) Error handling – APEX 4.1 introduced some new ways of intercepting and dealing with APEX errors. Patrick wrote two Blog entries on it.
*) Tabular Forms – this feature has considerably changed in 4.x. Adding the option of built-in tabular forms validations (without losing changes in case of validation error) and the option to process the tabular form data per row without resorting to the G_Fxx arrays. Also the Add Row functionality has become a client side operation (important for those who upgrade from pre-4.1 versions). You should search the forum for the combination of marc && tabular && form. He has several threads on the subject.
*) Globalization – if this is an issue with your audience, there were some major enhancement of the translation mechanism. Search Joel’s blog.
That’s all for now. Good luck with the presentation.
Regards,
Arie.
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