A few weeks ago some co-workers of mine were having a discussion about IDEs and concluded that their Eclipse would be the right choice for all most every project. Sure IntelliJ had some nice features and so has JDeveloper, but Eclipse had plugins to do the same. Did Eclipse had the best of the IDE world ?
Popularity: 290 points
Last month Oracle released a statement of direction for SQL Developer (here it is). Apart from the enhanced testing capabilities the most important feature will be the support of graphical logical and physical data modeling - just like you normally would do using Oracle Designer - using the acquired CDW4ALL extension. This modeling can be used offline (file-based, using XML files) or repository based. So Oracle seems to be moving (some) essential Designer features towards SQL Developer, therefore reducing the need for Designer - which is obviously in ‘maintenance mode’ (no new features added).
One thing that worries me a little is that this “functionality is delivered as an optional extension“. That sounds a little like $$$…., but I’m not sure about that!
Popularity: 150 points
You may know, or not know, that there are various kinds of software tests that may help you ensure that your code meets the requirements and behaves as intended, like Unit Testing, Scenario Testing, Integration Testing, etc. And the better your test coverage, the lower the risk and the safer you feel modifying your code since you can always run your tests to make sure you haven’t broken anything. Now, what do you do if you work on existing code without Unit Tests? Making a change can be a risky because you can’t run any Unit Tests. How do you make sure that your change won’t break anything? Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 333 points
Creating out of the box functionality for web apps with APEX is as fun as it is challenging. Some time ago Roel Hartman and me started working on a transport and logistics application in APEX. (Roel allready blogged about it once here)
One specific part of this application was a planboard which used dragging and dropping with orders in sort of a truck calendar. It was build in Java and had all the swingy features you’d expect.
The client wanted to know if this was possible with APEX. Well, sure it is. We’ll just use the full pallete available for us with the web browser! CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.
Obviously their are many paths to take when considering the design for this sort of functionality, especially when you have APEX at your disposal to create it.
Should we use the available calendar?
Could we use a tabular form?
Do we use standard APEX DML report/forms?
Well, this is what we did 
The design
Popularity: 213 points
This blog is about software metrics in a very broad interpretation; software quality metrics. During our last project we wanted to elevate the software quality and the quality of the software development process. The first thing that came to our mind was to focus on metrics to evaluate and guide the quality of the code, but after further thought we decided this was not the complete answer. We needed to upgrade our development process first. On the other hand we didn’t want to try it on the whole project so we decided to build one component using the new strategy and the other using the default one.
Popularity: 358 points
When building a serious application you often need to repeat certain regions in a couple of pages, for instance customer or order information. In APEX you can ofcourse copy a region to another page, but that enhances your maintenance effort when changes are needed on this copied region. Another solution is to group all the pages that share this region in one application and define the region on the famous Page 0. But maybe there is a more elegant way to solve this….
Popularity: 172 points
For a (even more) Web 2.0 like look-and-feel in your APEX application you can define a dynamic region ‘My Favorite Tasks’, that shows links to the pages you visit most frequently.
For these favorites we can query the APEX repository. Follow these steps to get this thing working:
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 173 points
There’s a very good article on JavaWorld by Klaus Kreft and Angelika Langer (the latter is the author of the well-known Java Generics FAQ) with the title Understanding the closures debate. I heard about this article on JavaPosse episode 194, and it’s also being discussed on Artima.
I knew that there were proposals to add closures to Java, but I hadn’t yet looked into the details of the proposals. The article explains very clearly what closures are exactly and gives a good overview of the three main proposals that there are today: CICE + ARM, BGGA and FCM + JCA. Read the article if you want to know what the alphabet soup means exactly. In short:
Popularity: 1197 points
In APEX 3.1.1 all compound item types - items that contain HTML layout and multiple inputs - have been surrounded by a fieldset. The result is that some items that previously nicely aligned horizontally now wrap to the next line.
It mainly effects items with a Post Element Text or where a ColSpan > 1 is defined.
Popularity: 207 points
Last thursday I hosted my first APEX workshop from a teaching perspective, and I must say it’s a whole different experience then being the attendee. Luckily Roel Hartman and I had prepared the workshop properly. (we hosted the workshop together)
First off I gave a presentation about APEX. My focus was especially set on “seeing the point” about what APEX is, does and what it’s intended to do. This combined with a healthy summary of features and architectures made the presentation quite long (about 50 min) but it was the minimal version, because I wanted to put so much fun stuff in that APEX has to offer. I just couldn’t decide what to scrap!
I must say the presentation went as expected, and the reaction afterwards were very positive, so thanks for the compliments.
Popularity: 166 points
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