My First Book: Beginning Oracle Application Express 4

I'm pleased to announce that Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 is finally published! I co-authored this book along with Doug Gault, Karen Cannell, Patrick Cimolini, and Timothy St. Hilaire. Co-authoring this book was a very interesting experience which was well worth the time and effort.

This book is aimed at beginner to intermediate APEX developers. It contains a lot of step by step instructions and detailed explanations to help you get a solid foundation for APEX development. You can purchase it from Amazon.com. If you'd prefer a soft copy the publisher, Apress, also offers the eBook.


Table of contents

Part I: Introducing APEX
Chapter 1: An Introduction to APEX 4.0
Chapter 2 - APEX 4.0: A Developer's Overview

Part II: Beginning APEX 4.0 Programming
Chapter 3 - Identifying the Problem & Designing the Solution
Chapter 4 - SQL Workshop
Chapter 5 - Creating the Base Application & Navigational Components
Chapter 6 - Forms & Reports
Chapter 7 - Charts & Maps
Chapter 8- Programmatic Elements
Chapter 9 - Security
Chapter 10 - Deploying Applications

Part III: Programming Websheets
Chapter 11 - Understanding Websheets
Chapter 12 - A WebSheets Example

Part IV: Advanced Topics
Chapter 13 - Extended Developer Tools
Chapter 14 - Managing Workspaces
Chapter 15 - Team Development

VirtualBox - High CPU Problem

I've been using Oracle's VirtualBox for several months now. I'm really impressed with this product and it has helped me a lot to rapidly prototype some APEX concepts.

One thing that bothered me when I started using it was that no matter what my virtual machine was doing, VirtualBox was using a lot of the CPU on my laptop. This didn't matter if the virtual machine was idle or doing any processing. After some digging around I found this very helpful post on the Oracle forums: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=9305831. As weird as it may sound the suggestion is to create and start a second, dummy, virtual machine. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked. The configuration that I used was: DOS as an OS. 4 MB of memory and a 4 MB hard drive. Disable all the extra stuff (network, audio, usb, etc).

Here are the screen shots of my CPU before and after I started the second, dummy, virtual machine:

Before:

After:

After starting the second virtual machine the CPU spiked for a few seconds then dropped significantly. Hopefully this issue will be fixed in a future version of VirtualBox but until then this is a very simple work around.

demo.talkapex.com

As part of this blog I've posted a lot of demos on apex.oracle.com. One thing that's always bothered me is that the demos have never been linked together or searchable.

I finally create a new demo site: demo.talkapex.com. Going forward all demos will be hosted on this site. In some cases I may move the old demos to the new site.

Console Wrapper (previously JS Logger)

I've moved the Console Wrapper (previous called JS Logger) code to be hosted as a Google project here: http://code.google.com/p/js-console-wrapper/

I decided to create a Google project since maintaining code via a blog is not the best or easiest thing to do. I will continue to blog about any major updates but all examples, documentation, issues, and code will be maintained on the Google project page.

Previous references to Console Wrapper
- http://www.talkapex.com/2010/08/javascript-console-logger.html
- http://www.talkapex.com/2011/01/js-logger-101-logparams.html

JS Logger 1.0.1 - logParams

Note: This now has a new name, Console Wrapper, and has been moved to a Google project. Please go to http://www.talkapex.com/2011/01/console-wrapper-previously-js-logger.html for more information.

I've updated my JavaScript Console Logger package to include a new function called logParams. logParams will automatically log all the parameters in your function. This can save a lot of time since you don't need to manually list all the parameters and it will detect any "extra" parameters.

Here's an example of the code:

function myFn(px, py, pz){
  $.console.logParams();
  
  //do something as part of this function
  
}//myFn;

//Not required if using in APEX. 
//If called from APEX it will detect if you are in debug mode
$.console.setLevel('log'); 

//Call myFn with the correct amount of parameters
myFn(1,2,3);

//Call myFn with more than "expected" number of parameters
myFn(1,2,3,'hello', 'goodbye');

Which results in:

Note: by default the parameters groups are collapsed by I've expanded them for this demo

Download Javascript Console Logger $logger.1.0.1. For more information about this javascript library please read my original post: http://www.talkapex.com/2010/08/javascript-console-logger.html

Thanks to Dan McGhan for helping come up with this idea.