APEX 5 Desires

No doubt about it, APEX 5 could be the opportunity to really think number 5 is alive! If you missed it, I commented on the statement of direction. It's a good list, and I still think the APEX product team have their fingers on the pulse regarding what the community needs & wants.

The APEX 4.2 wish list was certainly a success when it came to encouraging the community to speak out with what they wanted. There were many features suggested, all with varying degrees of complexity in regard to fitting in with the current data model & infrastructure. I have drafted a retrospective post to analyse some hits & misses.

Oracle now provides a dedicated application to listen your APEX feature requests. There is a similar one for SQL Developer.

APEX Feature Request application

I'm interested in something a little broader. I'm asking if the APEX community could have one major change applied to APEX 5, regardless of what the poor elves in Oracle development need to do under the hood to make it happen, what would it be? With the introduction of mobile applications with user interfaces, the bar has been raised.

What big change would you like to see in APEX 5?

Eight ideas to get your brain juices flowing:

1. A major restructure of Interactive Reports, offering more control with UI options, sharing reports, migration
2. Bigger, more dedicated leap into responsive web design for at least 3 devices, offering more features
3. A super easy to integrate, supported, WYSIWYG reporting engine/development tool
4. Remotely integrated migration engines operating over a database link
5. Built-in version control, perhaps with super-changed build option features
6. A simpler (than plug-ins) transparent porting facility to allow developers more easily integrate jQuery plug-ins, typically for menus & lists
7. More cross-application features, particularly the management of subscriptions
8. More integrated use of page aliasing, optionally applied "instead of" page numbers, and of course :APP_PAGE_ALIAS

As I did last time, I mentioned this on the OTN APEX forum - but I encourage you to use the Oracle's feature request application to manage these ideas, allow the community to help assess their viability & popularity, and help see some into fruition.

You'll get more awareness for these ideas using the application than relying on post 42 on 18 pages of posts, but it would be nice to see your big ideas repeated as comments/forum posts regardless to help seed activity.

The APEX development team are are listening.

Scott