Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
All APEX applications use themes and templates to create a uniform look and feel to
pages and their components. APEX comes with a set of themes, as well as the ability to
define your own theme. You can use this concept to create applications with mobile
interfaces by either using a theme based on responsive design principles, which allow
you to dynamically resize and reposition components based on the dimensions of the
calling device, or by creating a mobile interface, which uses specific mobile-type inter‐
faces, such as list views. An application can have a desktop interface and a mobile in‐
terface, with automatic selection of the interface based on the identity of the calling
device.
Individual pages are the building blocks of APEX applications, but an APEX application
also uses components that are shared across many pages in the applications. These
components include:
• Navigation components, such as tabs, lists of links, and breadcrumbs
• Themes and templates, which control the look and feel of the overall application
• Application-level computations, processes, variables, and options
• Various authorization and authentication options
APEX applications are composed of HTML pages, which when submitted interact with
the Oracle Database hosting the applications. APEX also gives you the ability to de‐
claratively implement dynamic actions, which can operate in the browser environment
through generated JavaScript.
APEX also includes team development capabilities, which help team members to com‐
municate about projects, issues, and bugs. One additional and useful feature of APEX
is the ability to assign a page or other object to a particular build option. You can then
specify what build options are active at any time. This capability lets developers work
on new options, but leave them out of export scripts created to move an application to
a production environment.
SQL Workshop
The previous portions of this section described, at a very high level, the application
development capabilities of Application Express and the Oracle Database Cloud. The
Database Cloud and APEX also provide an area called SQL Workshop, designed for
working with the data structures and data in the underlying Oracle Database.
SQL Workshop includes the following main areas:
Object Browser
Lets you see the structure and contents of your data objects. The Object Browser
also includes the ability to create and modify objects.
