Best Practices & Community - Expert Oracle Application Express Plugins - page 170

Participate in the Plug-in Community
The APEX community has really embraced plug-ins and has written a lot of excellent blog articles, as
well as posting some free plug-ins online for other developers to use and learn from. The following is a
list of some useful web sites and blogs:
http://apex-plugin.com : M ost developers will post their plug-ins on this site for
others to use.
http://plugins.clarifit.com : Pl ug-in demo site maintained by ClariFit.
http://skillbuilders.com/plugins : Plug-in demo site maintained by
Skillbuilders.
http://www.TalkApex.com : Bl og (by yours truly) with some posts on plug-in
development.
http://www.danielmcghan.us : Bl og by Dan McGhan, who writes most of
Skillbuilders plug-ins.
http://blog.theapexfreelancer.com : Bl og by Matt Nolan, who has created
some commercial plug-ins.
http://www.inside-oracle-apex.com : Bl og by Patrick Wolf from Oracle. He
created plug-ins for APEX.
http://apexblogs.info : APEX blog RSS aggregator that has some plug in-
specific content.
By far the best site to get APEX plug-ins is http://apex-plugin.com/ . Th is site allows any APEX
developer to post a plug-in for others to use. Most of these plug-ins are free, but some require a license.
You are encouraged to go to the site and try some of the plug-ins. If you do create a plug-in for public
consumption, you are encouraged to post it on this site.
The plug-ins on apex-plugin.com are not created or supported by Oracle, so you should be slightly
cautious about using them in your applications. Though the APEX community is a small and trustworthy
one, there is still a possibility that someone may post a plug-in with malicious code, or a plug-in may
have a security vulnerability. The following blog posts discuss this issue in detail, with some excellent
feedback from some of the experts in the field: http://www.talkapex.com/2011/04/malicious-code-in-
apex- plugins.html and http://www.talkapex.com/2011/04/malicious-code-in-apex-plugins-
feedback. html .
The articles also discuss scalability issues when using others' plug-ins. Though this is an area of
concern, it must be taken with a grain of salt. If you only have a small set of users on your system,
scalability may not be a concern. On the flip side, if you have thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of
users, then scalability is a very big concern and you should modify the open-source plug-in to fit your
needs and requirements.
Oracle also has some plug-ins which they maintain. To view this list, edit your application. Go to
Shared Components Plug-ins. Click the View Plug-in Repository button as shown in Figure 7-19. This
will open another web page, which will direct you to Oracle's plug-in repository.