Paul Brookes: Oracle, APEX, and other musings.........

The award for the "worst kept secret of the last 12 months" will no doubt be awarded to Apple later this week after the unveiling of the iPad this Wednesday (27th).   As I said in an earlier post , this is likely to herald the start of the era of the ubiquitous tablet computer, in part thanks to the success of the iPhone. Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple certainly know thing or two about delivering objects of desire, but I can't help feeling that there will be a lot of disappointment around if this story from The Register is true.  It indicates that the tablet's OS may be the same as that on the iPhone, and not based around Mac OS.  Considering that multi-touch is native to a 'fully blown' OS like Windows 7 and the cost of the Apple tablet is rumoured to be around $600-$800 dollars, then I wonder what impact this may have on its success? Anyway, onto the main reason for this post, which is that I got thinking about multi-touch and web based apps in gene

Bad title I know, but it's late here in the UK, so I hope you'll cut me a little slack? Now I said I would update you on my progress with creating an online shop for my wifes business.  So, this is what I have so far. I've taken the original Online Shop packaged application, then modified and funked it up a little it using Apex 4 early adopter (if you haven't already then get yourself an account at Apex 4 EA ).  Specifically, I have used some of Anthony Rayner's excellent plugins from his recent blogpost , which I highly recommend that you use as a starting point.  The plugins in question are those to create and control a slider and drag and drop. Please visit my demo shop application and have a play around.  It's obviously only a first cut, just to test drive some Apex 4 features, and is obviously a long long way off being useful.  The features you may want to try are: You can drag and drop products (the image) to the shopping basket and the number of

Interesting article on the BBC News site regarding how Apple ' manages ' controlled leaks. It looks like a dead cert that Apple will anounce the iWhatever next week, and in doing so will arguably kick start the next generation of computing, that of the tablet based computer.  This will be the start of the two horse race between Apples new device and other Windows 7 (with its native mutli-touch) based devices. So, I'm thinking this can only be good news for us developers out there, as the low cost tablet (though low-cost may not apply to the Apple device) takes over from the low cost netbook.  Modern web based applications are just crying out for devices like these, particularly the kind of business centric applications we Apex developers specialise in.  I think Apex version 4, with a focus on easier Javascript development, and Ajax functionality, is going to be well positioned for development on these devices. I'm interested to see what new Apex themes and code, p

Well just 3 years after creating an account on Blogger I am writing my first post. This of course is at a time when, we are told, blogging is dying (or should actually be dead now according to this Wired article from a little while back). So, with this in mind, it means I will likely start some serious twittering in around another 2-3 years, long after the twitter dust has settled. I had come here armed with an arsenal of excuses, but to hell with those, I'm just going to get on with it. You see, I'm coming to the end of a long'ish contract where again my Apex skills were called upon once again and, after it finishes, will probably spend some time building an online shop for my wifes business which supplies jewellery to other businesses, but wants to sell direct to consumers. I say 'probably' as what usually happens when I make plans in this way is that a nice little contract comes along which I start as the other finishes. Assuming for now that this plan