About 2 days ago we saw the announcement of the release of APEX 20.1.
I normally set myself quite an aggressive timetable to get new APEX releases to production. So much of what we do lags behind the curve, to the point where I just want to see it burn, so when I get the opportunity to force the issue, like I do with APEX, I do.
In my typical fashion I move all my builds to the latest release and kind-of forget any prior release ever existed. As result, you will see all my Vagrant and Docker builds have been updated to use APEX 20.1, along with updates of OpenJDK and Tomcat.
The basic installation is the same as always (here), so there is no drama there.
Next week I’ll start upgrading a few of our development environments, and check everything looks OK. Assuming I hit no problems, it will be full steam ahead. Fingers crossed.
The new features are always a big draw for most people, but I tend to start by looking at the deprecated features and desupported features.
- When I saw APEX_UTIL.STRING_TO_TABLE and APEX_UTIL.TABLE_TO_STRING had been deprecated I was about to lose my shit, then I saw they have just been relocated to the APEX_STRING package. Composure regained. 🙂
- The desupport of some of the productivity apps is a good thing. Some of them were not so good and having a long list of Meh, is not as good as a smaller list that offer something better. Just my opinion.
As far as the new features in the announcement, here are my initial (and uneducated) thoughts.
- Redwood. I feel a little “Meh” about this. I don’t love it. I don’t hate it. I guess it makes sense to bring it in line with the current Oracle thang! 🙂 I would have had a little more contrast on the icons. They look quite washed out, but I am not renowned for my design aesthetic. 🙂
- Faceted Search Enhancements. Love this! When I saw Mike Hichwa demonstrate the first iteration of this I had a When Harry Met Sally – Restaurant Scene moment in my head. All additional functionality is welcome. I think Faceted Search is a great and some might say killer feature.
- Friendly URLs. My first reaction was, “Oh thank God!”. This was quickly followed by, “Oh my God!”. The thought of what some people will name their page aliases fills me with dread, but it is a welcome addition.
- Native PDF Printing. Nice.
- Mega Menus. Love it. The traditional side-bar menu is fine for little apps, but it’s a bit dated, takes up a lot of room and is nowhere near as flexible as this looks. I think I would have made it the default choice, but I can see why sticking with the old style is probably the safer option. 🙂
There are a bunch of other things in the release notes that sound interesting, including remote application deployments using REST Enabled SQL, but I’ll leave you to discover those for yourself.
It’s early days, but this looks like a really nice release… Again…
Cheers
Tim…
I’d love to see your implementation of healthcheck for ORDS container.
Stefan: You’ll notice in my ORDS build I hard code it to be healthy, so for that build there isn’t really a health check. Why do I do this? Because it’s really hard for me to determine a generic method that is applicable to all people. Some people will say it’s fine if a HTTPS request returns a 200. Some people will want to provide a specific unauthenticated service that tests ORDS is running and is able to connect to the database. Some people will want the previous, but include authentication. I decided that rather that than trying to please all people, I would do nothing. 🙂
In my work implementation we do have services that are checked, but those are specific to us, so I can’t really share them.
Cheers
Tim…