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Oracle APEX, Citizen Development & Governance

There are different kind of developers out there. Here is my definition of these groups: High-code developers Programmers mainly working for example in Visual Studio Code writing C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PL/SQL, etc. Low-code developers Fullstack developers working in the IT department that like to work with a low-code platform to create applications faster by configuring components and designing simple statements. In small projects, they also act as high-coders to get the final approx. 10% of functionality in place that isn't possible to configure (ie. complex business logic). Citizen developers Employees working in the business department (hr, sales, controlling, etc.) that have deep knowledge about their business processes and are eager to implement corresponding apps themselves. Most low-code projects are done by professional app developers in the IT department. On the other hand, Gartner and Forrester are claiming that we need to embrace citizen developers as there aren'

Flows for APEX 23.1 is here!

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Flows for APEX 23.1 is now available for download at  https://flowsforapex.org . Minimum requirements for installation are Oracle DB 19c+ and Oracle APEX 20.2+. For a quick start, I suggest to install it in a free workspace on  https://apex.oracle.com . Check out the new features: REST API UserTask Assignment Map Lanes to Roles (Basic) Messaging Support Modernized Modeler Additional languages: Italian, Korean, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese The Flows for APEX team demonstrated key features of 23.1 in the APEX Office Hours session of 3-AUG. For those of you that missed that session, you can watch a replay at https://apex.oracle.com/officehours soon. We have also updated the sample app "Expense Claims" that ships with the software distribution to reflect most of the new features in 23.1. If you are new to BPMN 2.0, I recommend looking at the preinstalled tutorials in the Flows for APEX app. Ready to start building your first process-oriented app based on Flows for

Getting up to speed with Oracle Application Express (APEX)

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Want to start developing web applications with Oracle Application Express? Make sure you don't reinvent the wheel and adapt good practises from industry experts right from the start. Here are some tips for beginners: 1. If you don't already have APEX installed, don't install it yourself, but get a free workspace within minutes on apex.oracle.com  to be used for demo purposes. For production purposes, you can use the always free tier on cloud.oracle.com/free with two databases up to 20 GB database storage each without any cost. 2. Start making your first apps using the APEX tutorial from MT IT Solutions (German) or from Oracle (English): apex.mt-itsolutions.com/development  (includes good practises!) apex.oracle.com/en/learn/tutorials 3.  Take note of some the shortcuts from Oracle: apex.oracle.com/shortcuts 4. Install and explore all prebuilt apps from the App Gallery section in the APEX builder 5. Learn about how to build process-oriented apps using Flows fo

About sustainability & Oracle APEX

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The climate crises is here and immediate counteracting is required to prevent worse. Key is to take into account environmental and social aspects in each buying decision. Above all, a sustainable planet requires developed countries to consume less, a lot less. Starting at 2025, businesses in Europe need to report their carbon footprint besides the usual regulatory financial reporting. Regarding IT, this includes the carbon footprint produced by hardware. A better utilization rate of hardware leads to less hardware required. Companies like Vodafone monitor the utilization rate of their servers as well as the power consumption for each infrastructure component using Oracle Application Express (APEX) to reduce the carbon footprint of their data center. On software level, program code affects the required energy consumption. For example, in terms of database usage, are all records read out even if only one record is required? In terms of storage: do we really need to keep data stored infin

Flows for APEX 22.2

With Flows for APEX 22.2, there are many new features to explore. We have planned several sessions to give you an overview of these and to engage with the Flows for APEX team. 29-SEP 2022 16:00-17:00 CET APEX Office Hours https://apex.oracle.com/officehours This session will be recorded and made available publicly on YouTube 04-OCT 2022 15:00-16:30 SGT / 08:00-09:30 CET https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpdOmrqzMuG9WUsQZ8CuVX3Z3g4gqXYTOu More interactive session without recording for EMEA & Asia Pacific area 04-OCT 2022 10:00-11:30 EST / 16:00-17:30 CET https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUkcuyoqzooE9AgXlfHYwtZfmyG7nFwK9fe More interactive session without recording for EMEA & America area Yours truly, The Flows for APEX team https://flowsforapex.org

Out now: Flows for APEX 22.1!

We are proud to announce the general availability of Flows for APEX 22.1. You can download a free copy of this open source software at https://flowsforapex.org. Major new features of 22.1 include: - declaratively sending an e-mail using the service task in BPMN - support for repeating timers for non-interrupting boundary events - timers supporting the Oracle date/interval format during modeling - to prevent lost updates, we have introduced a "step key" - the modeler having the Monaco text editor integrated - APEX metadata being leveraged by the properties panel in the modeler - support for a business rule task in BPMN - an enhanced sample app "Expense Claims" to reflect most features of Flows for APEX 22.1 Have a look at the readme file in the software distribution to see a complete list of all enhancements. To give you an overview of what is new in Flows for APEX 22.1 and how the upgrade path looks like, we invite everybody to join one of the following online sessi

Protect your public server!

During the week, a DDoS attack with over 384 IP addresses from all over the world was started on our public Oracle APEX server. As we do like people (and proper bots) to make use of our free services to provide information about Oracle APEX, the bots managed to request an APEX page around 1.000 times a minute! With that many page views, the connection pool of Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) with maximum 30 DB connections got full and people were starting to see an error message from ORDS. Of course we could scale up the connection pool with the database, but that would mean we had to scale up our hardware too, as ORDS was already taking up 100% CPU. Instead, my colleague Moritz Klein quickly found a way to throttle-down the requests in our proxy server installed in front of ORDS. We used a module called "event MPM". The configuration looks like this: # event MPM # StartServers: initial number of server processes to start # MinSpareThreads: minimum number of worker threads wh