At the end of january, Oracle announced that Oracle HTML DB was renamed to Oracle Application Express. At the same time they published a roadmap for the next year. This confirms the inside information I had that Oracle takes Application Express serious and keeps developing this development tool.
Oracle Application Express has a short name, Apex, which is synonym for summit. I’m not sure if they want to promote the product with the short name or the long name.
The roadmap mentions release version 2.2 during the spring of 2006. This release brings some minor updates, like added user interface themes and improved distribution and deployment options. I have not found a releasedate yet.
More interesting, however, is the announcement of version 3.0 by the end of 2006. The list of enhancements is promising:
- improved graphical layout tools for form and page design (I have high expectations of this)
- Microsoft Access migration assistant (hey, HTML DB has been Oracle’s answer for MS Access from day one!!)
- improvements of master-detail functionality
- Print formatiing to Adobe PDF and other ouptut, enhanced charting possibilities.
- More quick start applications (though I’m wondering who really uses those templates!!)
The upcoming release 2.2 wil be supported on database 9.2.0.3 and newer. The current release (2.0) also runs on Oracle 10g Express Edition.
