Check out the Apex 4.0 preview at Carl Backstrom's blog!

The live demo presented by Carl Backstrom as presented to the attendees of the Apex European Training Days is now publicly available!

You can review at Carl’s blog , and if you got a few minutes spare time, you should take a look. I think the reporting features of Apex 4.0 are simply jawdropping. The out of the box rich client functionality will make very attractive and versatile reports, with end-user sorting, filtering (including more complex filters and sorts), and the ability for the end-user to store a certain ‘view’ on those reports for later use.

I read Oracle’s Statement of direction, where is mentioned what is in store for version 4.0. My guess was that a lot of Javascript can be generated in the future, for instance for client-side validations and calculations on form-items. Possibly some of the third-party functionality like Google Suggest and the Yahoo User Interface library might be delivered out-of-the-box. Looking again at the SOD, I think that is summarized mainly in the ‘declarative support for AJAX validations’, as well as in the ‘Improved tabular forms, including support for validations, integration with collections, and additional item types’. We might expect a huge productivity boost here. Another reason not to think of Apex as just another reporting tool, but more like a full-blown development environment.

My hope is that release 4.0 will be there somewhere in the first quarter of 2008. What I did hear is that 3.1 is expected to be released this month, with, as stated in the SOD, Documented and supported Application Express JavaScript libraries. The devteam has been working hard to update the documentation for this part.