Author Archives: Stijn Van Raes

Mobile Applications with APEX & jQuery Mobile

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Mobile development is not the next big thing anymore, it is THE big thing today. And as you may already know, Oracle APEX is ready to take on the challenge of creating mobile business solutions.

We at iAdvise already started to experiment with mobile application development in APEX 4.0, but off course this was not the ideal environment yet. Since APEX 4.1 you can declaratively create mobile applications with jQuery mobile, and with the latest release (4.2) it’s really starting to lift off. You can even declaratively build responsive applications.

In May 2012 we gave a seminar about mobile development, and since then we successfully developed several mobile solutions for our clients. Below you can find a demo of an application we created for one of our most valued customers, New Holland Tractor Ltd.

New Holland Tractor Ltd

About New Holland: Since 1895, New Holland is committed to providing solutions that improve farming efficiency and productivity.
New Holland offers cash crop producers, livestock farmers, contractors, vineyards and groundcare professionals the largest choice of easy-to-operate tractors, harvesters and material handling equipment.

New Holland complements the widest agricultural equipment offering in the world with efficient Parts and Service support and a range of tailored financial services from a specialist in agriculture. Setting themselves the highest standards in quality and service, is part of the culture of New Holland, part of the DNA of New Holland. The plant in Antwerp (New Holland Tractor Limited) with some 1,000 employees, is a major manufacturing unit of tractor parts such as rear axles and drive systems.

Mobile application

New Holland Tractor requested a mobile solution to let their workers use checklists at the quality gates of the assembly lines in the plant.
In the past they had to manage all these checklists by hand. For each checklist, a paper form had to be filled out after which it had to be processed by hand. This created a lot of overhead and it was very easy to make errors.

The application had to be developed in Oracle APEX 4.1 and had to be super user-friendly. The result is a simple, yet elegant application.

Usability

At iAdvise we invest a lot to make our applications user-friendly. For this project we started off by designing mockups that were used as guidelines during the development phase, those helped us to create a very simple and efficient application.

For the workers of New Holland Tractor, this solution was a huge improvement. Now that the checklists are processed automatically, it’s very easy to analyze the production process and there’s less room for errors, hence it further increased both productivity and efficiency at the assembly lines.

We feel that mobile development with APEX is really kicking off and the APEX development team is on the right track to make APEX a mobile enabled development environment.

Exciting times are coming!

OGH APEX Dag 2012

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This monday I gave a presentation at the OGH APEX Day about a Forms to APEX migration together with my colleague Ronny Boeykens.

Everything went smoothly, except when my laptop decided to install some windows updates and restarted out of the blue :) .

Our presentation was kind of a follow-up on the ‘Forms Modernization’ presentation of my colleague Gert Poel, where they illustrated what the possibilities are when you want to modernize your Forms applications.

In our presentation we explained that APEX can be a worthy substitute for Forms, by showing some examples of a business case.

OGH APEX Dag - Can APEX replace forms

OGH APEX Dag - Can APEX replace forms

I also saw some interesting presentations during the day:

First off was the keynote by Patrick Wolf, where he gave a nice glance at the features we can expect in APEX 4.2.
The things that stood out the most for me were:

  • jQuery mobile will be fully integrated.
  • It will be possible to attach multiple themes to one application, so you can have a mobile and desktop theme in your application.
  • Subscription will be possible on theme level: Thank you!
  • The max. number of items on a page will be raised to 200. Offcourse Patrick noted that when you have more then 100 items on your page, you seriously have to consider if your page is still usable!
  • You will be able to download packaged applications from the Oracle Cloud.

Next up was the presentation of Roel Hartman, that showed some interesting things you can do with HTML5. Especially the websockets, where you can push data from your database to your webpage was really cool. Also the local storage caught my eye.

I also liked the presentation of John Scott, that demonstrated the possibilities of the error handling feature in APEX 4.1. I’m still waiting for the result of the last demo though :) .

A big thank you to the organization, everything was perfect! I really enjoyed the day and saw some interesting things.