Preface

Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a rapid web application development tool integrated directly into the Oracle database. APEX is a completely web-based application featuring many ready to use components, allowing developers to build and deploy professional web applications rapidly. Using SQL and PL/SQL as the development language it provides a number of advanced features out of the box, including several authentication mechanisms such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Data Access Descriptors (DAD), Single Sign-On (SSO), authorization services, built-in session state management, and logging functionality.

Modern websites are moving towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA), where web applications have many characteristics of desktop applications. This has led to the growing popularity in JavaScript libraries to provide that rich interactivity and ease the burden of providing support for multiple web browsers.

There are several excellent JavaScript libraries which provide functionality to retrieve, traverse, and manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) using cross-browser compatible code. They also provide cross-browser event handling and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) functionality, for request and response objects to exchange data between the browser and server, avoiding full page reloads.

The story is very different when you examine the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) enhancements currently offered by JavaScript libraries. Major libraries such as jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools choose to limit the UI and UX functionality offered. Developers are forced to integrate officially sanctioned UI extension libraries with limited sets of UI components, such as jQuery UI, Prototypes Scripty2, and MooTools.More.js extension, or integrate third-party unsupported widgets.

The notable exceptions here are the Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI) and Ext JS.

YUI provides a large collection of UI widgets in version 2, including buttons, tabs, trees, menus, sliders, charting, dialogs, rich text editors, and more. YUI released YUI 3 in September 2009, completely rebuilding the library from the ground up. In 2011, some of the major widgets have been migrated to YUI 3, with many more still to be migrated. YUI widgets have basic CSS styling only, requiring you to modify the CSS to achieve a professional finish. While YUI is a mature library, its UI components and documentation feel unfinished.

Ext JS also provides the UI widgets including tabs, charts, windows, trees, desktop styled toolbars, menus, rich text editors, calendars, layout managers, ComboBoxes, and many more. All the Ext JS widgets are styled to a very high standard, giving a professional interface out of the box. They are designed to be customizable, and at the same time, allow you to re-theme them to suit your own requirements.

The Ext JS widgets are built using an advanced JavaScript application development framework, with components constructed using object-oriented design principles. This allows you to modify the existing components easily, or combine and extend them to develop custom components.

Documentation of the Ext JS API is well organized, with clear descriptions of configuration options, properties, methods, and events for each of the components and classes making up the library. Support services include an extensive library of examples, showing individual and combined samples, very active public forums, and premium support forums.

Combining APEX with the very professional Ext JS UI components allows developers to build amazing web applications rapidly using the latest Rich Internet Application functionality.