Saturday 11 August 2012

Mobile apps with Oracle Apex

I have been toying with the idea of using both Oracle Apex with JQuery Mobile as an application development platform for a while now. Why not? You get a great database and a Mobile UI design framework to built your mobile apps just using your browser!

I managed to create few apps on this platform. This post is about what tools I used when I was developing the apps.

Overview of using Oracle Apex and JQuery Mobile

This one was easy, just go to http://apex.oracle.com and register for a workspace. The workspace gives you an Oracle Workspace Schema, like a login (schema) to Oracle. Then you start developing Web applications just using a browser. Oracle Apex renders your pages in HTML and you use SQL and PL/SQL for your logic. Most of the pages are decorated with pre-built templates or custom CSS and templates you create.

Your app becomes a web app, read by browsers. To make it look like a mobile app you can use Jquery Mobile . A framework which enables you to further customise your Oracle Apex page regions and make them look like mobile apps.

Oracle Apex 4.2 - the upcoming release - will incorporate the JQuery Framework within itself as standard and building mobile apps will become native to Oracle Apex. If you want an Early Adopter release is available on this link: http://apexea.oracle.com

Below are few mobile apps I have been developing

(best seen from mobile phone or tablets)

The School Proximity app calculates the radius between two circles and draws a circle on Google Maps.






The Greekisland app is a mash up of Google Maps, Yahoo Weather and Google Charts APIs, dynamically querying the weather reading and temperatures on Greek islands. 
















The beachmap app is a test I did on Custom Authentication with Oracle Apex. Where you can register with your email and add beach locations around the world.






















All you need to do apps like this is two things really
It was a great learning process. Now, with REST API and JQuery Mobile in the horizon for Oracle Apex 4.2, I see a great potential with Oracle Apex!