Oracle Application Express (APEX) 20.1 is now generally available. Oracle APEX is the world's most popular low-code platform for enterprise apps and enables you to build scalable, secure enterprise apps, with world-class features, that can be deployed anywhere. This release of Oracle APEX introduces a number of exciting new features and enhancements to help deliver a functionally rich and modern user experience.
Some of the major improvements in Oracle APEX 20.1 include:
The user interface of APEX and the App Builder has been refreshed to align with Redwood, Oracle's new user experience design system. The new design and color scheme extends across the full developer experience and provides refreshing new visuals.
The appearance of APEX can now automatically switch between the dark and light appearance modes based on your OS or platform setting, enabling APEX to seamlessly integrate with your workflow.
Faceted Search has been enhanced to allow for cascading list of values, conditional facets and compact count display, among other enhancements.
The URL syntax for APEX apps has been simplified to allow for friendlier URLs at runtime. The new syntax provides a Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-friendly URL structure which is far easier to understand and provides immediate context as to where you are within an app.
The URL no longer features application or page numbers, and instead, uses the workspace path prefix, application and page aliases, and standard web parameter syntax for its URL structure.
There have been numerous improvements in application lifecycle management including one-click app deployments, automated backups, zip exports, and more. These features make it easy to deploy APEX apps and integrate it into your existing workflow.
You can now print PDF files directly from Interactive Grids. This feature produces a PDF file which includes formatting options such as highlighting, column grouping, and column breaks. To make use of this feature, simply enable PDF as an additional download format in your region attributes.
Universal Theme now includes Mega Menus for your application's navigation. Mega Menus render the navigation menu as a collapsible floating panel that displays all navigation items at once. It is especially useful for displaying the various aspects of your application and enables direct access to sections of your app.
As in every APEX release, a number of enhancements and bugs fixes have been made to the productivity and sample applications. Additionally, numerous bugs have been fixed in APEX 20.1, resulting in even higher quality and stability for APEX environments.
For more information about many of the other exciting new features in APEX 20.1, please see the Release Notes or visit the What's New page.
Application Express (APEX) is the low-code application development platform which is included with every Oracle Database and is also provided with every Oracle Database Cloud Service, including Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. APEX, combined with the Oracle Database, provides a fully integrated environment to build, deploy, maintain and monitor data-driven business applications that look great on mobile and desktop devices. To learn more about Oracle Application Express, visit apex.oracle.com. To learn more about Oracle Autonomous Database, visit oracle.com/autonomous.