We have a new statement of direction available on OTN outlining our road map for the next two releases of Oracle Application Express:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/apex_sod.html

Having written the current reporting engine, incl. tabular forms, I’m very excited about finally getting to work on the much asked for tabular form validations and of course after adding PDF printing in 3.0, I’m looking forward to continue my work on this feature as well.

After working through Patrick’s APEX 3.1 enhancements thread on the OTN forum, I think much of what customers had asked for will actually make it into 4.0 (3.1 will just be an incremental update).

Here’s what we have planned:

Oracle Application Express 3.1

An incremental release of Oracle Application Express, 3.1, will incorporate the following:

- Optional runtime-only installation, which will install the minimum number of database objects and grant the minimum number of privileges to run Application Express applications in a production environment
- PL/SQL API to manage a runtime installation of Application Express
- Documented and supported Application Express JavaScript libraries
- Enhanced integration with Oracle SQL Developer for MS Access to Application Express migration

Oracle Application Express 4.0

The next major release of Oracle Application Express will be 4.0. This release will focus on declarative support for Web 2.0 features in Application Express, as well as the extensibility of the Application Express framework. Application Express 4.0 will incorporate the following:

- Interactive reporting region types which natively integrate Web 2.0 features to filter, break, sort data, etc.
- Extensible item framework, enabling developers to "plug in" their own custom item types
- Declarative support for AJAX validations
- Declarative support for cascading select lists and other similar item types
- Improved tabular forms, including support for validations, integration with collections, and additional item types
- New item/region types, including DHTML calendar and AJAX tree
- Improved PDF report layout
- Enhanced print attributes allowing for more control of PDF document structures
- Improved error message handling
- Numerous functional and performance improvements