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Impressions from APEX Alpe Adria 2026
Creating apps built with ❤️ using Oracle APEX. PL/SQL dev. Exploring the AI and ML world. Keen on front-end, visual arts and new technologies. Love travel, sports, photography.
Sounds like a snapshot of where things stand right now—useful for tracking trends, but the real value is in how quickly you can turn that “state of things” into decisions and action.
The Use Case Oracle APEX has a special template for Dialog Pages, called Drawer. This template is also available for any Region on you Page (this time called Inline Drawer). 💡 A Drawer is an overlay
The Use case (and the issue) What you see on this screenshot is a pretty common requirement in an APEX application - A form, where you have some text item or dropdown menu, followed by a button or som
The power of Claude Code - offline, free, secure
Using a REST Media Resource as an image source
This year's APEX Alpe Adria conference, as expected, didn't disappoint. A day packed with great sessions and the latest insights from the Oracle APEX team. The only disappointment is that I had to miss few sessions due to overlapping with another ones or my own session. But nevertheless, I learned some new things and that's what matters! Thanks to Aljaž, Dario and the whole team behind the scenes, who made this possible. For me - it was first time in Ljubljana and I had a great time exploring the city - really green and lively place, full of charm and history!
Thursday night offered a great discussion panel. The main topic again was APEXLang - the elephant in the room as it was described. And while it’s obviously baking for more than two years, there was a good explanation for that - it just touches every single aspect, every single component of APEX. And something that affects so severely the system, requires a lot of regression testing - ensuring that all APEX apps, ever built - will still continue to work after an upgrade to the 26.1 version. On top of that this whole effort requires a very good coordination between the APEX team and the Database Tools (ORDS, SQLcl) one.
There were different opinions on why and when exactly was the idea of APEXLang born. But the main reasons could only be two - better CI/CD and version control or AI generation friendly language. Maybe it was the first one, as this has always been a downside of the APEX export files. And it just happened to start at the same time as AI became good enough for coding - who knows, maybe a coincidence. But the fact is that APEXLang is very AI friendly and will put APEX at a pole position in the era of Agentic AI development. And mainly because it will act as an intermediate layer between the LLMs and the actual code that powers APEX applications.
Christian Rokitta opened the technical part of the conference with a session, focused on AI, as this is the hot topic for everyone. Of course, the main question is when would 26.1 be released - and while we wouldn't expect a concrete answer, timing went from SOON to REALLY SOON. And the fact that Mike Hichwa is posting about it so frequently in the last two weeks (something that he hasn't done for a long time) just confirms we are really close to that moment.
So based on the above, my guess is that we will see it before or during APEX Connect in May. And since this has been a major rewrite of every single component in APEX - after we go live with 26.1, next releases will get back to normal and we can expect two releases per year.
From Christian's sessions, I would highlight two or three main directions that APEX gets updated - AI features helping developers, AI features helping clients and non-AI features that are adding to the overall look and feel of APEX - both on the Builder side and the application frontend side.
APEX Apps built with AI are smaller, safer, and sustainable - not by generating code, but by defining intent.
apex export -api 100 -exptype apexlang -dir "./workdir/demo"
apex import -input workdir/demo/conference-app
Version control and CI/CD friendly format - no more environment/instance specific large numeric GUIDs, APEXLang files use fixed IDs for each component in the format @component_unique_name - consistent across environments - if your component has an ID @admin_page, it stays @admin_page in any other environment you import the app into - test, acceptance or prod.
APEXLang supports every single property that is available in the Builder
Blueprint abstraction layer, built on top of APEX
AI Agent Skills for generating Blueprints and APEXLang files
Natural language support for Interactive reports - we will get that support out of the box, as user queries in human language will be translated into Interactive report filters - which is great, because LLMs will not directly generate code. More about this feature you can find in this recent blog post.
Function Calling for LLMs - All of the major Al providers support a feature called Function Calling (or Tools Calling), allowing LLMs to request specific information through structured JSON functions. Each function has a description and LLMs decide which one to use, based on the particular prompt they have.
Such a feature was available using United Codes' open source tool UC AI. But it will be great to have support for such a good feature straight inside APEX.
Brand new Iris theme - with soft, modern colours, round borders and a lot of improvements
New Drawer actions - very happy to see this feature, which I recently needed. It allows drawers (pages or regions) to appear not only from left or right, but now from the top and bottom of the page too. If you don’t want to wait until then - follow my blog post on how to quickly do it in a previous version of APEX
New Flexbox Container region - allowing to use the Universal Theme utility classes (u-justify-content-, etc.) to define region behaviour in a declarative way.
New CSS utility classes - mainly about flexbox, but also some about overflow
Font APEX gets an upgrade - a set of new icons added (mainly around construction though), but also new modifiers
The brand new Blank page - believe it or not, it is a very nice option if you want to be in the role of a painter in front of a blank canvas. It removes everything - header, menus, footer - just a blank page that you or your AI Agent can fill up with content.
Chat region - if you have read my blog post from 4 years ago about creating a chat region on APEX - now it becomes a reality as a native component. Implementation is exactly the same. Based on the comments region, you can define which messages should be displayed on the left or right side of the chat region. You can display initials or an image in the chat bubble. It comes with some weird features, such as the one to use Theme colors - giving each bubble a different color ?!?
Action Template Partial - this one allows you to define multiple actions to a report row. It acts just like the ones available for Template components.
Tree view upgrade - you can finally see which tree node is currently selected. It gets coloured differently and is a nice visual touch.
Buttons can now have badges next to the text - similar to the navigation menu items, now buttons can display some additional information in the form of a small badge next to the text.
Metric Card component - very similar to the standard card. Just styled a little bit differently, to match the widely used metric card style. It’s now a standalone component.
Dimitri Gielis shared his vision of the future of the Oracle APEX developer. From writing code, and configuring an app manually in the Builder, to becoming a Designer, an Orchestrator and Validator. A validator to what AI Agents have generated. Based on the questions we asked, the business analysis and the thorough descriptions of the system we need. And guess what - the new programming language is probably just … English. Which you might also don’t even type, but dictate - no matter if using Dimitri’s and mine’s tool or some other - speech-to-text models has become so good that they produce flawless sentences out of our often imperfect dictation.
And this, in his opinion, is what will make the difference between the good “developer” and the bad one - the ability to understand the business, the needs and the requirements. The ability to do a good analysis and to ask the right questions. And finally - to be able to validate the output of AI Agents work.
Another opinion that I also share is that APEX is now positioned and should be marketed as Reliable, Predictable and Maintainable product. Exactly because it works with metadata. And the final code is never generated by AI. Boring? Maybe - but boring is underrated, boring means reliable. I was happy to find out Dimitri is using almost the same tools as I do. And it’s mandatory in my opinion for every developer to start using them (or any similar ones), because the pace at which technology is moving is staggering. And we might indeed get cooked. Take a look at his blog post and find out for yourself - The APEX Developer Reinvented.
Louis Moreaux did a great job at showcasing some tips and trick on how to make your APEX application feel like a native mobile app. From the simple and quick wins all the way to some more advanced, but really powerful ones.
He started off by showing a research about mobile devices reachable areas. And while it may be obvious that the top left corner of your phone screen is very hard to reach, the APEX hamburger navigation menu is just there, making its usage very hard. When opened the side menu also doesn’t looks very pretty, making the page squeeze and look terrible. So consider disabling it and switch to bottom tabs navigation instead - it’s positioned in an areas that is easy to reach and looks good on mobile - win-win situation.
Turning the app to a PWA is done by just switching a toggle ON, so a very easy one. Add screenshots and a description and your app can be installed on a device and have it just like any other native app. Another easy win for APEX mobile apps is using some native components like the Date picker, which can be customized to show just time, date, weeks or months - and it looks just like the same type of component in many other apps on your phone. A very nice topic that he touched on was disabling some browser artefacts that affect negatively the user experience while using a web application. Such can be:
Pinch to zoom
Selectable text
Focus outline
Pull to refresh feature
Long press context menu
At the same time web apps (including APEX) are missing some patterns typical for the native apps:
Swipe to reveal actions
Swipe able tabs
Floating action buttons
Action sheet (bottom drawer, see above)
Micro animations
Most of these are easily fixable with very little code and Louis has put them in the second category of his UI/UX improvements chart. Some require more effort - like custom CSS and JavaScript code. But the end result is totally worth it - an app that looks and feels a lot more better and just like a native one!
Velimir Ćorović showed us a really complex APEX project, that integrated with SAP, ADF , Oracle Service Bus, public portals, and mobile apps. The fiction ACME company from his presentation (although be sure - this is a real-life example) was using the APEX app for Document Management and Business Process Management. And we are talking about big numbers here - more than 5,000 users and millions of documents being uploads through it.
Going from fully manual process to a fully automated one, where paper is just a history and is only part of the archives - this is what APEX is capable of - truly suitable for enterprise-grade applications. Debunking all myths from the past that it is only a POC capable platform and not a product for the ambitious projects. Providing consistent and seamless UI and user experience, while being integrated with all your other enterprise apps.
Last but not least - it was my session about the journey I had, building a commercial app in Oracle APEX. And while I have been building internal or public apps for many years, this one was special for me for two reasons. First - it was an app that had to be commercial. Meaning it had to accept payments, sell a product and be able to trace what users have generated with it. Which makes things like auditing, traceability and administration - mandatory. On top of that I had to resolve some issues that came with the higher volume of usage that I had during my tests - switching from keeping BLOBs in the database to an OCI Object Storage. From keeping the original photos, to having a thumbnail version of it - all using third party JS libraries, integrated with the workflow.
The product itself is an app that generates studio grade corporate headshots. The idea is not new and was technically possible for the past few years. But with AI image generation models getting better - the methods allowing generating this type of image, preserving the person identity and facial characteristics, have become a lot better. And while it took a whole model retraining with loads of training images of a particular person in the past, we can now achieve very good results with just a single source photo.
And while cost is also a factor - generating a professional looking portrait from a single source image allows keeping price low. And unlike other similar products, this one does not require monthly subscription - you buy some credits and they never expire. I've spoken to many people about pricing. Some told me the'd willingly pay \(10-15-20 for such an image - I think that's unrealistic price to ask, but it's good to know someone would pay so much if they have the app available. Others said - \)4-$5 per image. Third ones said around $1 would be a fair price.
So that's what I went with - a corporate portrait, with a professional look, preserving person's identity and characteristics - at the price of a morning coffee. Sorry - twice as cheap as a morning coffee. Is it worth it - who knows? At least for me - it was a good learning resource and I will definitely use what I've learned in other projects - commercial and non-commercial.
Here is a LINK to the App in case you want to try it for yourself. Remember to use this coupon - AGENTS - and get a discount at checkout.
