JApex is a set of java extensions for Oracle Apex. currently it contains two modules, Blober and RESTful JasperReports. The following sections introduce you to JApex and the motivations behind it. still if you feel like getting straight into the steps involved in downloading , Installing, or configuring Blob Support or JasperReports please help yourself.
Please send me a feedback email with your experience with JAPEX. Also bear in mind that I'm merely kick-starting the project and I'm working on getting the ball rolling, once all project aspects complete, I will definitely have a dedicated round of polishing and enhancing its edges so as it's usable by the general public of APEX users.
Current version is marked as 0.8-ALPHA however this exact version is used successfully in production in some critical applications I'm developing/supporting , also, it's battle tested in terms of reliability, performance and robustness.
I'm already working on several enhancements, but I wished to make a version of JAPEX available ASAP, so as to gather feedback and steer future effort in the right direction.
The project is open source and while writing it, I could think of tens of possible enhancements and extensions. however, again, I will let the community decide.
Like many software development projects especially in the business area, we; develpers; find ourselves repeating certain tasks over and over. examples of tasks JApex targets include Declarative Blob Handling, generic reporting amongst other similar tasks.
JApex aims to provide a drop in solution to such recurrent requirements. When you find yourself trying to save the time rewriting that code that simply loads an image from a database, or display a stored pdf to the end user. Similarly when you need a mature RESTful generic report integration component. that is ready to go and serve reports to clients as soon as you configure it with (almost) zero coding on your side.
Such additions deliver instant value to almost any APEX project. They were born out of real requirements in real applications and I believe they will prove valuable to you as much as they are to me.
JApex is based on JAVA and is built primarily to compliment the mentioned functions in Oracle APEX (Application Express). in my humble opinion APEX is a great product that goes a huge distance in meta-data driven programming. and if you haven't seen it or used it yet. and you're like me building Data-centric Applications for your every day job; APEX is nothing short of a life saver.
Well, Yes and no. as much as it's built to compliment few extra features often required by applications I built that use APEX, it is still database agnostic.
Nothing is Tied to Oracle Database in specific. if you've done your fair share of JDBC programming against several database, it's quite noticeable oracle requires special handling especially when it comes to Blobs , still the code written in JApEx cuts no corners to support the standard Blob handling in every major DBMS. testing and verification is underway to ensure its compatibility with other major Databases like DB2, MySql, PostgreSql, MSSql etc.
JApex currently functions in to distinctive areas. generic blob handling and, high quality RESTful reporting.
Blobs (Binary Large Objects) are becoming increasingly common in all scales of databases. from simple POS's to store product images in the database, to HR applications storing employee photos, to document storage and retrieval. the list just goes on and on.
Blobs, regardless of their contents, share common requirements in most modern web applications. such as:
What is not readily visible until you have your fair share of applications, is that despite what a particular Blob represents, all handling of all blobs can be generalized as
Also, several interface methods are commonly required, such as:
Of course there are numerous work-arounds to have the database instance does that for you without ever needing JAPEX. several approaches are documented. however, in my experience, such task is better suited for Java based component. if for no better reason may be you can consider to offload your database engine, allow for blob storage in a secondary database. share the logic and the experience in providing such features at relatively no cost, both development and runtime.
APEX uses the term "reports" quite confusingly, APEX used the term reports for any tabular listing of resultset data, while APEX in consistent in this regards with support for both simple tables and a highly customizable interactive tables, it doesn't fulfill what we usually refer to as Reports in common business applications.
Think of cross-tabs, sub reports, background images and advanced formatting, multipage printouts on media with various form factors, not to mention advanced exporting to high quality sharable documents.
In JApex sense, reports are read only, dynamic, high precision, print oriented artifacts. Once your application users have one of these, it's quite difficult to convince them to settle for something simplistic as simple HTML with tables.
As a Java developer, I'm constantly blessed with an amazing library and/or its toolset for generation of reports in JAPEX sense. this library is JasperReports. JasperReports not only competes with high end commerical reporting tools, IMHO it can easily be considered to exceed them in terms of functionality robustness, performance and overall quality. not to mention all this is absolutely free and open source.
So for the RESTful part, simply it means that every thing you need to run an arbitrary report ( that is available to JApEx Of course) can be passed in a simple URL. That's right, you select which report, pass it all its parameters and even specify which format you want it to be produced in along with an optional file name is specified by a simple URL.
YES, PDF is supported out of the box, YES printable XLS also is, as part of our coming features, we will be simply surfacing more and more output formats as time permits. We say surface as the grunt work of actual production of target formats is totally provided by JasperReports.
All the credit for the quality of reports to JasperReports team. JAPEX RESTful reports simply surface that in simple URLs.
JAPEX merely adds a couple of features here and there, APEX listener is production quality replacement for mod_plsql. I would like to think of JAPEX as a component that aims to make your life easier, by off loading all the effort of blob handling and high quality printing to JAPEX you can concentrate on what matters most; that is business functions to add to your applications.
Also, JAPEX and APEX listener are neighbors. if you choose to use Apex listener, it's quite logical that you would be hosting JAPEX onto the same application server such as tomcat, glassfish and the likes. With that in mind, it's important to note that both projects; Listener and JAPEX, have nothing in common and share nothing between their configurations and thus you can use either, at any point in time in your project without ever needing the other.