Duncan Mein's Blog

Most client sites I have been on tend to love wizards that hold the users hand through often complex business process / workflows. As a general rule, if I have a 10 step wizard (I generally use 1 page per step) I like to ensure that all 10 pages have their cache cleared as the user enters the wizard to ensure no values from a previous attempt to complete the process are hanging around. This is typically done by enter a comma delimited string of all the page numbers you wish to clear the cache of upon branching from page to page. In an ideal world, what I wanted to do was take advantage of the fact that I had taken to time to put all 10 pages into a page group and clear the cache of ALL pages contained within. Furthermore, using this logic, pages can come and go from the page group without the need to worry about how this effect my clearing of session state. Pretty cool huh, but wait, "APEX only allows you to enter page numbers and not page group names into the clear cache text...

Now as anyone who knows me me will confirm, I have always been a long admirer of VMWare and their suite of excellent virtualisation products. I started with Workstation before switching to Fusion on OS X and finally made the jump to the way cool ESXi a few years back (I blogged about this here ). Recently however, I am finding less and less time to install guest linux OS, configuring it for use with an Oracle Database (or Application Server), making sure all the RPM's, kernel values are correct etc. Yes you can use the Oracle Validated Packages to help simplify this (see Tims comments below for how to obtain these) but what I really value these days is the simplest configuration for home / home office use that is pretty much turn on and play. After a quick trawl of the Virtual Appliances section of the VM Market Place, I was left wanting until I remembered that Oracle were now dabbling in the Virtual Machine space. After a quick dl of VirtualBox (their virtualisation offering)...

I have just read the latest Statement of Direction from Oracle ( download here ) and there are some comforting statements from Oracle about there long term commitment to Application Express. For those like me who have been using APEX since the early days, this is good news as it represents a very clear intent that Oracle are very serious about APEX as key development framework. Nice read! Cheers Oracle.