APEX Alpe Adria 2025

Sphinx participation in the APEX Alpe Adria Conference in Zagreb in April 2025

As part of my work for Sphinx, I had the opportunity to attend this year's APEX Alpe Adria Conference 2025. The event, held on April 11, 2025, in Zagreb, offered high-caliber insights into current and future developments related to Oracle APEX, particularly the new features of version 24.x. The conference featured exciting presentations, practical demos, and an open exchange with the community.

Highlights of APEX 24.x features

During the conference, numerous innovations and best practices were presented that are directly relevant to our current and planned projects. Particularly noteworthy are:

• Improved Interactive Grids: Advanced options for custom control of interactions (e.g., single favorite selection, automatic saving during UI actions).
• Declarative Dynamic Actions++: Many manually scripted functions can now be mapped declaratively – e.g., dependent selection fields, inline validation, and reactive layouts.
• REST Data Sources 2.0: Better performance and more extensive options for integrating external data sources – ideal for planned integrations, e.g., with internal services or external data platforms.
• Universal Theme 24: Even more responsive, with modern UI components, clearer structures, and better accessibility standards.
• Intelligent Assist Features: Initial approaches to AI-supported page design and code completion – still in development, but promising.

Use cases for our projects at Sphinx

The newly gained insights have already been incorporated into initial considerations for optimizing our APEX applications:

• The modernization of existing interactive grids is significantly simplified by the new features.
• The planned decoupling of Forms components can be implemented more quickly and with less maintenance thanks to improved REST integration and new UI components.
• The new Universal Theme facilitates responsive design – especially for mobile applications in the field.
• The AI functions offer long-term potential for reducing repetitive UI work.

Network & Community

In addition to the technical input, the event also provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with other APEX experts from across the Alpe-Adria region. Discussions on Oracle Forms migration strategies, the use of APEX in the healthcare and education sectors, and the creative use of low-code within regulated industries were particularly valuable.

Conclusion

Participating in APEX Alpe Adria 2025 was not only a personal gain, but also a source of inspiration for our current and future APEX projects. The features presented in APEX 24.x enable even more efficient, modern, and user-friendly development. Many of the solutions presented can be adapted directly or with minimal effort in our Sphinx applications.