Decades ago, Oracle supported the creation of interactive applications for client-server environments with its development tools SQL*Plus, SQL*Forms, and SQL*Report. Third-party products such as Toad and PL/SQL Developer supported back-end development, now together with Oracle SQL Developer. Realizing the increasing demand for web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Oracle introduced HTML DB in 2004. Improving and renaming this product to Oracle Application Express (APEX), it has evolved and spread quickly; in 2015, the fifth of its main releases was launched. This second, refreshed, and extended edition of the popular book for advanced developers treats this release thoroughly in 15 chapters. The authors of the book, introduced in the beginning together with the technical reviewers, are devoted, experienced experts in Oracle DB-related tool and application development. They give their conceptual advice and practical knowledge on the purpose and use of each major APEX facility in a fruitful way. They discuss several concepts deeply: the proposed ways to use APEX; its inconveniences; possible workarounds; the circumstances in which a component or pluggable external tool is to be applied; and how. This book is a valuable add-on to the official APEX documentation.

APEX is a very rich framework, meeting the needs of at least small development teams (having about five members) for rapid prototyping and development of robust enterprise applications. Chapter 5 of the book describes the team development capabilities. Beside its many built-in facilities, APEX is extensible with successful third-party tools through plugins. It supports the whole life cycle of the application: the development, as well as test, acceptance, and production environments. Chapter 9 of the book treats this theme.

APEX is provided with all of the Oracle DB engines freely. Beyond the many-purpose framework, it contains a great number of its own tools, as well as popular third-party ones. Some of the latter tools are somehow limited, or not the latest product versions of their vendors, as the product lines evolve quickly and simultaneously. If some of these facilities of APEX are not sophisticated enough, then that component can be replaced technically easily by the complete and up-to-date variant of the external tool. If this change among versions of a product would not help (for instance more advanced reporting or analytic capabilities are needed), then (by greater efforts) a different, more suitable tool should be integrated into the system. Beside many points in the book, where some of the built-in external tools are treated, chapter 10 is devoted to the theme how to create new plugins for APEX.

Dedicated projects, requirements, configuration management systems, revision control, documentation systems, and testing environments can be integrated with third-party apps to make APEX suitable for large development teams.

The book describes a lot of configurable extensions already integrated/plugged into APEX, and explains how the extension is attached, how can it be changed for a more complete or fresh release and for what purpose, how it can be applied, and the advantages and the drawbacks. The themes are equipped with examples, some of them with downloadable code, too.

A dozen chapters describe the rich set of development facilities for displaying data and provide interaction on front-end equipment. The possibilities range from tabular forms (chapter 4) through the new HTML Page Designer (using component trees, grid layout, code editor with syntax highlighting, and validation for PL/SQL, described in chapter 1) for creating pages with heterogeneous content, including charts (using HTML 5 or Flash technology, chapter 3), sophisticated maps (chapter 12), or reports (chapter 14). APEX 5 helps structure the pages by themes and templates (chapter 13).

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS 3) can be used in APEX 5, too. It may provide web server access or create and access the REST services in the database. Chapter 2 sketches the production deployment options (standalone or embedded into a web server) and details ORDS itself.

Browser-independent JQuery, JavaScript and CSS, AJAX calls, and callback processes are supported; DOM, XML, and JSON are explored in APEX 5 (chapter 11, for example). Dynamic actions (triggered by/based on browser events) can be programmed manually in JavaScript, or defined declaratively in APEX. Chapter 8 presents these alternatives and discusses the latter one.

An important aspect of web-based applications is how to handle states across a user session. APEX supports this by private and public collections based on managed DB tables, as described and demonstrated in chapter 15.

For the sake of multilanguage and multicultural applications, chapter 6 shows how to treat globalization and localization during development with APEX.

The theme about security is touched only in this book with a special topic: how to secure plugins (in chapter 10). To treat this important theme deeply, I propose an expert companion to this book [1], including authentication/authorization schemes for users of the developed application, as well.

The chapters of the book are detailed, well structured, and full of arguments and good examples. Beyond basic notions, the advanced ones are well explained. To ease the overview of this heavy book for the reader, the contents of the book have two layers: an enumeration of the chapter titles and a detailed table of contents. The index is a well-edited cross-reference among chapters.

I recommend this book to advanced Oracle developers to both intensify their knowledge about their favorite APEX facilities and extend it to the valuable ones they have not applied yet. (For less experienced developers, I suggest beginning with an introductory work [2].)