It's been a busy couple of months. I'm currently building a couple of websites in the Amazon cloud, using APEX of course!

I have to admit that I'm a massive fan of the Amazon cloud, the service is amazing and the cost of running your environments in it is extremely cost effective, especially storage. And since the release of 11gR2 in the cloud, which has it's root device booting off the Elastic Block Store (EBS), it's much much much simpler to use!

Unfortunately this means that the jqGrid integration won't be provided for download until they're completed as I'd like to make it available on the company website. In the meantime, I'd suggest heading over to Morten Braten's blog as he has an alternative integration solution for jqGrid and APEX.

Here's a sneak preview of the company website currently under development...



Most of the content is stored in backend tables and I've converted the layout into a number of different page/region/report templates and AJAX pagination is supported. This means that I can create a number of forms/reports to manage the content without having to access the database or edit the application. I've cheated a little by purchasing a template from template monster but they're great value for money and it's pretty straight forward to merge them into APEX. The only time consuming part is coming up with/changing the content. Modifying the images and flash banner is pretty straight forward if you have a little Photoshop and flash experience.

If you weren't aware, it's quite easy to pass parameters to the flash file (<param name="movie" value="flash/af_menu.swf?button=&APP_PAGE_ID." />) it's the same as the URL syntax. This can then enable your banner buttons to behave like APEX tabs using a little actionscript. Creating a custom RSS feed using PLSQL is simple too, have a look at this post from Tyler Muth for more details...

Hopefully it will be a good showcase that an APEX application or website can look any way you want it to!

I'll be offering an APEX website creation service once the company website goes live. I can even host it for you in the Amazon cloud as an added bonus.

As for the jqGrid integration when it finally arrives, the good news is that I'm supporting inline adding and colModel options which can be defined in the column "comments" section. This is extremely useful for enabling validations and masks using the available jQuery plugins, just to name a few.