The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), PINNACLE, and VISTA Technology Services are among the organizations taking advantage of Oracle Application Express to rapidly prototype and develop Web applications utilizing data from their Oracle Databases.

Penn State Tracks PC Inventory with Oracle Application Express
One institution with extensive experience with Oracle Application Express is Penn State. Founded in 1855, Penn State is a multi-campus public research university that improves the lives of the people of Pennsylvania, the nation, and the world through integrated, high-quality programs in teaching, research, and service. Penn State's Information Technology Services relies on Oracle Application Express for rapid application development and prototyping. The IT team uses an inventory tracking system developed with Oracle Application Express to keep track of over 2,000 computers along with all of the components attached to each particular workstation.

"With Oracle Application Express Release 3.1, I look forward to adding interactive region reports for my end-users," said Justin Patterson, Programmer Analyst, Information Technology Services, Penn State. "The end-users are thrilled that the latest release of Oracle Application Express includes features they've requested but that we had yet to add to the application ourselves. With Oracle Application Express, the development cycle is reduced by allowing developers to focus on writing queries or back-end logic rather than worrying about how to develop a slick interface, authorization logic, or updateable regions -- all of which Oracle addresses."

PINNACLE Builds Communications Application Suite with Oracle Application Express
PINNACLE, a division of PAETEC (http://www.paetec.com), offers a suite of Enterprise Communications Management tools designed to streamline an enterprise's operations, ensuring visibility, accountability, productivity, and compatibility. PINNACLE (http://www.pinnsoft.com) relies on Oracle Application Express to build its suite of applications.

"Oracle Application Express Release 3.1 substantiates our business decision to move to a thick database Web architecture based on Oracle," said Larry Foster, vice president and General Manager for the PINNACLE Communication Management Suite. "The new interactive reporting features in this latest release will allow our customers to conduct powerful spreadsheet-caliber analytics directly from their Web browser – which will revolutionize our TEM (Telecommunications Expense Management) application."

VISTA Technology Services Rapidly Refreshes Key Property Planning Application
VISTA Technology Services, based in Herndon, Va., provides high-end consulting services and systems development for the U.S. Department of Defense related to real property lifecycle management. VISTA recently re-architected the U.S. Army's real property planning system supporting thousands of users worldwide. After evaluating several different technologies, VISTA selected Oracle Application Express based on capabilities consisting of solid user interface code, complete support for all of Oracle's performance capabilities, security, scalability, and hooks into maintainable table-driven business logic. The application is a critical component of the Army's mission in managing its buildings, utilities and land resources and is used daily to support planning, budgetary and spending decisions involving a real property portfolio of over 150,000 buildings with a replacement value of $263 billion.

"VISTA re-engineered the application in record time," said Bharat Pappu, VISTA's Lead Solutions Architect. "A team of developers with no previous experience in Oracle Application Express is developing a complete solution in a matter of months. What the Army thought would take years and millions of dollars is being delivered by VISTA in a much shorter amount of time and at far greater value. We are particularly impressed with the speed with which an interface could be assembled with Oracle Application Express, its integration of AJAX, dynamic HTML and third-party tools, and its rapid response ability to support functional design changes. And because the solution is based on Oracle, the initial capability was immediately accepted by the government's information assurance team for deployment."

Latest Release Delivers New Reporting, Testing and Layout, Features
Oracle today also announced the general availability of Oracle Application Express Release 3.1. New capabilities and enhancements available in Oracle Application Express Release 3.1 include:

* Interactive Reporting Region - innovative technology enables end users to customize reports resulting in reduced development time and effort while enhancing application functionality;

* Declarative BLOB Support - enables files to be declaratively uploaded in forms and downloaded or displayed using reports. BLOB (binary large object) display and download can also be authored using PL/SQL; and,

* Improved Printing Support - Report Queries now support multiple reports in a single document and allow the combination of reports and charts based on multiple queries. The output format can be set dynamically at runtime and documents can either be downloaded to the client or shown within the browser window.

The latest release of Oracle Application Express also supports simple and easy-to-use pre-built applications available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). These free, fully functional Oracle Application Express applications can be easily customized, deployed and shared within an organization allowing developers to jumpstart simple Web application development efforts. These applications are available at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/packaged_apps/packaged_apps.html.

"We approach each release of Oracle Application Express with an eye on how we can further help our customers to get the most out of data in their Oracle Databases," said Mike Hichwa, vice president of Software Development, Oracle. "This release features innovative dynamic reporting that brings industry leading end user capabilities to applications developed with Oracle Application Express."

Pricing and Availability
Oracle Application Express Release 3.1 is generally available and is downloadable from the OTN at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/download.html.

The tool is integrated with all editions of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database Release 2 at no additional cost. For more information on Oracle Application Express, go to: http://otn.oracle.com/apex.

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