Oracle Application Express 4.2 was officially released today and is available for download from the Oracle Technology Network.

When developing applications which make a lot of use of Javascript, it can be very useful to use the console.log() function to output debug to Firefox’s Firebug console or to Chrome’s Javascript console.

However, such calls will cause errors when run inside IE as it does not by default have a console object (depending on the version of IE you are running and what add-ons you have installed). These errors may prevent other aspects of your Javascript from running, essentially breaking you application.

Last Monday at 7:30 AM PST, 17 brave souls joined me in the First Annual Oracle OpenWorld Swim in the Bay, a refreshing swim in San Francisco waters.

To be precise, it was at the Aquatic Part near the Dolphin Swim & Boat Club. OK, here's the map to make it easier.

And here's a pretty panoramic:

At Oracle Open World 2012, Scott Spendolini and I did a presentation entitled “Developing Commercial APEX Applications”. One of the topics that seemed to get a lot of attention and a number of questions was automating our build process using ANT. Several people requested a copy of the ANT script, so instead of sending it out individually, I’ve decided to include it here and walk though it.