Chapter 3. APEX Basic Concepts

Anyone can open a cookbook, follow the recipes, and produce a decent meal. But only those who know their way around the kitchen can produce a great meal, and can do even better by improving the current recipe, or even inventing a new one. So, before getting to the APEX recipes, let's try to learn a bit more about the APEX kitchen.

Knowledge and understanding can be very powerful. If you become familiar with the APEX environment, and understand the APEX concepts and capabilities, you'll be able to design and develop better, faster, and more optimal applications utilizing advanced technologies to give your users better and improved UI experiences right from the start.

In the following sections we'll discuss some of the major APEX concepts and learn how they can help us in our developmental efforts. These concepts will include:

• Session state

• Substitution strings

• Shortcuts

• Themes and templates

• The f?p URL notation

• APEX multi-lingual support

Later in the book, when we discuss...