Oracle APEX 26.1 Is Here! And Honestly, We're Pretty Excited

I'll be upfront: I don't usually get excited about software releases the way some people do. But APEX 26.1 is different. After spending time with it over the past few weeks, I can say with confidence that this one actually changes how we work. The United Codes team has been putting it through its paces, and I wanted to share our collective first impressions before we get too deep into the weeds on individual features.

Spoiler: APEXLang is a big deal.

APEXLang: The Feature Everyone Is Talking About

Ask anyone on our team what they're most excited about in 26.1, and you'll get the same answer: APEXLang.

APEXLang is a structured, AI-readable language for describing Oracle APEX applications. In practice, that means you can now give an AI agent meaningful, inspectable instructions for building and modifying APEX apps. And yes, it works.

Dimitri has been experimenting with it the most, and his take sums it up pretty well: "APEXLang allows me to focus on the fun part, and not the boring part. If I know I want a report with form for every table, I can just tell AI to do that — and it does that flawlessly." His goal? Build an entire app using just his voice. Two weeks in, he's doing it for smaller apps. The more complex builds still need some hands-on attention, but the direction is clear.

Philipp is approaching it from a coding-agent angle. His take is that AI has already accelerated backend and logic work to the point where the APEX front-end has become the relative bottleneck. "AI has accelerated dev so much that APEX is now the thing that could be slow and tedious. Like adding five simple backend admin tables with just some table and maybe some filter items." APEXLang is the answer to that.

Koen is particularly excited about what APEXLang means for our Forms migration projects. The idea is to take the analysis and redesign of an existing Forms application and feed that directly to the AI as input, generating a new APEX application from it. The extra piece he's focused on is ensuring the output aligns with United Codes' development standards, so everything we generate maintains the same quality and consistency our clients expect.

Bjorn, rounding out our team's first look at the release, landed on the same conclusion: APEXLang is the feature with the most potential to change how we approach development cycles going forward. Sometimes the signal is clearest when everyone independently arrives at the same answer.

It's worth being honest here too. Dimitri put it really well: "I sometimes get into a rabbit hole of AI chat where at some point I thought, I could have done it faster myself. But thinking this way is like a senior dev who always does it themselves and doesn't want to teach the junior." Getting the most out of APEXLang is a skill in itself. There's a learning curve, and anyone who tells you otherwise is skipping ahead. That said, the potential is real, and we are actively building that muscle as a team.

The Builder UI Refresh

Beyond APEXLang, the APEX Builder has a noticeable refresh in 26.1. The workspace search is genuinely useful if you're managing a lot of applications, and the richer diff views are something Dimitri flagged specifically. "The APEXLang view and diffs are best for me, because it allows me to see very fast what was changed or which settings were put on components." For teams working across multiple developers or dealing with frequent change, that visibility matters.

Koen noted that navigation feels easier overall, though he didn't notice sweeping changes to Page Designer specifically. Philipp was similarly measured: the refresh looks good, but the real value is APEXLang, not the coat of paint. Fair enough.

AI in Interactive Reports

Dimitri's pick for the single feature most likely to genuinely excite a client is AI in Interactive Reports. APEX users have always been able to filter and reshape data themselves, but layering AI into that interface opens the possibility of surfacing insights in a conversational way, without the developer in the loop. For end users, that's a meaningful shift in what self-service reporting can look like.

This also aligns closely with what we've been building with our UC AI framework. It's been great to watch Oracle move in a direction we've already been heading with our clients.

Community Contributions in This Release

APEX 26.1 includes over 90 community-submitted ideas, which is pretty fantastic. Philipp had one land directly in this release: the split button / multi-action button feature. "It was my first idea. Love it." And as Dimitri pointed out, it's also one less plug-in we need to maintain. Win-win.

This kind of feedback loop between Oracle and the APEX community is one of the things that makes working in this ecosystem genuinely enjoyable. Seeing the product shaped by the people who actually run production applications for real clients is worth celebrating.

A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Upgrade

One area that caught Koen's team off guard: APEX 26.1 moves to message-based translations and away from the translation repository. If you have existing applications using the translation repository, there's no automated migration path from Oracle yet. It requires manual work to move to the Text Message-Based approach, and it's worth factoring that into your upgrade planning. We're actively working through the best approach for our own clients and will share more as we figure it out.

So, Should You Be Excited?

Yes 😄. APEX 26.1 is a meaningful release. APEXlang alone makes it worth paying attention to, and the AI in Interactive Reports has real promise for the end-user experience. If you're in the Oracle APEX ecosystem, now is a great time to get hands-on with it.

We're happy to talk through what any of this could look like for your team or your upgrade path, so feel free to reach out.

- Jackie -