What you need for this book

At the absolute minimum, this book requires basic skills in Oracle Application Express, access to an Oracle Application Express development environment through a web browser, and the Ext JS library.

Oracle Application Express and Ext JS library are both directly accessible on the Internet:

Productivity wise, a better approach is to set yourself up properly with a local environment. Typically this will be a development database and web server, set up by your company's database administrators, but could just as easily be Oracle Database Express Edition (XE), a free edition of the database running on your computer.

Running a local web server on your computer will greatly assist with JavaScript development, saving time by editing the file directly on the web server, rather than the save-deploy-test cycle. It also reduces friction in a team environment, when that little change you make breaks every page in the application. You can happily work in isolation until you are ready to deploy to a wider audience.

Having good editing and debugging tools makes any developer more productive. Long gone are the days where Oracle database development was done using SQL*Plus and Notepad (or vi). Most developers will already have their favorite editor, either one of the excellent free tools SQL Developer or JDeveloper provided by Oracle, or an equivalent commercial product.

Similarly, you can do web development using any plain text editor to edit your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A more powerful open source environment is Aptana Studio.

Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It provides JavaScript code completion for all the popular JavaScript libraries including Ext JS, and even provides code completion for your own JavaScript libraries.

Mozilla Firefox and Firebug are an absolute must have for working on your live application. Firebug allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Many of the examples in this book depend entirely on Firebug, either issuing commands from the console, inspecting HTML, and CSS, or inspecting and debugging AJAX requests from the browser to the server.

You'll also need other tools such as image editors, version control, and FTP tools, but they are less essential at the beginning.