Why Oracle APEX

Oracle APEX has been designed from the very beginning to help developers build modern, beautiful, responsive applications without the need to become specialized experts.

The mission of Oracle APEX is to empower developers to easily build compelling apps with superior functionality, performance, and end user experience. In order to deliver on this mission, Oracle APEX aims to eliminate the enormous complexities of developing and deploying enterprise apps. Here are a few reasons why choosing Oracle APEX makes sense for your next development project.

  • Eliminating Complexity

    Oracle APEX eliminates the complexity of developing and deploying applications at all layers. The result is a low-code platform that is simpler, faster, lighter-weight, and lower-cost than the alternatives.

  • Simple Development

    Oracle APEX is easy to use and easy to learn. The Application Builder provides a rich, browser-based, intuitive interface which guides you through the creation of your applications. The powerful components of Oracle APEX enable you to add a high-level of functionality to your apps with limited coding. Many customers are productive in a week or less!

  • Powerful and Proven

    Oracle APEX can be used to build a wide variety of apps for any industry - from the simplest app that "webifies" a spreadsheet, to mission-critical apps which are used daily by tens of thousands of users. The elegant architecture of Oracle APEX has been used to power thousands of applications around the globe for years.

  • Secure

    Oracle APEX is designed to build web apps which are highly secure out of the box. In a world of ever-changing web standards, evolving security standards, and resourceful hackers, the focus on security means that your applications stay protected and remain state-of-the-art.

  • Portable

    You can run Oracle APEX everywhere - on the Oracle Cloud, on-premises, or anywhere else there is an Oracle Database. And you can deploy your Oracle APEX applications across any environment with ease.

Eliminating Complexity

Low-code application development with Oracle APEX is a whole lot more than simply reducing the amount of code necessary to build incredible applications. Oracle APEX is unique in that it eliminates complexity at all layers.

  • APEX eliminates mapping between relational and application objects

  • APEX eliminates remote procedure call complexity

  • APEX eliminates proliferation of database connections

  • APEX eliminates middle-tier application logic

  • APEX eliminates complexity of high availability and disaster recovery

While these complexities are often common when developing applications with other platforms, Oracle APEX eliminates the need for this altogether. Simply put, there is no other platform like it.

Simpler and Faster Development

Oracle APEX is data-driven and development typically begins with a spreadsheet or data model. Applications are developed in a low-code browser-based environment where 98% of hand coding can be eliminated.

Oracle APEX works directly against data in database tables. Most middle-tier apps must define application data structures to hold, convert, interact and maintain data flow between the app to the database. This is a vastly underestimated source of complexity that Oracle APEX completely eliminates.

In addition, APEX eliminates the need and complexity of remote APIs for a large majority of use cases. It is not architected as distributed components, and remote calls to the database are eliminated.

Light-weight and Lower-cost

Having an application run in the database seems heavyweight and expensive, but counterintuitively it is lighter-weight and lower-cost.

When compared to middle-tier applications, running applications on Oracle APEX consumes far fewer resources. Typically, middle-tiers deploy three containers per microservice to achieve High Availability, with each container requiring considerable memory and compute. These applications often make dozens to hundreds of calls to access data in the database to render a single screen. These SQL calls from middle-tier to database are generally 10x slower than when performed directly within the database.

Oracle APEX is both stateless and serverless and the runtime application state is stored in tables so connections can be re-used across users. This results in far fewer connections and each connection is far lighter in weight. In addition, Autoscale on Autonomous Database eliminates the need to manage scaling in middle-tiers. The result is that Oracle APEX apps require less database resources and 100x less mid-tier hardware resources when compared to middle-tier applications.

Easy Deployment

With Oracle APEX, deploying both the app and the data in the database is dramatically simpler when compared to middle-tier applications.

  • Eliminates complexity of middle-tiers

    Everything is in the database. There is no need to design, develop, or manage complex middle tiers.

  • Eliminates complexity of HA and DR

    There is no state in the middle tier, and failover automatically happens within the database

  • Eliminates complexity of database management

    With Oracle Autonomous Database, there is no need for DBA or DevOps to manage your database

Why should I use Oracle APEX?

Developers

  • Are you an existing Oracle Database customer?

    Then you have everything you need to start building useful, scalable apps now using Oracle APEX. If you know even a little bit of SQL, you can become wonderfully productive and start producing apps that you would have thought required a full-stack developer.

  • Are you an Oracle Forms customer?

    With your knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL, you have everything you need to create modern Web applications. Oracle Forms customers readily adapt to the Oracle APEX app dev experience, and as a bonus, you can easily reuse all of your existing SQL and PL/SQL!

  • Do you work in a line of business? Are you constantly asked to produce solutions, but are given tools which are difficult to learn and use?

    Consider Oracle APEX. It's used for business applications by thousands of customers worldwide, it's easy to get started, and you have a feature-rich application development environment to build nearly any application you require.

  • Are you a professional full-stack developer?

    Often you will spend most of your time developing and maintaining the “plumbing" required for a typical Web application. The platform of Oracle APEX manages all of the mundane aspects of Web app dev, like security, session state management, concurrency, data persistence, responsive design, and more. Spend more time focusing on your business requirements and less time writing the necessary infrastructure.

  • Are you an Oracle DBA?

    Then you have all the skills you need to begin creating elegant and powerful Web apps. As well, understanding Oracle Database like you do, you're able to easily understand and appreciate the simple but reliable architecture of Oracle APEX. Add your own SQL and let Oracle APEX take care of the rest! DBAs have written amazing applications - from building visualizations against the Enterprise Manager repository to creating reports and a dashboard against RMAN backups - it's all possible by you, with Oracle APEX.

Students

With Oracle APEX, you can easily build web applications with essentially no knowledge of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Oracle APEX is tightly integrated with Oracle Database and manages all of the processing associated with data manipulation in a database. If you have a basic understanding of SQL, you can build beautiful, responsive web applications very quickly. For data analysis, Oracle APEX is excellent, as it supports the full SQL language, which is the industry standard for data manipulation and aggregation. If you are familiar with HTML, CSS or JavaScript, you can also exploit your talents in Oracle APEX, to create highly customized UI's.

Oracle APEX is taught at numerous universities and colleges throughout the world, and demand for employees with Oracle APEX experience is at an all time high and continues to grow. Plus, you can get started for free right now.

Business Users

Are you tired of using spreadsheets as a multi-user database? For multi-user purposes, they can be insecure, inefficient and inaccurate (who has the latest email attachment?). Oracle APEX has something for you. In minutes, you can easily create beautiful, responsive applications from the data in a spreadsheet. Choose your favorite enterprise authentication method or use Social authentication and away you go!

Oracle APEX includes powerful self-service reporting features. You can easily add custom filters, sort, aggregate, pivot and chart your data, and even create reports which get emailed to you on a periodic basis.

Oracle APEX includes a number of productivity applications which are free and supported - no knowledge of anything is required, not even of Oracle APEX! It's as simple as installing an app on your smartphone. Project tracking, surveys, group calendar and more!

Architects and CIOs

Do you have application needs which aren't being met? Are your information assets scattered throughout your organization, using tools that you can't support or aren't even aware of? Using Oracle APEX, you can provide an industrial strength "application development service" which can be used to consolidate all of these rogue applications throughout your enterprise. It's already included with your Oracle database, so there is no additional cost. You can consolidate these applications on the enterprise-ready Oracle database. The information assets can be audited, secured, monitored and shared.

Using Oracle APEX, you can expand the pool of people who are capable of building applications for the department and the enterprise. Oracle APEX has a much lower barrier to entry for creating responsive and powerful business applications.

In an enterprise setting, Oracle APEX provides a scalable and proven platform for applications which can scale across the enterprise. Oracle APEX includes native functionality to integrate with REST and SOAP Services in your organization and in the cloud. Oracle APEX also provides a graphical UI to create and host secure REST services against data and business logic in the database.

Start solving the problems in your organization which are going unsolved today!