Oracle APEX: The Ideal Solution for Small and Medium Business Development
Vahidin Kerimi, The Advantages of Using Oracle APEX for Developing Business Applications for Small and Medium Businesses
Oracle APEX (Application Express) is a powerful tool for developing business applications based on Oracle databases. This low-code platform is perfectly suited for small and medium-sized businesses, providing a range of significant benefits:
• Ease of Use and Rapid Development: APEX offers a declarative approach to development, allowing the creation of applications without the need for deep programming. This is especially valuable for companies with limited IT resources.
• Efficiency and Performance: Studies show that development in APEX is significantly faster compared to traditional platforms such as Node.js and React.js, while requiring much less code.
• Universality and Scalability: APEX is suitable for both small and large applications, ensuring a high level of security and ease of integration with existing systems and databases.
• Integration with Existing Systems and Databases: APEX easily integrates with Oracle Database and external APIs, simplifying the application development and support process.
• Low Implementation and Support Costs: Since APEX is part of the Oracle Database, there are no additional expenses for licenses or support.
• Broad Support and Ecosystem: Oracle provides regular updates and active support for APEX, making it a reliable choice for business.
Oracle APEX is ideal for optimizing business processes and enhancing the operational efficiency of companies. The combination of ease of use, high performance, and scalability makes APEX an attractive solution for various industries and application development tasks.
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Transcript:
(00:00) hello everyone yes of course I can start uh but if you want we can make uh if uh attendees or maybe they wanton take a cover we can do a short break for me same I can start immediately whatever you want no no let's let's start let's start okay uh thank you for inviting me uh thank you for your time being on this weinar I first I want to apologize not being able to speak in local language I'm ven shimi I want also to thank MUK group for organizing this webinar and giving us opportunity to address to our
(00:41) clients uh I'm part of uh uh Oracle Romania um um I got some uh message on my screen do you speak Russian I I understand something but I I cannot speak actually uh so I'm part of Oracle Romania I'm part of solution Engineers team I'm responsible for covering uh uh adriatics region from Romania and actually uh recently I am engaged also in supporting our sales team in mova because as probably you know know my ex colleague ctin moves moved to other position and I'm temporary how to say replacing him
(01:39) with the movian market uh so today we are going to talk talk about Oracle aex my topics and uh just to start Shing my screen do you see my screen now and my topic is uh how you can use appex for developing business application for small and business for small and medium businesses uh what is Apex first of all let's uh discuss about a short definition appex is called a low code development platform which means uh we can produce application we can generate application with no code or just a few lines of code
(02:32) and uh this platform enables us to to build scalable secure uh applications uh at any scale any size let's let's first start with a with a question what why we think that Apex is uh is recommended for small and medium business why we are recommending it for small and medium business because first of all it's uh ideal platform for wide range of developers and we know that small and medium business cannot afford a big it team big it developers team to produce and to to to write code to generate application so on so uh this
(03:27) platform is ideal for any developer for any person and uh expert that has a bit of SQL uh knowledge and they can produce a nice uh functional application with what whatever Lang uh skills and knowledge of SQL they have uh we say that this is uh platform that can be used by so-called citizen Developers citiz and develop means that people with with no or just few few um just sum of knowledge of it knowledge and they can this uh kind of Citizen developer they can develop spreadsheet uh application which can replace spreadsheets Excel
(04:20) spreadsheets Google Sheets and so on they can uh develop application to to support back back office application they can uh develop opportunistic uh application Case by case uh also uh Apex is is a good platform it's a recommended platform for line of business developers that means people who know uh business who know every characteristic of BR and they can uh combine their business knowledge with their uh technical skills to to generate application but nonetheless Apex can also be used and can can be leveraged by
(05:03) professional developers that means that we can build a very uh demanding big application from professionals and by that but by data scientists that mean people who are really uh knowledgeable who are skilled on using data uh and to support our our recommendation why Apex is uh recommended tool for uh small and medium businesses I found one study which has been uh uh published by PK solution it's third party is not Oracle company it's not uh comp even company link with Oracle and they compared the uh classical development in in node GS and
(05:55) react GS uh uh classical development uh of one application with Apex so uh they took two measurements they they they measured development time and lines of code that they are using for same application in order to uh to generate final solution for the clan and from that study it was uh the findings of that study it was that uh application developed in Apex was 38 times faster than in node and react GS and the the code needed to be written to be generated it was 20 times less so this is I would say uh showing us
(06:45) why Apex is a recommended plat platform for for companies and for businesses who cannot afford uh large uh technical team large development team for generating and uh uh producing applications what is Oracle appex from the business point of view it's this database Centric web application development fra framework because we develop desktop and mobile web apps so with the same platform we can uh develop application which can be used by uh by desktop or PCS or Mac users and uh uh in same time this application can be
(07:34) run and can be executed by mobile web apps so we we can use it Apex application from Smart devices that's uh Apex is used to visualize and maintain database data because of that we are saying is database Centric is data driven platform because we visualize we show to users how Graphics how the data are looking and we can use it as a platform also to update to delete to insert uh data in into our database and so on and as a platform it leverages SQL skills because it's database driven so every user that knows
(08:14) bit of SQL uh knowledge has uh ability to use and to develop application in Apex what are the characteristics of Apex first of all it's web uh development platform is web based we don't need to install any client on on the personal machine on the machine where uh the user is developing or accessing the application uh uh Apex application application definitions that means all code all data related to application are stored in the database as metadata so they are stored in tables in in columns as a metadata
(09:00) that means it is declarative don't we we don't generate any code outside of database actually we can do it but it's not necessary it's not mandatory to store any code we can link application with uh let's say CSS configuration files HTML files and so on but uh uh in any case we can make it all uh code stored in inside the database uh page generation is efficient with one request and one response so because the data are stored in the database client is sending a request to to show data as
(09:43) HTML file and it will get one response from the database because everything is stored in in database as metadata uh Apex is used to uh to produce and develop rapid applications so we can develop and we can customize and deliver faster and uh it it includes lot of buil-in controls so we don't need the let's say to take care of security authentication because they are built-in functions and we can use them in uh in in application um or session management and so some some other uh application issues that we we might need during the user
(10:43) interface is for any device it's modern so so it is more uh intuitive it's accessible user interface for any device uh from uh personal computers uh smart device and so on uh this is one another reason why we are recommending uh Oracle Apex for small and medium business because it's no cost feature of Oracle database it's not separate platform it's not separate application or uh so it's considered from Oracle as a uh feature of Oracle database so every user that has any version any addition of database can
(11:33) leverage from having Apex platform installing configuring using developing uh running any application on Oracle Apex it is fully supported feature what that mean that mean that every user that in some way has a uh legal support from Oracle he they can leverage free support for Apex also on on that uh on that condition that they they are using support for Oracle database uh you can run any number of applications there is no limitation it can be used by any number of developers and and users there are no limitation on
(12:17) usage of Apex from uh as a platform there is specialized Oracle support team for Apex if you have if you are using if you are running Apex on your en and you have issue you can raise uh technical support uh request on on the support Oracle support to to to solve that issue it runs on all versions I I mentioned here 20c ATC but also on previous version it can be run but depending on on what version of Apex and what version of database there is a matrix of compliance and it can run on all edition whatever X Express Edition
(13:02) previous ex Express Edition currently 23c free edition Standard Edition on autonomous database on cloud and and so on so it is uh widely available widely you can use it wherever you want and wherever you need it it is easy to install on premises so uh you can download it from uh usually it comes by default with Oracle database installation but if you want to and every installation has its own version of Oracle Oracle appex you need to configure it you need to uh run some scripts in order to enable uh Apex instance but uh and you can
(13:48) also upgrade it to newer version of Apex that's uh for example if you're using 18c database 18c or 19c you can run Apex 23c on 19 database 19c but you need to download it separately as a installation file and you can use it on 19c database Apex architecture so it is very simple architecture because we said previously it is internet based so uh to access platform to develop application to run application uh all you need to is uh any browser Chrome Firefox Edge whatever browser you you are using you can
(14:38) access uh platform you can access uh Apex instance as a middleware it is using Oracle res data or or DS Oracle res data services which can run as a standalone instance ORS can run as a standalone e instance using uh Eclipse Jetty application or you can run it on web logic as a more robust as more I'll say Enterprise solution or if you have small application you can run it also on Apache Tom cut AS application but keep in mind that you have uh those option to to run Apex AS stand alone on web logic or on aach
(15:25) to uh and uh uh uh the source of the data is Oracle database as we said in previous slides everything is stored in Oracle database uh it can be stored in plugable or S container or in previous version it can be run also on non plug on non container databases what is on Oracle database what is stor first of all is data schemes so or Apex will create this schema for storing those metad data we were talking about previously it is Apex engine that is running and in background as a as a service as a uh as application to to to perform all
(16:13) this processes needed for user and for uh platform itself and it is uh using SQL and psql procedures to run code to access database to to perform any action on uh on the database and uh because uh application stored as metadata we have uh near zero latency database uh data access because it's it is stored in in database itself what can be data sources of Apex so as we said from the architecture architecture point of view we have browser we have or data services which can connect to database and database can
(17:03) be local data source so if you have server or in your PC have Oracle database installed you it can be local data source but also from uh Apex instance you can uh access external apis web services through rest or soap web services and you can also access external database through database links so if you have create database link you can access uh external database through those links uh the new feature that is coming with the new version of uh Apex is rest enabled SQL this is a new feature which comes from uh Apex
(17:47) 17.4 uh that that means that you you can run SQL commments on external database using uh web services and you can uh perform uh SQL commands as in your local database but actually you are manipulating doing whatever uh DML DL ddl uh commands on remote database what are the uh deployment options I think I mentioned that uh you can install it locally as a standalone uh installation you can use Oracle Express editions or uh latest uh free edition of 23c you can upgrade to any uh required uh version if you have let's say if you
(18:47) start a development on pre Edition or Express Edition you can upgrade same application on standard edition or Enterprise Edition and you can work completely disconnected from uh uh from the server or from any other platform so you can can work locally on your machine or on your computer uh without uh interfering with other uh database or other remote databases you can run on premise you can install it on local network uh actually it's uh it's similar to to to internet based installations because you need to
(19:29) install it and you need to create connection to that instance uh you can run it as production and uh you can run this service provider in your uh for different department in your uh local network and you can assign administrators for each instance for each workspace uh on that Apex instance for each department and they can use it as a standalone instance inside your network to to run and to develop Apex application and uh uh finally you can run it on cloud you can use it free uh Oracle cloud or or free Apex instance
(20:10) there possibil to use only Apex on free uh on on free usage but you can run it also as a free Oracle user you you can create autonomous database and you can create Apex instances on your free Cloud account not as a free Apex uh free Apex option Apex is it's having a huge uh community that is one of the advantage for small and medium business because uh this community supports uh uh there are a lot of of Open Source resources lot of code lot of uh we are calling plugins that you can use on your application so you
(21:05) have support even not from only from Oracle officially but you can have also support from Community uh there is community that is uh how say hosted on Oracle portal Apex oracle.com Community where different Oracle experts or external expert are I'll say giving their expertise sharing their expertise with the CLI but there are also uh Community outright sites we can you can use this is Apex do World which is nice uh portal where you can find different resources for Apex like plugins uh uh news even jobs uh conferences which are organized
(22:01) in the region or whenever you you want to to attend it and so on and there is also community supported website when you where you can see build with apex.com where you can see uh how others are using Apex there are commercial and there are some free uh links on application that different different organization people are using uh Apex for different uh purposes what are the use cases first I think we mentioned that it's uh platform for Rapid application development uh what are the features you can build application in days or weeks
(22:55) but not not in months and years because you are reducing the time to deliver the final uh solution you can use Wizards to create fly fully futured apps by not driving but not uh writing a single line of code uh you can meet you can change that means you can adapt to to changing requirements of of the user and the locco allow non professional also to build or help build applications so people who are not really it technicals can uh be involved in the process of uh uh building Apex uh applications Apex platform can be used
(23:47) also to extend Enterprise systems that means you can extend any ARP you can build it as a uh as a side applications performing modular application performing just part of of the of the functionality that is cannot or cannot be covered by the core application uh it feel you can use it to fill gaps which are requesting more resources or more Investments on your applications uh and so on Oracle Apex is recommended platform to for modernizing Oracle forms Oracle forms is uh I I guess you know that it is a long time uh
(24:44) product of Oracle and we are supporting we are we will continue to support but if uh any Oracle forms use company user is not is facing problem with Oracle phone then the first choice should be Oracle aex because it is Natural Evolution to of Oracle forms it is based on SQL and p plsql uh it provides many more more other features for uh than Oracle forms and so on uh uh one of the cases to use Oracle Apex is to move from spreadsheet to web application so Apex can be very easily used to replace uh spreadsheets I going to give you a demo
(25:38) at the end of this presentation how you can use Apex to actually to to move your Excel data to web or to uh internet application what are the Apex features uh because it is low code or no code platform it is using Wizards Wizards are simple and modern for creating different objects of the application it's you can use Access Control activity reporting and themes while creating this application through the wizard you can customize interfaces with th style theme style uh application you can use wizard not for creating whole
(26:38) application like I'm going to use it on my today's demo but you can use wizard also to create the objects like Pages for for for the application so you can uh generate any particular uh object inside the application with the wizard not only uh at at the at the level of whole application interactive reports is another feature where you can generate reports which can be interactive with the user so user can use it like a spread spreadsheet but online spreadsheet to to perform any aggregation any uh any aggregation uh
(27:22) action on data he can produce oltp uh from from the data that he will get as a spread she on his uh page and so on same but uh similar but not same is interactive grid because active interactive report is only for reporting only for uh extracting data interactive grid you can use to interact with the database to to to receive data and to change them uh you can use uh different uh features like Dynamic actions to to perform specific action on data when any condition is fulfilled you can upgrade this utility you can use
(28:11) this uh uh interactive grid to to perform tabular forms uh uh actions on data and interactive grid can be uh configured on Master detail or parent child uh uh parent child uh level so you can structure in deep and in wide as much as you need as much as you want this uh data so you can uh build application which where you uh drill down or uh on on your records with using this master detail interactive grid uh facilitated search this is one option that I'm going to uh to demo today when you can filter the data when you can put
(29:07) filters in very effective way smart filters there are features when you can uh build uh filtering of the data on your reports cards are nice way to display data and to to be kind of uh entry point to to to your uh more detailed information on database declarative Progressive web application or pwa is one feature of aex platform Apex application where you can build installation application for uh personal computers or for mobile devices and those application can be installed locally on any device and they can uh
(29:53) work even when when there is no connection with the uh main application so they can work offline and whenever this uh connection restor cache data will be uploaded to to to the web application Maps are another feature where when you want to to put geographical data on uh visual uh display you can use whatever uh uh layer like points lines uh heat maps and so on with the geographical uh with maps model dialogues are you can display the form in way that it is uh better for the usage from the user application chart Eng is based
(30:45) on JavaScript extension cool this is open source uh uh framework of Oracle to to help users display chart data visual way in uh JavaScript CSS 3 and HTML 5 format you can use uh jet Oracle jet as a normal way of displaying visually your data from the database there are different types of uh uh graphical charts like uh area bars lines P whatever you can use gun chart uh type of graphics and so on uh another feature is calendar when you want to display uh uh date and time data on on visual way when you want to show something on
(31:44) calendar way you can use as a month as a week calendar weekly calendar or you can even display as a list of uh dates and times navigations menu are configured list based you can put uh top navigation menu or side menu you can configure it as you want in Oracle Apex dynamic dynamic actions are uh the way to to control actions just by using the viser you don't need to write any JavaScript or Ajax uh code you just configured by uh providing uh with viser you can create actions whenever one condition is filled
(32:31) you it will perform any action on data or on application client side and so on uh another feature I think I mentioned is the rest enabled SQL support where you want to perform SQL commands on remote databases and finally is consuming external web service you can call any external service G data as a Json data on your application uh you can use it as in interactive report classic report any chart whatever object you are using during Al you can call web service and receive data from external services and the uh plugins are
(33:14) uh small pieces of software which enables you to extend your Apex you can build small uh application and you can attach it to your uh core application uh you have plenty of Open Source plugins for different purposes like uh for um uh performing formatting of dates of uh calendar of uh messages or whatever you can use those plugins or you can develop plugging and uh attach it to many of your application which are performing the same uh actions on your data and now I'm going to give you a small demo uh before going to the demo I want to
(34:01) present it what is uh uh what is the uh issue so I have it with me here a small Excel Excel file do you see my Excel file so in Excel in this Excel I have uh some uh information about managing projects so name of the project what is the task related to the project where is this task uh forcing to start to end what is the status who is responsible what is the cost and what is the budget this table contains this Excel file contains about 73 records exactly 73 not about it contains 73 records and now let's say I'm uh I'm using this uh
(34:56) Excel spreadsheet to manage projects in my company now I'm going to use this Excel sheet to create one uh Apex application just a moment I need to of course to do that you need to have uh an uh running uh Apex instance I'm going to connect now to my Apex instance just a second while I'm connecting here in meantime if you have a question if you have anything if you have ifue you want to raise please let me know I am connecting right
(36:13) now yes I'm connected now just a moment so here is my instance of Oracle uh Apex so what you see here is a uh first screen of Oracle appex uh there are some features of Oracle appex like application Builder SQL Workshop team development and gallery on application Builder you can see what are the applications I don't have any application right now I'm going to create later on on SQL work from you perform SQL uh actions with your database we can see that I don't I have just one uh this metad table I don't have any table or
(36:59) any object with application team development is uh it's a feature to to to help you organize uh programming or uh building application appics in a team where you can uh start and gallery is the uh where you have templates of small application so you can start building even without knowing anything on apex just by installing those templates simple application which can help you to create whatever and later on you can learn or you can enhance this application with whatever you need from that so today I'm
(37:38) going to create one application with application Builder I'm starting create and I told you I'm going to create it from uh Excel spreadsheet you can create it here you can name it whatever you have many option but I'm going to create it from spread sheet I'm going to choose the file that I I have shown you projects open I need to give a table name here because uh with this visard Apex will load all data from Apex and it will create a table in database and here you can view your data but for the for the sake of the
(38:20) time I'm not going to go in to DET too much this to just load the data this is all all wizard I'm not doing any coding and not right any line of code and you see data has been loaded 73 rows has been uh created in table projects and now I'm going to create application I'm not writing any code at the moment just a second while uh Apex platform is doing uh this creation of uh application so here we can name up we can change it the name of application we can even change the uh template of the application I will put V
(39:05) dark let's say save changes and we can add pages you see there are proposed Pages which from the data that Apex has load from Excel it is proposing homepage dashboard project search because he recognizes that there are data about the projects and it will create a calendar page also I can add more features like if I want this application to send to someone to install it on his PC or his mobile phone I can make it Progressive web app I can put let's say Access Control to create users later on for this I can put a page to receive
(39:49) feedback from the users uh if I want to see activity reporting who was accessing at what time uh uh application and above page there are many others option but I will not really use them and I will just push the button create application and we wait now for this whole application to be create without writing any line of code so application has been created you see uh platform has created many pages which are needed for for whole application to run we we choed only four page but he created also some other objects uh login page uh which are
(40:39) automatic I told you you don't need to carry about security about authorization and so because those are all automatic issues of course you can uh uh customize it you can make it as sish but for the uh simple user for not very skill Tex developer you can use it all this automatic uh functions and I'm going to run this application I have my username password for the same user that has developed I haven't created any other user and you see application is ready I'm running it from Oracle Cloud you see this uh uh
(41:20) link here in uh less than 5 minutes I have created just by loading Excel spreadsheet now here is the uh menu if you want to see the dashboard you see automatically gr all this charts visualization chart about the project he loaded the data from Excel spret and create the chart immediately if I want to see this facated search as a picture that I was showing you before you see it here but of course this is the initial application all is here you see it created calendar for all this task that has been performed by different uh uh
(42:03) project members in different dates you can customize it let's say if I want to customize this uh facated search all I need is go to this edit uh and I'm going to to see uh the uh first screen of uh Ed development uh uh GUI where on the right SE on the left side I see uh s a three all the uh uh all all the objects of the application on the middle uh part I see uh layout of the applications how they are how they are performed and on on the on the on the right side I see the properties of any object that I'm
(43:03) selecting here let's say here I select assign to I see all the properties of of this one let's say I want to put this cost as as I want to change the type of uh of this cost type is arrange and I wanted to put it as R Radio group so I don't want to to be able to to choose all type of cost I want to chose just uh one group of the of the code of the cost and I will type it save if I go to application again when I go to cost you see from uh it has changed now to radio groups so I can group it uh different different records with this
(44:03) radio group so this is interactive report as I was showing you and here I can perform as a US user not as a developer I can perform different uh different uh uh actions as being use as being normal user not developer I can aggregate data I can compute if I want to calculate what is the remaining of the of the cost let's say I can put new computation what will be uh uh I will put column e or no uh column budget
(45:11) minus column e remaining budget let's say what what is the budget and what is the remaining [Music] budget you see I have calculated immediately as a user not as a developer so I I can use Apex as a spreadsheet but online not uh local my machine I calculate everything what is here that's all from U my site if you have any questions if you have.