Oracle APEX (or Oracle Application Express) is an online low-code application builder that allows users to develop a database-drive application, customize the application's UI, and then give their users access to the application via URL. Oracle APEX includes a suite of pre-built productivity applications and examples, such as a Survey Builder, Bug Tracking, P-Track project management, etc
$0.32
OCPU per hour
SAP Build
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SAP Build is a business application development and automation solution with a comprehensive suite of low-code, pro-code, and generative AI tools. SAP Build is for developers, IT professionals, and business users/citizen developers who want to create and customize business applications.
It is appropriate for database application development supporting data driven processes, online transaction processing, BI/reports/analytics ... for addressing about any business data processing need I can think of. Oracle Application Express is fantastic for creating beautiful rich user interfaces with support for all major browsers rendering well on a range of devices. It is less appropriate for applications requiring native low level access to device peripherals and is less appropriate for applications that must execute offline without network/internet connection to supporting application and database servers.
SAP Build is a strong and reliable partner with a rich FAQ and consulting power. New features make sense and are easy to distribute within the team and to end users. The community is nice, and there are many discussions on product development, shared solutions, and productivity improvements. UI is also one of the strongest points.
For complex APEX applications you need to be a pro expert in PL/SQL
Debugging in APEX can be complicated if there is a logical error. Syntax errors will end up shown as ORA errors
Lack of designer interface. Even though you are designing a form you need to do it by means of APEX interface using a series of steps, no UI for design
Oracle specific not applicable for other databases
I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.
Because it's very easy to develop, fast, secure, has a lot of features. It's like a prototyping tool such as figma, but it can be used as a real product. Dynamic action, plugin, rest api, minimize a lot of coding, a lot of templates, PWA, really bring Oracle APEX functionality to be able to solve most common internal users pain points.
Because I think it is fairly easy to navigate. But at the same time, I still think it’s not mature enough for non-developers. At least for our use cases, it has been needed to perform coding in some sense. But ofc. I think joule will help a lot here.
Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.
There are, for example, great blog writings about automation cases and examples. The studio version is updated often. There are also useful OpenSAP online courses.
Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
Oracle APEX and Oracle Visual Builder are both low-code development platforms within the Oracle ecosystem, but they serve different purposes. Oracle APEX is more suited for the people who are familiar with SQL, PLSQL. It provides rapid application development features based on data residing in Oracle database. It's a low code platform and best suited for web based applications/extensions based on Oracle DB that may use REST APIs and other web services. It also provides mobile application support. Oracle Visual Builder is best suited for web applications based on Oracle Cloud services. It utilizes javascript based drag-drop UI builder. It's very deeply integrated with Oracle Fusion Cloud platform.
Compared to Mendix, we decided not to go for low code application building and in the other parts of Build, Build is stronger and better integrated with SAP. On the hand of Coding, using Build Code, gives us Joule, which understands SAP better and also have a tighter and more secure coupling with SAP services.
It has increased our development output over Forms greatly. For instance, when starting at my current company, I was able to replace our aging ASP Intranet site within 4 months when our IT manager had budgeted over a year for the task.
We've been able to standardize under one technology, incorporating previously unsupportable disparate systems under one roof.
It's free with an Oracle Database so the only investment was our time, something we now have more of thanks to Application Express.