Why use Oracle? Because it has Oracle Application Express.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
At first, Oracle Application Express was used by only one department. However, after realizing the benefit, gradually it has been adopted by the whole organization. Majority of the use case is for Internal Application, with user mostly from employee. Example of Internal Application such as small-scale ERP, workflow framework, tracking assets and licenses, issue tracking system, and also can be used to analyze and monitor various data, such as activity log and sales dashboard. To use Oracle APEX for commercial application is not recommended, unless you have very good Oracle DBA.
Pros
- Fast. Nothing beats Oracle Application Express in terms of speed of development. Almost all common and must-have features for most application has been built into Oracle Application Express, and we only need to focus to the business requirements.
- Quality. Luckily, fast doesn't always translate to low quality. Even using basic wizard, within five minutes, we can build a quality application that has good security, a good user interface and good features, and this can be a very good standard for a company. The default is basic, but it's easy to tweak to achieve higher than standard quality. Notable features are checksum to enable integrity of web application, interactive report, interactive grid, modular ajax functionality, instrumentation for every user and developer action, PWA ready.
- Customization. The apps created are very customizable. You only need to understand Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, Javascript, CSS3, and JQuery. Then, you can create nearly any application you have in mind.
- Prototyping. When we are working for a client, sometimes it's hard to be on the same page when at first we only talk about the application concept. Using Oracle Application Express helps to create a prototype application and adjust it according to the client's input within minutes. This greatly helps bringing IT and non-IT clients on the same page faster.
Cons
- It's tied up to Oracle Database only. If you don't have Oracle Database, forget Oracle Application Express.
- I wish it has offline mode so it could be used in no-internet areas and sync it when it's back online.
- It's not critical, but it would be nice if there were more choices of themes. I know Oracle Application Express has couple of themes, but in my opinion, currently only Universal Theme is the theme for Oracle Application Express.
Return on Investment
- Due to our limited IT resources (mostly because we are not IT company), easy, fast, and sustainable framework allows us to catch up with business improvement without hiring additional IT resources.
- Prototyping done quickly and easily also improve our application quality. We are able to map business requirements to application more accurately, ensuring sustainability and less maintenance for go-live application. This also saves the need for huge IT resources.
- Because we already use Oracle Database, and our existing IT members are all proficient in Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, there are only a few learning curves to adopt Oracle Application Express the first time.
- Because it's too easy and quick, it has downside. We can have tendency to be lazy to adopt other modern and more flexible language.
- For the business requirement that still changing, this tool is perfect. Any change request will require little effort and can be developed quick.
- The negative is, if sometimes in future the user of application reaches very big, then we need to rewrite entire application using another technology stack since oracle apex can only scale vertically.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Appsmith
Other Software Used
Qlik Sense, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, UiPath Automation Platform, Microsoft Teams, Snowflake, OneNote, DBeaver
