Presentation on the maturity level of Oracle APEX

1. The maturity level of APEX
Patrick Hellemans – Competence Manager Technology

2. Once upon a time …
There was an assignment from your CEO
Deliver a new application :
Cost-efficient
Fast
High quality

3. Is Oracle APEX mature enough?
Should we even consider APEX as a valid option?

4. Is Oracle APEX mature enough?
How to start convincing a CEO ?
• What do the analysts say ? (Gartner / Forrester)
• Project triangle (Time / Budget / Quality)
• Professional software development

5. What do the analysts say?
Gartner / Forrester

6. Gartner on APEX …
“Oracle APEX is in the adult stage of development:
• APEX is updated at least annually with new releases that expand functionality
• APEX training is widely available
• APEX is used in many new projects
• The volume of Gartner inquiries on APEX indicates growth
• APEX has stable programming constructs based on PL/SQL and on JavaScript
• APEX has outstanding community support.”
“Gartner believes that APEX will grow significantly among Oracle
DBMS customers during the next 12 to 36 months.”

7. Forrester on APEX …
“Oracle has come a long way in understanding what customers
really want when it comes to accessing data quickly and easily, and
APEX delivers such an environment. The tool offers several
benefits, including:
• An easy-to-use application development environment.
• Consolidation of desktop databases and spreadsheets.
• Lower costs of application development.
• Tight integration with Oracle DBMS.
• Real-time interactive application development.”

8. Project triangle

9. What are our goals ?
Reduce risk (= budget)
QA cycle and Open Source Software
Reduce time
APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features
Offer high quality
Software factory

10. Reduce budget
Oracle APEX is a free option of the db
Architecture can be extended with OSS components
Low hanging fruit / quick wins

11. Quality Assurance cycle
Gartner’s analysts (Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predict that
by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all
software development projects”.
• Business validation on requirements
• Functional validation on developed software
• Unit tests on PL/SQL code (Continuous integration)
• UI tests (Selenium)

12. Continuous integration

13. Continuous integration

14. Hudson
Build engine
Monitoring tool
Free !

15. Selenium
Free Firefox plugin
Cross browser UI testing
Tests are reproduceable

16. (OSS) Architecture
APEX Development Architecture
jQuery Framework
Selenium UI tester
Hudson Build engine
Maven Build manager
Oracle SQL Developer IDE
Subversion Versioning control
Apache Tomcat + APEX listener Application Server
Oracle Data modeler DM
Oracle DB + APEX Database

17. jQuery
JavaScript framework
Less coding, more productivity
Adds very visual features
Some examples:
• jQuery Accordion
• AJAX zoom

18. What are our goals ?
Reduce risk (= budget)
QA cycle and Open Source Software
Reduce time
APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features
Offer high quality
Software factory

19. Reduce time
Reduce project ramp up time
• Adds little value, costs a lot
• Most projects use the same basic setup
• Emphasis on reuse from other projects
• Automatic generation of basic components
APEX framework
• Hosted on apex.oracle.com
• CSS is fully customized
• Serves as master application for new projects
• Reduces ramp up time drastically

20. IAB APEX Framework
Scenario
• Basic setup of a project (table auditing, error messaging, …)
• Starting point = generated ddl-script from data modeler

21. IAB APEX Framework
Demo IAB APEX Framework

22. New APEX 4.0 features
APEX advisor
• Create daily scheduled job
Dynamic actions
Plug-ins
Integrated jQuery

23. What are our goals ?
Reduce risk (= budget)
QA cycle and Open Source Software
Reduce time
APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features
Offer high quality
Software factory

24. Software factory
Assembly line with high software throughput

25. Software factory
Only for Java / .Net ?
Continuous integration
APEX development framework SOFTWARE FACTORY
QA cycle

26. Conclusions
Cost-efficient
• Quality Assurance cycle
• APEX combined with Open Source Software
Fast
• APEX framework: minimize project ramp up & maintenance time
• New APEX 4.0 features (more declarative, dynamic actions, …)
High Quality
• Software factory (requirements, PM, code, release management)

27. One final thought …
A hammer doesn’t build a house, the person swinging the hammer does.
It’s all in how you use the tools available.

28. Questions