This is a very common question that
I’m regularly asked in one form or another. The simple answer is that Oracle is
committed to the ongoing development and support of Application Express. There
are a number of key factors for Oracle’s commitment including the strong
community support, the continued uptake from customers, the products standing
within Oracle, and the passion of the Application Express Development Team.
The main reason I believe that the future looks very
positive for Oracle Application Express is that the product delivers. An ever
increasing number of organizations have successfully deployed applications with
exceedingly good ROI, due to the very high productivity the tool delivers for
developing and enhancing applications. It is becoming increasingly important to
very rapidly iterate solutions to meet the ever-changing business demands, and
this is where Application Express excels.
One of the big factors leading to
the popularity of Application Express is the almost evangelical community of
Oracle APEX developers worldwide. The community is very active on the OTN APEX Forum.
There are approximately 150 blogs listed on the ODTUG APEX Blogroll. To date there
have been over 25 books
published on Application Express, six of which have been published in 2013
alone. There are over 130 consulting companies who cover Oracle Application
Express consulting services listed on the APEX Community and
Partners application. The customer evaluation instance of Oracle
Application Express, at http://apex.oracle.com,
which we provide to the public, has over 18,000 workspaces and gets over 5
million page views / week.
All of these statistics only talk to the health of the community
and the activity, but doesn’t address the passion. One of the great things
about being an active participant in this community is how enthused and
motivated the APEX community is as a whole. My job takes me around the world
presenting at conferences. As such I get to interact with a large number of people,
and I’m regularly taken aback by the extensive networking, collaboration, and camaraderie amongst APEX
community members.
Application Express is not
generally pushed by Oracle’s sales force, and we don’t receive the same
marketing, as other “for-cost” products. However, the strengths of the tool
have led to sustained organic growth within a growing number of organizations. One
of the windows into this is reviewing the support calls, which reveals a
plethora of large well-known organizations. Since releasing the Extending
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 using Oracle Application Express white
paper there has been significant uptake within the EBS community. I regularly receive
emails from Oracle Sales Consultants who want me to talk to their customer
about Application Express. The email will generally say something to the effect
of “Customer x has been using APEX for years and they need someone to talk to
them about y”. This growth is further supported by the fact that Application
Express is downloaded from Oracle Technology Network (OTN) more than 100,000
times a year.
I define “mission critical” as those applications that would
have a large negative impact on business operations, productivity, or
profitability should they become unavailable to the business for extended
periods. I have countless examples of where supposedly “quick and dirty” APEX
applications, with only a few pages and/or a small user community, have matured
and are now considered critical to the business. On the other end of the
spectrum, there are also more and more very large APEX deployments with sizable
development communities and company-wide usage. Application Express is viewed
more as a strategic development tool than a simple RAD tool for building simple
Web-based applications. It is still very much a RAD tool, but gone are the days
when the tool is pigeon-holed as only capable of developing spreadsheet and
Access replacements. More recently a number of organizations are focusing on establishing
and growing Application Express “Private Cloud” environments and communities within
their organization, rather than simply building APEX applications. Just last month at OOW, Joel Kallman and I
met with Solution Architects from three different organizations about this very
matter.
Why is Application Express important
to Oracle? When I first started developing custom applications against the
Oracle Database there was one choice – Oracle Forms. Today Oracle has a myriad
of different development tools to allow developers the freedom to develop using
a range of languages and tools, one of which is still Oracle Forms. Oracle
Application Express is Oracle’s primary tool for developing applications with
SQL and PL/SQL. For Java developers, Oracle’s primary tool is Oracle JDeveloper
and Application Development Framework (ADF), but we also provide support for Eclipse
and NetBeans.
The importance to Oracle extends far beyond how important it
is to our customers. Oracle itself utilizes Application Express extensively to meet
business requirements and improve business processes. One of the best examples
available externally is the Oracle Store
which interfaces with over 10 back-end systems. Oracle Application Express is
also tightly integrated into the Oracle
Database Cloud Service, whereby when you request a database service you are
provided with access to the Oracle Application Express builder environment to
define and deploy your applications.
Other Oracle products such as Audit Vault and Database
Firewall have integrated Application Express to reduce the number of reports
they need to develop. They have replaced 300 SQL based reports with 30 APEX Interactive
Reports, while providing significantly enhanced capabilities to their users.
Oracle Database 12c Mutitenant allows for numerous Pluggable Databases (PDBs)
to be defined in a single Container Database (CDB). The Multitenant
Self- Service Provisioning system provides an interface to allow for the
self-service provisioning of PDBs. This system was developed in under two
months, from inception to delivery of the BETA product, using Application
Express.
There is an extensive range of APEX solutions available to
Oracle employees. For example, the Aria People application allows employees to
search our organizational hierarchy and get contact details for any employee.
This application is one of the most actively used applications within Oracle
with over 1.2 million page views / day. Applications Technical Services, who
are responsible for customizing Oracle’s Global Single Instance (GSI), use
Application Express to extend EBS and then feed the requirements back to the
EBS Development team. To realize operating efficiencies when we acquired Sun it
was imperative that Sun’s operations be integrated rapidly into Oracle. To help
facilitate this integration a number of key APEX applications were developed.
One of the key resources for Oracle employees is our hosted
internal APEX instance, http://apex.oraclecorp.com.
This service has over 2,000 workspaces, with over 12,000 applications, and over
2 million page views / week. More than 20,000 distinct employees from almost
every line of business in Oracle use this service regularly. There is a huge variety
of applications, from simple to complex, and from limited to critical
importance for that business unit. Many of these applications are built and
maintained by “citizen” developers.
Since it’s improbable inception,
coming out of a skunk works project within Oracle Pre-Sales, by Mike Hichwa and
Joel Kallman in 1999, Oracle Application Express has continued to evolve,
improving both developer productivity and application capabilities. The
Application Express Development Team is very adept at analyzing trends in the
IT landscape and incorporating the best attributes of these, such as HTML5 and
CSS, into Application Express to ensure the tool remains modern. The continued
success of the tool is largely due to this dedicated team that interacts
extensively with, and genuinely listens to, the APEX community. To facilitate community
input we have implemented the APEX
Feature Requests application and established a Feature Advisory Board,
consisting of leaders from the APEX community. The board helps us identify the
most important requests to consider for upcoming releases. New versions of
Application Express are released approximately once a year. We also provide
numerous patch sets to ensure bug fixes are available in a timely fashion.
In conclusion, I can’t guarantee
that Oracle Application Express will always continue to have the incredible
popularity, inside and outside Oracle, which it enjoys today. However, the
above should give you confidence that Application Express has a very solid and
promising future, and that Oracle will continue to invest in the tool’s ongoing
development.
