DEVOPSdigest

Oracle is making its popular APEX low-code development platform available as a managed cloud service that developers can use to build data-driven enterprise applications quickly and easily.

Oracle APEX Application Development expands on two decades of APEX functionality already used by 500,000 developers as an easy-to-use, browser-based service for creating modern Web and mobile apps. While the original APEX platform was only available as part of the Oracle Database, APEX Application Development is available as a standalone service and works with a variety of applications.

Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the service provides support for more than 500 users and unlimited applications, and elastically scales as additional capacity is needed.

Developers interested in easy, declarative development instead of complex traditional coding can start building low-code applications for free using the new APEX Application Development service, which is included with Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Applications built and deployed using the APEX Application Development service benefit from high security, scalability, availability and performance provided by Oracle Autonomous Database, allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and not the underlying technology.

“Oracle continues to support developer communities and the new APEX service is the latest example, enabling citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy beautiful, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, EVP, DB Server Technologies, Oracle. “APEX is powerful enough to build the vast majority of business applications. Building data-driven applications with traditional coding should now be the exception rather than the rule.”

The APEX service is also pre-configured with Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) and SQL Developer Web. Developers can utilize ORDS to create custom REST APIs against their application data and SQL Developer Web to compose SQL queries and graphically model data. If the business requires traditional coding against the database beyond what can be done in APEX, then with one click developers can upgrade the service to a full Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database with Oracle APEX that supports the full Oracle Database client APIs, SQL*Net, and Autonomous Data Guard.

The Oracle APEX architecture provides extremely tight integration with the database, enabling a 10x reduction in round trips between the application and the database, resulting in much faster response times for end-users of data-driven applications. Additionally, APEX allows application developers to fully exploit the power and simplicity of SQL.