Why use Oracle Application Express for web app?

Question

I believe we\'re moving to Oracle Apex for future development. I\'ve read about Oracle Apex on wikipedia and it\'s pro and con. It seem to me the con outweigh the pro but ma

Answer 1

I am a DBA and I never had to program with APEX or recently anything else (aside some bash scripting and custom SQL scripts for administration purposes) because my job is far away from developing applications (except being pain in the ass of developers that is). Of course my background is developer though and I do believe APEX is future for strictly Oracle based data centric programs.

Now the keyword here is data centric since I disagree with many other DBAs that all applications are data centric (you know the kind of DBAs who still think ODBC stands for ORACLE Database Connectivity). Of course all applications involve data but are all applications data centric? I doubt, just as I doubt APEX would be ever used for image processing or mobile gaming kind of apps. However, despite all the hype with RIA and Web 2.0 the fact is most of businesses around us are hungry for those plain old data centric applications and Oracle is best database around and I can assure you Oracle and APEX can handle much much more than Facebook scalability provided of course you have put the same amount of money as Facebook guys in underlying infrastructure.

By the way I also hate Oracle's design of APEX themes (awful unprofessional UI, just imagine it as main UI for a bank or airline business), limited capabilities (although that seems about to change in the future), many many more issues (professional PDF reporting without paying amount of Enterprise Database license for BI publisher??) but most of all marketing of APEX as substitute of Access or Excel because it gives bad impression it is for kids and I can assure you my friend I would never allow kids to touch my databases :)

You see, Oracle has a gem called PL/SQL which was perfected over the years to handle data in much more intutitive way than any other language. Now that gem is withering with slow death of Forms/Reports and I am positive no fresh graduate will ever bother learning it strictly for database stored procedures (just see the raging war between Java and .Net developers and you realize that once you touch curly brackets {} anything else becomes a heresy). Alas for thousands upon thousands of excellent PL/SQL developers APEX remains the only sanctuary where they can remain productive and develop outstanding data centric applications and without APEX PL/SQL will surely become next COBOL. This is why PL/SQL community will drive Oracle to transform APEX to grade A platform much more powerful than what we are seeing today. Either that or say bye bye to PL/SQL and join curly brackets front (by the way it is never a bad idea to at least try different technologies when you are developer, at least you get an idea why it is not neccessarily greener at the other side).