Oracle Application Express (APEX) Reviews

With APEX, I developed a web portal for an insurance company. With this portal, every agency can look at its customer's personal data, their claims, policies, coverage, and collections.

I am using this solution and I am developing software for my customers.

For three years, we have done the same application with more than 10 people.

With APEX, we can reduce our costs by reducing the size of our teams.

Before APEX, we were using Oracle Forms. This required larger teams.

With small teams of four to six, with a maximum of 10 people, you can build every kind of product.

APEX will also benefit enterprise companies.

Developing in a web environment is very easy with just one browser. With a username and password, I can develop this product very easily. With this product, it is very easy to develop. Many sample applications have been created by Apex in the Applications Gallery.

You can built multilingual applications, each user can interact the application with their own depending localization parameter.

Apex supports Restful Service in JSON format. It is very easy to create a web service for Apex Environment.

It's suitable for team development.

It would be my dream to merge two products into one. Visual Builder and APEX should meld in one product. 

Each has different strengths. Visual Builder is very strong in Java, and you can build HTML applications very easily with low code. APEX is very important to have a direct connection to the Oracle database.

If these two products would meld into one in the future, it would be very nice. 

In the future of APEX, I would expect features more like Visual Builder. Also being able to use HTML codes directly. Visual Builder produces HTML codes and source codes.

APEX does not have source code, it runs from the database. We can export our objects, our source, and import them in different environments and different hardware, but it's not readable in HTML codes. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

We are using the latest version and will be upgrading to 20.2

It's a stable solution.

Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a scalable product.

We have four users in our organization.

We don't need direct support from Oracle. We are using Oracle Websites.

It's very easy to install and easy to deploy.

The first time, I spend six weeks, but now it can be done in a few hours.

We need only one person to maintain this solution.

We completed the implementation of it ourselves.

This is a built-in license with data.

When buying the data license, APEX is included.

Currently, I am doing some research on Visual Builder. I saw a demo.

It's an application that is ready for the cloud. You cannot use it on-premises or on your local machine. It's just for the cloud.

They have very nice features.

You can easily build your applications at a very low cost, and it is very powerful with JavaScript.

We are a consultancy firm for IT purposes, software. Especially, we are engaged in the insurance and banking finance sector. 

We have a very large and deep knowledge of accounting software. Our team is very experienced, senior developers, and business analysts.

We are migrating our Oracle Forms to APEX. In the future, we will continue to use APEX.

I would highly recommend this product to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The only feature which is useful is that it makes it easier to quickly create publicly accessible applications. We were using it to make these applications.  

We used it in addition to Forms and Report Services because Forms and Report Services at that time were client-server applications. It used to be an addition to the Oracle development environment.  

Right now I am working on two projects. One of them is using Oracle Forms and APEX.  

The valuable feature is the basic use case: it makes the process of creating publicly accessible applications easier.  

The first thing I can think of that needs to be improved with this product is that there is a problem with security. In all of the applications I saw, they stored the passwords in the configuration files. I think this is a big issue. The security module is supposed to be included in the APEX connection component, but people connect to the Oracle HTTP Server and the password goes to the HTTP server. It is using the HTTP server for the security part. We did some analysis and we figured out that we had to move to another product.  

Because security is not satisfactory, we created our own connection mechanism in ORDS. It was a better way to keep the passwords encrypted and to make access to the APEX applications a little bit more secure. But the way APEX causes applications to store the security information is a big issue and a security vulnerability. ORDS is pretty straightforward and Oracle WebLogic Server is very flexible and a very nice feature.  

Also, the Oracle application page is supposed to be able to cancel access to the application. From what we found, this is not done properly. The connection is hanging and sometimes different people who connect to the application use the same ID. This can seriously interfere with users who are already connected. These are both very bad security issues.  

There is also a disadvantage in that it is pretty hard to fix bugs in APEX. It is very tricky. Basically, the Oracle objects generate the HTML code and cast it to the HTTP server. You have to be very careful with the HTTP Syntax for the sake of compatibility. Some browsers accept the code that gets generated and some browsers not. It is very hard to debug these coding issues.  

We have been using Oracle Application Express (APEX) since 2015.  

Applications are usually accessible by thousands of users at a time without stability issues.  

You can use multiple servers and the scalability of APEX is really pretty good from an end-user standpoint.  

I do not think there is really much of a limitation on how many people can use the generated applications. This is one thing it is good at.  

I used to work with other Oracle products like Fusion Middleware, Forms, and Reports. Since 2016, I worked less with APEX because there are other solutions that I prefer. My experience with APEX is that it is a little limited right now. Because of that we actually moved most application development to ORDS (Oracle REST [Representational State Transfer] Data Services).  

ORDS is more efficient and easier to use. APEX is compatible with ORDS as well. The problem with APEX is mostly that I do not like to use different vendors for HTTP server and Oracle WebLogic Server. ORDS is supposed to be more of a native, all-in-one solution. So we try to use ORDS for development projects because Oracle HTTP Server is not supported anymore by Oracle and this is a problem for APEX security. You have to use a Tomcat server or something else with APEX.  

I worked with APEX to do the initial setup and I have never set up the environment fully on my own. It is complex enough that I do not think I would want to do it without their help.  

APEX is a pretty old application and a pretty old environment. Most people are usually trying to get rid of it rather than bringing it onboard. For anyone still considering it, I strongly suggest going to the cloud application because the general strategy of Oracle Corporation is to support applications on the cloud. There are multiple other solutions to consider from Oracle or other vendors as well.  

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Oracle Application Express depending on the task. For some tasks, it is just perfect. You can say it would be an eight or nine-out-of-ten for quickly creating an application that does not need strong security. But for some tasks, like when you try enhancing an application, the score is pretty low. In that case, I would give the product a three or a four.  

Our primary use is to develop secure applications for the Oracle Database. It is like an administrator for data processing functions.

This product allows us to manage our data processing using simple screens.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use.

The user interface is not complex.

Workflow capabilities should be added.

Better connection and integration with non-Oracle databases is needed.

I have been using Oracle APEX for the past four to five years.

We have not had a problem where it has crashed. However, it may be that our application is not complex enough.

We have approximately eight people using Oracle APEX. At this point, we are trying to reduce our usage.

I have not personally been in contact with technical support.

We did use another similar product before implementing APEX.

The initial setup is not very complex. Our deployment took four or five months.

A consultant assisted us with implementation and deployment.

We are currently in the process of migrating from APEX to Microsoft PowerApps.

My advice for anybody who is implementing APEX is to use the default parameters and do not do anything that is customized.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We make software for municipals.

It's fairly easy to make a user-friendly interface. 

It has a bit of a strict framework, you have to make all the time adjustments in their JavaScript. Another downside is that it's only available for Oracle databases.

I have been working with Oracle APEX for a year now. 

It is quite stable. 

Scalability will depend on your database. 

I don't have any experience with their support. 

As a developer, I used to work with Delphix which was a little different. 

The installation is quite difficult. Because somehow it doesn't work if you begin with a clean installation. It's much easier to use it with the cloud setup or do a box. If you want to install it from scratch, then it's a bit difficult.

Oracle is very expensive. Too expensive in my opinion.

My advice to someone considering this solution is to look into older applications. 

I would rate Oracle APEX an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use for this solution is web-based applications built on an Oracle database backend. It is suitable for applications from small proofs of concept to enterprise-scale.

Extreme rapid application development. Allows existing Oracle knowledge base to be utilized for building web applications.

This solution offers declarative, low-code development. Improves delivery speed, accuracy, and performance.

It provides attractive GUIs allowing professionally-styled applications without the need to know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

Portability: It can be easily moved to other environments.

We would like to see tighter integration with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The valuable feature is simplicity. It is easy to learn and implement.

I would like to see more flexibility and productivity.

We have been using this for two years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

The most valuable feature is how fast you can do applications compared to other frameworks, like Java and PHP. It will take you three times longer to do what you can do in Apex. You don’t have to cut through a lot of layers to get to the data in your database with Apex.

From a cost perspective, you can use less resources to build applications. Time to market is another improvement, because you can make applications very quickly. We used to create a NBC project with another framework and write our own modules to access the data, but Apex gives you access to data in your database in a more straightforward way.

From a technical perspective, Apex is not yet well received from developers because they think it is not mature. From my experience, I think it is just like any other NBC framework that is out there. The approach is a little bit different, and it is a different part line, but you can still achieve the same stuff.

There are some improvements that could make Apex more robust as well, like integration with third party frameworks in order to have more components. They give you a stock of components that are enough to create a range of applications, but if you need more complex features or are creating something for end users or commercial users you have to build your own. However, being able to create your own features is another advantage.

I’ve never had to open a ticket. I’m familiar with web technologies so sometimes when I find an issue I just know how to resolve it myself, but the Oracle forums are very responsive and used by a large community of people. It is a strong environment, particularly because not everyone can submit a ticket since you need an account with access to the ticketing system in order to have Oracle look into an issue for you.

Apex is already installed in your database, so you kill a lot of steps in that. If Oracle Database is already installed, you pretty much just need to execute one line of code and you will be up and running. It is very straightforward.

If you are looking for performance and speed for your application, I would choose Apex. I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The most valuable features are the ease with which data can be accessed and the improvements that have made the front-end look like a real application. The graphing plug-ins are really good as well.

We are excited that they are going to go into the web service world to make the rest of the APIs available. We have been looking for master detail, but that is has been improved quite a bit. Nothing is perfect though.

I have been using the product for eight years.

It has been consistently stable. We have not had any issues with it.

So far it has met our needs and we hope that it will continue to do so. At the end of the summer, we are moving a flex application to APEX that will be released in August. It will have about four hundred users.

I have never personally talked to tech support, but we have had conversations with the consulting folks about some of the rack solutions for improving data expansion. From my understanding, tech support is very good.

It is always fun having to do the Oracle patches. Our DBAs handle all that, but it does affect us as far as having to take systems down to do the upgrades, which gets a little frustrating. It's manageable though. They take about an hour or two.

It is a free product. Install it and start having fun. APEX out of the box is pretty good and very easy to get started. You can get your data out in five minutes. I’d give it an eight out of ten.