Oracle Application Express (APEX) Reviews

Apex is part of your database. Everything, program logic included, is happening directly where data is, so it's fast, it's centralized and it's easy to use. It's declarative.

Apex can help you centralize many things. You can replace spreadsheets that are being sent back and forth with Apex, for example. It increases efficiencies and reduces man-hours.

Apex runs in a browser, so using the latest technology, like push notifications, would be good. It could also have better connections and better reporting in terms of getting files out of it. It could create a PDF rather than just showing data on the screen.

This is definitely a tool that is stable, and you can use it even in point zero versions.

It simply scales with the database. There are absolutely no problems with scalability.

It is a really straightforward deployment. You just run a script and then copy a directory of files to a server. It's probably the easiest tool that Oracle provides.

I wouldn’t recommend an official training by Oracle. They are too long and expensive; however, there is tons of information on the web, many books, and a lot of third party trainers that run reduced versions of the introductory seminars. Apex even provides a two-day tutorial that I think is pretty good. It shows you the basic concepts like how to use the tool and what is available.

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 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 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.

It is a no-code or low-code solution for testing applications. It helps me build and test an application quickly.

It makes life easy.

Oracle is always adding very important updates.

The solution could provide more AI functionalities or AI assistance.

I have been using Oracle Application Express (APEX) since 2016.

It keeps getting more flexible. As new releases come out, the setup process becomes easier. If we’re discussing Apex in the cloud, there's essentially nothing to worry about regarding setup.

We are using a free-tier version of the solution.

It is relatively easy to maintenance compared to other tools that we work with.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.