Oracle Simplifies App Development with New Low-Code Service

Oracle today 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 application development platform was only available as part of the Oracle Database, the new service is available as a standalone service and works with a variety of applications. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the service starts at $360 per month, providing support for more than 500 users and unlimited applications, and elastically scales as additional capacity is needed. A recent study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without having to learn complex, full-stack technologies. 

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, executive vice president, database 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.

Pricing
The APEX Application Development service includes everything needed to build and run low-code applications, with no extra fees per user, per developer, per application, or for data ingress and egress, making it easy for developers to build and deploy applications at scale. The APEX service is fully managed, so customers do not need to manage the application platform, database or infrastructure. Starting at $360 per month for 1 OCPU and 1TB of data, which can easily support more than 500 active users using multiple applications, the APEX service can elastically scale to support larger workloads when needed. 

Oracle APEX: Delighting Customers and Partners for Nearly Two Decades

“Whether you know it or not, Oracle APEX has been around for the best part of two decades, and has evolved to be an industry-leading, low-code, data-driven application development framework with over 500,000 community developers,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst and practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “No other development platform better exploits the unique capabilities of the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata in OCI. Best of luck finding another low-code cloud platform that provides its level of scale, cost effectiveness, proven-ruggedness, and ease-of-deployment.” 

“In late 2019 we started leveraging Oracle Autonomous Database with APEX on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deliver a mission-critical solution within our Logistics Division,” said Giovani Cani, vice president, IT delivery, Wilson Transportation & Leasing Group. “The APEX low-code platform has enabled the delivery team to quickly go from prototype to a final product and rollout within five months. The result was a secure, elegant, and responsive web-based solution deployed in four distribution centers being used by more than 250 active users around the clock managing a fleet of 600 assets.”

“Without a doubt, Oracle APEX on Autonomous Database is the gold standard for low-code development platforms. For almost 20 years, we have built our entire business on APEX,” said Michelle Skamene, vice president, Insum Solutions. “It has given us a huge competitive advantage, allowing us to deliver beautiful, scalable, feature-rich solutions for our clients in a fraction of the time compared to any other technology we’ve seen. We’re delighted to see this new offering from Oracle, which offers a simple and more affordable entry point into the world of APEX on Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud.” 

“We have used Oracle APEX since its very inception, and in that time we have found it to be the most flexible, powerful, scalable and cost effective solution available to us. We have based an entire solution development strategy on an APEX platform, and can deliver low-code solutions to a higher quality, lower cost and quicker timescales than the equivalent tools from other providers,” said Dermot Murray, vice president ideation, Inoapps. “The continuous delivery of new capabilities, combined with the power of the underlying Oracle Cloud database, allows us to deliver a huge range of business use cases both internally and to our customers.”