Oracle Application Express
Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX), is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using Oracle APEX you can develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure. Oracle Application Express combines the qualities of a personal database; productivity, ease of use and flexibility with the qualities of an enterprise database; security, integrity, scalability, availability and built for the web. The Oracle APEX development environment is also conveniently web-based. Oracle APEX is far more than a wizard based development tool. It's an extremely productive and flexible development tool backed by Oracle; the industry leading database.
Do you have an Oracle database? Do you need to access to this data over the web? Then you should be using Oracle APEX because it's the most productive and flexible development tool to access and manage your Oracle data. At Explorer we use Oracle APEX to deliver professional applications, for far less than the cost of applications developed using traditional web based languages, such as Java.
- Reporting - With Oracle APEX, you can quickly generate HTML reports that display the results of SQL queries. You can also download and print reports in HTML, PDF, RTF (compatible with Microsoft Word) and XLS (compatible with Microsoft Excel) formats.
- Forms - Using wizards, you can easily create forms on tables or on a stored procedure. When creating a form on a table, these wizards provide automatic management of insert, update and delete as well as lost update detection. Once you create a form, you can rearrange form fields (called form items) using a visual representation, enabling you to quickly achieve the layout you want. Form items offer a variety of display options including text fields, text areas, radio groups, select lists, check boxes, date pickers and popup list of values.
- Web Services - The Oracle APEX Web services engine supports loosely defined types and document style Web services. This makes it possible to support JDeveloper created Web services and Oracle BPEL synchronous Web services. It is also possible to interact with Web services over SSL (HTTPS) and Web services that require basic authentication. Finally, there is also support for manually creating a Web service reference if the Oracle APEX engine cannot correctly parse the WSDL document for a particular service. You supply the SOAP request envelope and the URL endpoint among other information about the Web service.
- Security - With Oracle APEX you can create public applications that do not require a user log in, or you can create secure applications that require authentication. Oracle APEX provides a number of built-in authentication schemes including Single Sign On, Database Account Credentials and an easy-to-use user management system. You can also use custom schemes that interface with just about any authentication service including Microsoft Active Directory and Oracle Applications.
- Performance - Oracle APEX provides application developers and application users with an extremely high level of performance. Because Oracle APEX resides in the Oracle database, it has minimal impact on network traffic. Plus, Application Builder includes a large number of monitoring reports to enable you to identify and tune application performance. Oracle APEX enables a single database to host large numbers of users. Users work in a dedicated work area called a workspace. This flexible architecture enables a single database instance to manage thousands of applications.
- Database Features - You can expose any number of database features available like Flashback, XMLDB, Row Level Security, Recycle Bin, Advanced Queuing (AQ) and Object Types. Oracle APEX can also generate content in a number of different formats, HTML, PDF, CSV, XML etc.
The key features of Oracle Application Express, include;