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APEX Thoughts

  • A

    My company is currently looking into adopting APEX to replace most of their intranet report site.  How have you guys found it?  Good?  Bad?  Any good rants?  Any serious limitations?  Anything to watch out for?

    I'm mostly interested because I'll be dealing with it fairly regularly if the adoption goes through, and I figured I should do my homework before making any recommendations to management.

    So... thoughts?

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  • B

    I am using APEX currently as main tool for developing applications. APEX is becoming quite populair here in the Netherlands. Although my customer's management tends to look at it as a toy, I find it a pretty complete tool to develop.

    It allows you to develop up to 70% faster, if you are using standard components. As with every development tool, non-standard functionalities cost the most. Luckily APEX does support a lot of functionality out of the box.

    Some highlight:
    - Mostly declarative application building
    - Except for any HTML/JavaScript, uses PL/SQL to code which is pretty nice in an existing Oracle environment
    - Out-of-the-box support for graphs, maps(4.0), excel-like reports, forms, reports etc

    Any limitations you might consider:
    - PDF printing is possible, but requires the Oracle BI publisher, which is pretty expensive. There is a free solution using Apache FOP, but is not supported by Oracle.
    - Error henadling is the Oracle way. The user is presented, by default, the pretty harsh ORA-XXXXX - not understandable for end-user error. Although you can fix this, it's quite a setback imo.

     I find it a very the best tool for data-oriented applications and do actually recommend it to customers.

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  • M

    But what about for full on applications?  Everything you mentioned seems to point towards a very "report" oriented application.

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  • Scarlet_Manuka

    @Medezark said:

    But what about for full on applications?  Everything you mentioned seems to point towards a very "report" oriented application.

    I have a feeling that the OP would be OK with that.
    @Albatross said:
    to replace most of their intranet report site.

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  • B

     @Medezark said:

    But what about for full on applications?  Everything you mentioned seems to point towards a very "report" oriented application.

    I assumed just like Scarlet Manuka, that the OP wanted that.

    What do you mean by "full on" applications?

    3D Games?
    realtime machine applications?

    I think APEX is the perfect tool for developing data-oriented applications. I'll bet I outrun every other tool when I can use default APEX components. 

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