The maturity level of APEXPatrick Hellemans – Competence Manager Technology

Once upon a time …

There was an assignment from your CEO

Deliver a new application :

Cost-efficient

Fast

High quality

Is Oracle APEX mature enough?

Should we even consider APEX as a valid option?

Is Oracle APEX mature enough?

How to start convincing a CEO ?

• What do the analysts say ? (Gartner / Forrester)

• Project triangle (Time / Budget / Quality)

• Professional software development

What do the analysts say?

Gartner / Forrester

Gartner on APEX …

“Oracle APEX is in the adult stage of development:

• APEX is updated at least annually with new releases that expand functionality

• APEX training is widely available

• APEX is used in many new projects

• The volume of Gartner inquiries on APEX indicates growth

• APEX has stable programming constructs based on PL/SQL and on JavaScript

• APEX has outstanding community support.”

“Gartner believes that APEX will grow significantly among Oracle

DBMS customers during the next 12 to 36 months.”

Forrester on APEX …

“Oracle has come a long way in understanding what customers

really want when it comes to accessing data quickly and easily, and

APEX delivers such an environment. The tool offers several

benefits, including:

• An easy-to-use application development environment.

• Consolidation of desktop databases and spreadsheets.

• Lower costs of application development.

• Tight integration with Oracle DBMS.

• Real-time interactive application development.”

Project triangle

What are our goals ?

Reduce risk (= budget)

QA cycle and Open Source Software

Reduce time

APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features

Offer high quality

Software factory

Reduce budget

Oracle APEX is a free option of the db

Architecture can be extended with OSS components

Low hanging fruit / quick wins

Quality Assurance cycle

Gartner’s analysts (Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predict that

by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all

software development projects”.

• Business validation on requirements

• Functional validation on developed software

• Unit tests on PL/SQL code (Continuous integration)

• UI tests (Selenium)

Continuous integration

Continuous integration

Hudson

Build engine

Monitoring tool

Free !

Selenium

Free Firefox plugin

Cross browser UI testing

Tests are reproduceable

Apache Tomcat + APEX listener Application Server

Subversion Versioning control

Oracle DB + APEX Database

Oracle Data modeler DM

Hudson Build engine

Selenium UI tester

Oracle SQL Developer IDE

Maven Build manager

jQuery Framework

(OSS) Architecture

APEX Development Architecture

jQuery

JavaScript framework

Less coding, more productivity

Adds very visual features

Some examples:

• jQuery Accordion

• AJAX zoom

What are our goals ?

Reduce risk (= budget)

QA cycle and Open Source Software

Reduce time

APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features

Offer high quality

Software factory

Reduce time

Reduce project ramp up time

• Adds little value, costs a lot

• Most projects use the same basic setup

• Emphasis on reuse from other projects

• Automatic generation of basic components

APEX framework

• Hosted on apex.oracle.com

• CSS is fully customized

• Serves as master application for new projects

• Reduces ramp up time drastically

IAB APEX Framework

Scenario

• Basic setup of a project (table auditing, error messaging, …)

• Starting point = generated ddl-script from data modeler

IAB APEX Framework

Demo IAB APEX Framework

New APEX 4.0 features

APEX advisor

• Create daily scheduled job

Dynamic actions

Plug-ins

Integrated jQuery

What are our goals ?

Reduce risk (= budget)

QA cycle and Open Source Software

Reduce time

APEX framework and new APEX 4.0 features

Offer high quality

Software factory

Software factory

Assembly line with high software throughput

Software factory

Only for Java / .Net ?

Continuous integration

APEX development framework

QA cycle

SOFTWARE FACTORY

Conclusions

Cost-efficient

• Quality Assurance cycle

• APEX combined with Open Source Software

Fast

• APEX framework: minimize project ramp up & maintenance time

• New APEX 4.0 features (more declarative, dynamic actions, …)

High Quality

• Software factory (requirements, PM, code, release management)

One final thought …

A hammer doesn’t build a house, the person swinging the hammer does.

It’s all in how you use the tools available.

Questions