ApEx: What is it? Surprisingly it seems, very few Oracle professionals know about ApEx. At WellCare, no one knew about it. Many others I have talked to have no idea what it is.

How can this be?

I'm hard-pressed to believe I am an early adopter. I like to think of myself as such, but perception and reality are two totally different things.

In a nutshell, ApEx (or Application Express, aka HTMLDB) is a rapid application tool that allows you to quickly build web based applications on top of an Oracle database. If I remember correctly, it was initially billed as the Microsoft Access killer.

It is also the front end for Oracle XE.

I've personally built 3 (professional, i.e. paid for) ApEx applications. One for my former day job with 350 pages (1.5 years to build and maintain), one for my fellow baseball alumni at the University of Florida, and one for my now defunct business, CABEZE.

I believe the question I get most often is: "Can you format it?"

Which I take to mean can you make it pretty or design it anyway you want?

The answer to that is a resounding "Yes!"

So, what follows is a list of ApEx applications for you to evaluate on style and design (borrowed from the unofficial ApEx wiki housed at shellprompt):

• Dance Tunes - arguably the best designed ApEx application out there.


• AskTom - We all know, or should know, this site. 40,000 page hits a day on a 4 CPU box.


• Metalink - In my opinion not the best implementation of ApEx, but it's a busy site.


• Shellprompt - host your applications here for a very reasonable price.


• View other examples here

In summary, you can do with ApEx what you can do with any other web tool/environment. Want AJAX? Done. CSS? Done.

You're only limited by your imagination.

(Polls are fun...I'll stop apologizing for it soon)

Labels: apex, development, oracle

  ¶ 5/12/2008 07:34:00 PM