Axa Assurance Maroc - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
Inter Access OBUG 2010-06-17 APEX maturity level
1. The maturity level of APEX
Patrick Hellemans – Competence Manager Technology
2. Once upon a time …
There was an assignment from your CEO
Deliver a new application :
Cost-efficient
Fast
High quality
3. Is Oracle APEX mature enough?
Should we even consider APEX as a valid option?
4. 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
6. 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.”
7. 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.”
9. 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
10. Reduce budget
Oracle APEX is a free option of the db
Architecture can be extended with OSS components
Low hanging fruit / quick wins
11. 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)
16. (OSS) Architecture
APEX Development Architecture
jQuery Framework
Selenium UI tester
Hudson Build engine
Maven Build manager
Oracle SQL Developer IDE
Subversion Versioning control
Apache Tomcat + APEX listener Application Server
Oracle Data modeler DM
Oracle DB + APEX Database
17. jQuery
JavaScript framework
Less coding, more productivity
Adds very visual features
Some examples:
• jQuery Accordion
• AJAX zoom
18. 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
19. 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
20. IAB APEX Framework
Scenario
• Basic setup of a project (table auditing, error messaging, …)
• Starting point = generated ddl-script from data modeler
22. New APEX 4.0 features
APEX advisor
• Create daily scheduled job
Dynamic actions
Plug-ins
Integrated jQuery
23. 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