We shall not use APEX!?

During the weekend John Scott and I were discussing an article on Chris Muir’s blog. John commented on the article and posted his opinion on his blog (Carl Backstrom and Scott Spendolini posted also a very nice comment). I also added a comment to Chris’ post and promised to go into more detail on my blog soon.

Chris’ article “A career path for Oracle developers - consider JDeveloper!” is about the choice for JDeveloper as *the* tool for next generation Oracle development.

Do I share Chris’ opinion? No. I believe in all Oracle tools but IF I had to go to a deserted island with only one Oracle tool, I would choose the Oracle Database (as I get APEX free of charge with it ;-))!

If one tool was best for everything, Oracle wouldn’t have more tools… I strongly believe that APEX can do most of the development and is a true solution for most of the business problems of today. I also believe JDeveloper is a great tool and ADF has its place in this world too.
In my APEX projects I use also other tools like SQL Developer and JDeveloper! I really like the ERD, UML and PL/SQL-tools in JDeveloper.
Some years ago I made a production application in BC4J with JDeveloper. I liked this “new technology”, but when I look back, BC4J is already “old” and today you should probably go for ADF or JSF (if you would like to stay in the JAVA arena). Just to say that the JAVA arena is changing quickly, as for APEX it’s proven technology (SQL, PL/SQL, JavaScript, CSS, …)

The comparison.

Last week I read this article (in Dutch). That company did an internal competition: 4 teams, each team uses his favourite technology. They got one day and a half to develop a business case with as much functionalities as possible (in the time frame of that 1,5 day).

The goal of the game

• find the most suited tool to do RAD (Rapid Application Development).

The technology choices of the teams

• Oracle Designer, Oracle JDeveloper (with ADF), Adobe Flex Builder and APEX.

Most important area’s of the game

• user friendliness and security.

How could a team score points

• 80 business rules to implement from webservices, lovs, printing of pdf documents, authentication, calculation of positions etc.

The Game

• Oracle Designer / Developer Suite
  They got the back-end nicely up and running, but at the front-end there was still some work to do
• APEX
  The jury was impressed by their application, as they asked how much time they still need to make it a full application ;-) They got almost all back-end done and I can imagine that the front-end was nice and slick.
• JDeveloper and ADF
  They needed a lot of time to make their data controls (webservices, java-beans, pl/sql functions etc.). They would use these data controls as components in their application (by drag-drop). They also needed a lot of time to make all pages individual, as also multi-record and master-detail screens. Their architecture was nice, but 1,5 day was a bit too short for these guys, I think ;-)
• Flexbuilder
  This is a new tool of Adobe (I also did some testing with it, as you find in some other posts on this blog). It’s a nice tool, but these guys made such a complex architecture that they couldn’t get the prototype finished. So they retreated out of competition, but showed what it could do.

The Results

• The jury was unanimous on this: APEX won the match, but the jury added that changing the templates to a custom lay-out would take some time, which would compensate some of the time they were ahead of the others.

So, shall we *not* use APEX? Hell no!!

The people reading this blog more often know I’m a big fan of Oracle and APEX.
That won’t change that fast ;-)