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Oracle Application Express (APEX) -- A SWOT Analysis

Patrick Cimolini
SkillBuilders, Inc

SWOT -- Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats

Inside the box development

  • declarative
  • sql or pl/sql
  • Fast
  • delivers more than CRUD operations
  • relies on Oracle testing
Outside the box development
  • Programatic
  • results that can't be achieved declaratively
  • Advanced: PL/SQL, html, CSS and javascript
  • increased time,cost,risk
Apex Strengths
  • Rapid Application Development 
    • Pages
      • data loading
      • charts
      • trees
    • Components
      • web services
      • security
  • Declarative environment
    • wizards do 80% of work
    • 20% customizable
    • no compilations necessary
  • Few Moving Parts
  • easy to install
  • Stable and reliable
    • pl/sql based
    • as stable as your database
  • Supports Desktop, Responsive and Mobile Interfaces
  • Community Support
APEX Weakness
  • Declarative Environment
    • Property inter-relationships can be confusing
    • refactoring can be hard/painful
  • One datasource per declarative tabular form
  • One Interactive reports per page
  • Some weaknesses will be addressed in future version
  • PDF Report Generation unavailable without BI Publisher
    • alternatives
      • Jasper REports
      • pl/pdf
      • APEX Listener
      • Oracle Reports
  • Hardcoded limitations
    • 200 items per page
    • varchar2(4000)
    • pl/sql variable size 32k
  • Security
    • vulnerable to usual web-tier issues
      • sql injection
      • cross-site scripting
      • etc
    • Book: Hands on APEX Security by Wiley
    • Book: Expert Apex Security by Spendolini
    • Automated security checkers
    • Branding is hard
    • Components are Not Objects
      • APEX Subscription Model mitigates, sort of
    • Version Control is hard
      • possible, but tedious
    • Testing can be challenging
    • Debugging
      • hard to find root cause
APEX Opportunities
  • Enterprise-ready
  • ERP BoltOn
  • Spreadsheet and FILE DB Centralized
    • eliminate duplicate data
  • Lower Hardware costs
    • eliminate desktop hardware
APEX Threats
  • Next Big Thing...
  • Web Security
    • policies to block web access to data
  • Migration to non-oracle database
  • discontinuation of APEX from Oracle
    • not really a threat, myth
  • Programmer acceptance
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