Introducing Oracle Application Express

Introducing Oracle Application Express
Welcome to the world of Oracle technology. The book you are holding will give you all you need
to start creating powerful, flexible, highly productive applications for yourself and your users.
And the software included with this book will give you the path to even greater capabilities through a
broad range of Oracle software. You are going to like it here.
This chapter will introduce you to the core technology you will be using to create applications, Oracle
Application Express. The rest of the book will walk you through the process of creating an application
with a hosted version of this product, finishing up with information on expanding your environment
with packaged applications and migrating existing applications to your new platform.
But first, a few basic questions and their answers.
What I s O racle A pplication E xpress?
The focus of this book, like its title, points to Oracle Application Express. What exactly is Oracle
Application Express, also known as Oracle APEX?
Oracle Application Express is a rapid application development (RAD) tool built on Oracle technology. Oracle
APEX runs in an Oracle database instance and comes as a no-cost option with all Oracle databases.
APEX runs entirely in a browser and does not require any software to be loaded onto your client machines.
You develop your applications from a browser-based environment, as shown in Figure 1-1, and deploy
your applications to a browser-based environment.
Oracle Application Express is a declarative development tool. As you will see throughout this book,
APEX development consists of assigning values for properties which describe the various components
of your applications. The Oracle APEX environment does the rest for you.
For most components, you will use wizards to guide you through the process of creating those components.
After this initial creation, you have access to these properties to modify or shape the operation of
your applications, combining ease-of-use and productive maintenance in the same development tool.
All APEX development is data-driven. Tight integration with the Oracle database which hosts APEX
means that your applications will naturally flow from your data designs. For instance, APEX applications
automatically understand and implement relationships between tables, generating fully-featured applications
without additional programming overhead.
Oracle Application Express is an all-in-one development tool. You use the same techniques to create
forms, reports, and charts, as well as integrating these components together with navigation methods.
Your Oracle APEX environment gives you all you need to create virtually any application through an easy
declarative development process. However, APEX is also extensible, so you can use HTML to modify the
presentation of your APEX-generated client interfaces and Oracle’s standard PL/SQL procedural language
to supply additional logical operations on the back end.
When you start to use Oracle APEX, you will quickly discover that you are not alone. The Oracle
Technology Network (OTN) has a vibrant community of APEX users and experts, who regularly contribute
leading to continual improvement in best practices and technical solutions. In addition, you will
find a large collection of application packages that have already been created with APEX, readily available
for you to integrate in with your own applications.
Last, but certainly not least, Oracle Application Express gives you a way to protect the investment you
have in all those personal applications spread throughout your organization. You can upload data from
an Excel spreadsheet with a few simple mouse clicks, moving crucial information into an Oracle database.
You can even generate a complete application to interact with that data with a few more clicks,
completing the task in less than 10 minutes.
Oracle also provides a migration tool to help you move your Access applications to Oracle APEX, migrating
from a personal database with limited scalability to the world’s most powerful database.
Ready to start yet? This book contains all you will need to jump into the world of APEX-created applications.
But first, a little bit about the application you will be creating in the remainder of this book.