Oracle releases APEX platform as a service

Oracle is releasing its APEX low-code development platform as a managed cloud service that developers can use to build data-driven enterprise applications.

Oracle APEX Application Development expands on two decades of APEX functionality used by 500,000 developers as a browser-based service for creating modern web and mobile apps.

While the original APEX application development platform was only available as part of the Oracle Database, the new service is available as a standalone service and works with a variety of applications.

Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the service starts at US$360 per month, providing support for more than 500 users and unlimited applications, and scales as additional capacity is needed.

A recent study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without having to learn complex, full-stack technologies.

Developers interested in declarative development instead of complex traditional coding can start building low-code applications for free using the new APEX Application Development service, which is included with Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Applications built and deployed using the APEX Application Development service benefit from high security, scalability, availability and performance provided by Oracle Autonomous Database.

"Oracle continues to support developer communities and the new APEX service is the latest example, enabling citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy beautiful, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort," says Oracle database server technologies executive vice president Andrew Mendelsohn.

"APEX is powerful enough to build the vast majority of business applications. Building data-driven applications with traditional coding should now be the exception rather than the rule.

The APEX service is also pre-configured with Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) and SQL Developer Web.

Developers can utilise ORDS to create custom REST APIs against their application data and SQL Developer Web to compose SQL queries and graphically model data.

If the business requires traditional coding against the database beyond what can be done in APEX, then developers can upgrade the service to a full Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database with Oracle APEX that supports the full Oracle Database client APIs, SQL*Net, and Autonomous Data Guard.

The Oracle APEX architecture provides tight integration with the database, enabling a 10x reduction in round trips between the application and the database, resulting in faster response times for end-users of data-driven applications.

Additionally, APEX allows application developers to fully exploit the power and simplicity of SQL.