GeneXus vs. Oracle APEX

Develop a large and complex product, integrated with multiple tourism service providers, reservation systems, and e-commerce sites, with constant needs to adapt to changes and innovation in business and technology, with a small development team that must have a lot of business knowledge

It is appropriate for database application development supporting data driven processes, online transaction processing, BI/reports/analytics ... for addressing about any business data processing need I can think of. Oracle Application Express is fantastic for creating beautiful rich user interfaces with support for all major browsers rendering well on a range of devices. It is less appropriate for applications requiring native low level access to device peripherals and is less appropriate for applications that must execute offline without network/internet connection to supporting application and database servers.

Incentivized

• It allows to focus on the solution instead of seeing technical or implementation limitations as it is multiplatform.
• Development times are shorter due to its easy implementation and on the same platform manage the database, services and front.
• Being multiplatform allows us to implement the solution in different technologies.

• Easy upgrade path from Forms, allowing reuse of code and a low learning curve for Forms developers.
• Very quick to develop in. Ideal for prototyping or iterative development which is how we usually work.
• Comes with cross browser and mobile compatibility out of the box.
• Easy to incorporate other web technologies.
• Development environment runs straight from a browser. This has proved to be a life saver when issues crop up on a weekend.

Incentivized

• Some errors at building time that are difficult to figure out. In the deployment and executions, sometimes you get errors not easy to figure out.
• Now it's fast, but when you create a large solution, it slows down.

• Perhaps is our problem, since we haven’t explored it deeply, but I think that a better portability to mobile devices would help the adoption of APEX.
• Applications weren’t as light as we thought, and we had to move the APEX server to the same data center where our data base was running, due to performance issues. When we started, we supposed that that situation would not be an issue.
• At least in Argentina and Brazil, you can not find as many programmers with experience in APEX as you can find with other technologies.

Incentivized

I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.

Incentivized

Usability of the tool by a developer who is well trained in the use of GeneXus and with good judgment is excellent. It allows them to know good practices in the generation of code for the database as well as for the backend and the frontend. It allows us to achieve better standardization within the development team and to present solutions and solve complex problems in a very simple way.

its easy to use as a developer and applications designed using apex are easy and intuitive to use as an end user. Even non-coders can build good applications, the more code you can write the more you can enhance the application but you can get up and running quickly with almost no technical know how.

Incentivized

Sometimes the support takes a little while, but in the end they always have good answers and the people who answer you are very prepared even for questions outside of GeneXus.

Incentivized

Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.

Incentivized

Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Incentivized

GeneXus has a wider approach in terms of the platform it supports. It has been in the market evolving with technology changes for more than 30 years. It has a better business model for the users, instead of charging for the amount of developments we make or the amount of users we have, it only charges per developer station.

Obviously Oracle Application Express cannot replace WebLogic in terms of creating domains but it is not designed to do that. We can use this tool to prototype and later develop a product using the Oracle WebLogic platform. We selected Oracle Application Express due to the ease of learning, and not having to buy licenses to use it.

Incentivized

• Being able to work with a multidisciplinary but small team of professionals with a lot of focus on the needs of the business
• GeneXus to take care especially the permanent evolution of the technology

• In the mid-size organization, we had a BI tool that had a significant license cost involved. With Oracle back-end we were able to switch to APEX and move all reporting at literally zero cost.
• For Oracle PL/SQL users the learning curve is very quick and easy, there are ready templates that you can start with and eventually create complex reports.
• You can track authorization and authentication on data editing and usage. High performance as it is native oracle sql codes.
• Centralized data capturing, makes your datawarehouse writable for lookup tables or reference tables.

Incentivized