Oracle APEX vs. Oracle Java SE

Based on our organization's experience, Oracle APEX is a versatile and powerful tool, but its suitability depends on specific business needs, technical requirements, and the nature of the application being developed. Scenarios where Oracle APEX fits well: Business Process Automation/Workflows Reporting and Dashboards for Data Analytics AI based systems such as Select AI Chatbots for data insights based on LLMs Native-like Mobile Applications using PWA feature of APEX Scenarios where Oracle APEX may be less appropriate: Very Complex and highly interactive applications Use cases based on a non-oracle Database

Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.

Incentivized

• 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

• Since Java runs on a virtual machine, it's generally considered to be agnostic of the hardware it's running on. It allows for deployment across a mix of hardware setups with the same binary.
• Lots of literature, third party libraries, support forums, and books have been devoted to Java in general, making it a great language to use to support the business.
• Backwards compatibility has been an important strength of Java for us. Legacy code that isn't ready to be retired yet can still run on our newer setups despite using older versions of OJSE.

Incentivized

• 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

• Oracle java SE is more memory intensive as compared to some of the other programming languages. It would be great if it can be optimized for memory.
• Licensing cost could be reduced to make it more affordable.
• Java's GUI frameworks are not very capable.

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

Oracle APEX has delivered a strong positive ROI by significantly reducing development time, lowering costs, and improving operational efficiency through automation and real-time reporting. While there are some limitations around frontend flexibility and DevOps, the overall business value—especially in data-driven enterprise applications—has been substantial.

Incentivized

The language is fluent and has good support from a number of open source and commercial IDEs. Language features are added every 6 months, although long-term service releases are only available every 3 years. It would be nice if some of the older APIs were depreciated with more pressure to move to the new replacement APIs (e.g. File vs. Path), but transitions to new features are generally well implemented.

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

Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.

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

Our company was preparing a comparison of Oracle APEX against other low-code technologies. The focus was primarily on Mendix and Microsoft Power Apps. As with any technology, each platform has its pros and cons. I would choose Oracle APEX because clients often already have an Oracle database, but they don't always realize they can use it with Oracle APEX. This easily accessible platform is a great web-based interpretation of the database.

We choose Java as our system has multiple sub-applications that have different purposes and architecture including back-end applications, front-end UI, front-end Rest API, and Selenium Automation tests. They are deployed in Windows and Linux, communicate with each other using Rest API, RMI and Queue Message and need to support different deployment environment from Dev, Test, UAT to Production so using Java allows us to have a common standard from development, build and deployment for all applications.

Incentivized

• There have been numerous cases where solution development using Oracle's "RAD Stack" (ORDS, RDBMS & APEX) has saved many ten's of thousands of dollars in cost that would have otherwise been incurred by following vendor recommendation and/or other alternatives.
• Impact on overall business objectives has been completely positive: low cost of maintenance, seamless easy upgrades, reduced development time

Incentivized

• We didn't need to spend more time and resources on developing apps for each OS. Our Java application worked perfectly on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
• Our customers aren't fully satisfied with the performance of our application, specifically load up times.
• We didn't need to purchase training courses for our software developers. Each of them were already well-versed in using Java SE.

Incentivized