Beginning Oracle® Application Express

1.4. What Is Oracle Application Express?

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.

Figure 1-1. Figure 1-1

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 ...