Why use Oracle Application Express for web app?

Question

I believe we\'re moving to Oracle Apex for future development. I\'ve read about Oracle Apex on wikipedia and it\'s pro and con. It seem to me the con outweigh the pro but ma

Answer 1

Oracle's Metalink support site was written in Apex, so it definitely CAN scale. They're migrating to a newer Flash-based support site now though. I understand they acquired that platform through an aquisition of another company, rather than building it in response to any Apex limits.

If you want 'super sexy' with any web-app, you'd probably need to go Flash/Silverlight/Air. Under that, any HTML based site, including an Apex one, can be prettied up with Javascript. The JQuery library will be included in with the next main version of Apex (4.0), though you can include that (or any other library) now.

The caching issue mentioned in the Wikipedia article has been addressed, though most installations would still put images and scripts on a conventional directory structure rather than serving them out of the database.

While you are locked into the Oracle database, I don't get the 'platform' lock "con" in the article. Oracle is available on Windows, Linux and AIX (amongst others). That's a lot less lock than ASP / SQL Server.