The Evolution of an APEX Application

Last week saw another milestone here at Inoapps as yet another customer went live with our Legacy Data Archiving Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite (as discussed on previous blog posts about retiring Oracle E-Business Suite and archiving legacy data). Whilst in itself this is not remarkable - there are customers going live with our solutions all the time - it did give time to pause and reflect on the evolution of this application, and how it is a use case that really brings to life the power and flexibility of Oracle Application Express (APEX) as a Low-Code platform.

First, some quick history. We originally built a solution to deliver a legacy application for a customer back in 2013.  An organization that we provided Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) support services to had acquired another business, and the Inoapps team were carrying out the migration exercise from their legacy platform into EBS. In this case the legacy application was JD Edwards, and so the migration team lifted and shifted all open and recent transactions into EBS - but the customer wanted to retain read-only access to all of the historic data that was not being migrated. As time was of the essence, the Inoapps team proposed a lightweight APEX layer to allow basic interrogation of the historic data. The Low-Code nature of APEX allowed the team to deploy a solution in weeks, meeting the objectives of the project and requirements of the user community. With long-term regulatory commitments to support, that application is still in use eight years later.

From that initial deployment, the Inoapps team used the same framework as an accelerator on several custom developments, building out legacy archive applications for new customers, this time with EBS as the legacy application. As this reached a critical mass, the Inoapps Products team then took the framework that had been used to deliver those custom applications, and turn that into a fully productized solution, delivering a pre-built platform to enable read-only access for retired EBS instances, delivering low cost, highly flexible, business applications. Some of our customers were running very large databases with terabytes of data, and yet APEX continues to deliver highly efficient, optimized user performance.

Over the last year, the Inoapps Product team has used the latest APEX features to further extend the power and capabilities of the solution - delivering ad-hoc and custom reporting capabilities, data redaction and data level security features, along with an enhanced user interface to empower end-user navigation. In addition, the Inoapps team is using the very latest DevOps deployment principles to install new versions and releases of the software across multiple customers simultaneously, utilizing containers, scripting and virtualization to deliver at scale with efficiency.

In summary - the same Low-Code platform has been used to deliver many rapid custom solutions against large, complex database structures, and has then evolved into a productized solution, delivered at scale across multiple customers, whilst maintaining a low cost of ownership and support overheads. All this from a platform that has grown to become a considerable force in Oracle application development, and one we're proud of getting behind from day one.

Many organizations find it hard to deliver a solution for their legacy archive requirements - once again, Oracle APEX has been proven to be an excellent platform to solve this business challenge. Want to learn more? Ask Inoapps!