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Hey there,
So I've been heavily focused on design/development using web technology for the last few years (php/mysql, javascript, etc), and I'm a bit hesitant to start learning C++.. At the same time, I see it as a potentially enjoyable learning experience.
To keep things brief, right now I'm developing an online app that plots out certain locations on a map, and you can sort through these locations and do a bunch of other nifty things..sorry to be vague. The point is: I don't see any real advantages of making this an actual "app" when the entire functionality of the app itself can do quite fine through the modern mobile browser..
Not to mention that, by living in a browser, it's much less proprietary
So, my question is: Is there any way to make a simple app that's basically porting the user to my site? I guess it'd be convenient that as an app, the user has a nice little icon to click on when they do need to access it..
Android development relies heavily on Java. So you are all ready on the right track.
However if you just want to make an app that brings people to your website, running javascript I am guessing, this is easy to do with android.
Android supports the webkit browser and has a view group called WebView. Your app can be nothing more than a shortcut on a desktop that opens a webview directly pointed to your website. It could add other options to point to other parts of your website like bookmarks.
WebView webview = new WebView(this);
setContentView(webview);
weview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
webview.loadUrl("yoursiteurlgoeshere);
A lot of apps on the market are actually based around a WebView. There are other classes that allow you more control over the view, like whether links are opened in the webview or in a new browser, or whether the user is allowed to use the resize options, etc.
Welcome to Android.
There is a massive article on exactly this type of idea. It discusses a number of different things and is well worth the read if you are indeed interested in making a cross-phone web-app. It talks about an html5 facility in the works for creating such a thing as you describe, but it isn't quite universal yet.
Here is an article on making an iphone app in html5.
You can also use phonegap to port your design to andorid.
also, check out a jquery plugin calld jqtouch if you are interseted in developing touch capable applications quickly.
If you are worried about speed and the issue of internet connectivity, you can use html5 local storage features which are available on both android and itouch. Ibm has a great series on these issues and part 2 covers local storage.
No. The problem with web technology on a mobile device is the delay. You are far away from the server, so a lot of the things you can easily do with a normal client creates a very bad user experience on a mobile device. The roundtrip time is simply too large. You have to move much more functionality to the client. This client is also less powerfull, and tends to have limits on caching large elements
How is this related to C++?
There is also a C++ API which is only recently available. Google calls it the NDK (Native Development Kit). Information about it can be found here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html
I personally haven't developed using the NDK. The only real reason someone would really need to would be to write a high-performance application that can't stand the overhead of the Java JVM--which is getting more and more rare these days IMO.
As far as creating a simple app with a web container in it, see Phobos' response. That is exactly how I'd do it personally.
Is there a relatively easy way to display the output of a C++ program on a webpage? And I don't mean manually, in other words, you see it on a webpage as it runs not as in I make a code tag and write it in myself.
EDIT: Just so everybody can get this clear I am going to post this up here. I am NOT trying to make a webpage in C++. Please excuse me if this sounds spiteful or anything but I am getting a lot of answers relating to that.
Step one, get yourself a server-side language. Be that PHP, ASP, Python, Ruby, whatever. Get it set up so you can serve it.
Step two, find your language's exec equivalent. Practically all of them have them. It'll let you run a command as if it were from the command line, usually with arguments and capture the output. Here's PHP's:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
Of course, if you're passing user-input as arguments, sanitise!
I've just seen that you accepted Scott's answer. I usually wouldn't chase up a SO thread so persistently but I fear you're about to make a mistake that you'll come to regret down the line. Giving direct access to your program and its own built-in server is a terrible idea for two reasons:
You waste a day implementing this built-in server and then getting it to persist and testing it
More importantly, you've just opened up another attack vector into your server. When it comes to security, keep it simple.
You're far better having your C++ app running behind another (mature) server side language as all the work is done for you and it can filter the input to keep things safe.
You could write a CGI app in C++, or you could use an existing web server language to execute the command and send the output to the client.
You want to use Witty.
Wt (pronounced 'witty') is a C++
library for developing interactive web
applications.
The API is widget-centric and similar
to desktop GUI APIs. To the developer,
it offers complete abstraction of any
web-specific implementation details,
including event handling, graphics
support, graceful degradation (or
progressive enhancement), and pretty
URLs.
Unlike many page-based frameworks, Wt
was designed for creating stateful
applications that are at the same time
highly interactive (leveraging
techinques such as AJAX to their
fullest) and accessible (supporting
plain HTML browsers), using automatic
graceful degradation or progressive
enhancement.
The library comes with an application
server that acts as a stand-alone web
server or integrates through FastCGI
with other web servers.
I am not sure this is what you are looking for but you may want CGI You may want to look at this SO question, C++ may not be the best language for what you want to do.
based off the questions you posted Writing a web app like what you want is no simple task. What I would recommend is use some other library (this is one i found with a quick google) to get a web console on your server and give the user it is running under execute deny permissions on every folder except the folder you have your app installed.
This is still is a risky method if you don't set up the security correctly but it is the easiest solution without digging around too much on existing libraries to just have the application interactive.
EDIT --
The "Best" solution is learn AJAX and have your program post its own pages with it but like I said, it will not be easy.
It sounds like you want something like a telnet session embedded in a webpage. A quick google turns up many Java telnet apps, though I'm not qualified to evaluate which would be most ideal to embed in html.
You would set up the login script on the host machine to run your c++ app and the user would interact with it through the shell window. Note though that this will only work for pure command line apps. If you want to use a GUI app in this way, then you should look into remote desktop software or VNC.
It may be worth looking into Adobe's "Alchemy" project on Adobe Labs
This may help you with what you're trying to achieve.
:)
Are you looking for something like what codepad.org does? I believe they explain how they did it here.
There is a library called C++ Server Pages - Poco. I used it for one of my college project, its pretty good. There is also good documentation to get started with, u can find it here http://pocoproject.org/docs/
Background:
I have a new site in the design phase and am considering using ColdFusion. The Server is currently set-up with ColdFusion and Python (done for me).
It is my choice on what to use and ColdFusion seems intriguing with the tag concept. Having developed sites in PHP and Python the idea of using a new tool seems fun but I want to make sure it is as easy to use as my other two choices with things like URL beautification and scalability.
Are there any common problems with using ColdFusion in regards to scalability and speed of development?
My other choice is to use Python with WebPy or Django.
ColdFusion 9 with a good framework like Sean Cornfeld's FW/1 has plenty of performance and all the functionality of any modern web server development language. It has some great integration features like exchange server support and excel / pdf support out of the box.
Like all tools it may or may not be the right one for you but the gotchas in terms of scalability will usually be with your code, rarely the platform.
Liberally use memcached or the built in ehache in CF9, be smart about your data access strategy, intelligently chunk returned data and you will be fine performance wise.
My approach with CF lately involves using jQuery extensively for client side logic and using CF for the initial page setup and ajax calls to fill tables. That dramatically cuts down on CF specific code and forces nice logic separation. Plus it cuts the dependency on any one platform (aside from the excellent jQuery library).
To specifically answer your question, if you read the [coldfusion] tags here you will see questions are rarely on speed or scalability, it scales fine. A lot of the questions seem to be on places where CF is a fairly thin layer on another tool like Apache Axis (web services) and ExtJs (cfajax) - neither of which you need to use. You will probably need mod-rewrite or IIS rewrite to hide .cfm
Since you have both ColdFusion and Python available to you already, I would carefully consider exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish.
Do you need a gradual learning curve, newbie-friendly language (easy for someone who knows HTML to learn), great documentation, and lots of features that make normally difficult tasks easy? That sounds like a job for ColdFusion.
That said, once you get the basics of ColdFusion down, it's easy to transition into an Object Oriented approach (as others have noted, there are a plethora of MVC frameworks available: FW/1, ColdBox, Fusebox, Model-Glue, Mach-ii, Lightfront, and the list goes on...), and there are also dependency management (DI/IoC) frameworks (my favorite of which is ColdSpring, modeled after Java's Spring framework), and the ability to do Aspect-Oriented Programming, as well. Lastly, there are also several ORM frameworks (Transfer, Reactor, and DataFaucet, if you're using CF8 or earlier, or add Hibernate to the list in CF9+).
ColdFusion also plays nicely with just about everything else out there. It can load and use .Net assemblies, provides native access to Java classes, and makes creating and/or consuming web services (particularly SOAP, but REST is possible) a piece of cake. (I think it even does com/corba, if you feel like using tech from 1991...)
Unfortunately, I've got no experience with Python, so I can't speak to its strengths. Perhaps a Python developer can shed some light there.
As for url rewrting, (again, as others have noted) that's not really done in the language (though you can fudge it); to get a really nice looking URL you really need either mod_rewrite (which can be done without .htaccess, instead the rules would go into your Apache VHosts config file), or with one of the IIS URL Rewriting products.
The "fudging" I alluded to would be a url like: http://example.com/index.cfm/section/action/?search=foo -- the ".cfm" is in the URL so that the request gets handed from the web server (Apache/IIS) to the Application Server (ColdFusion). To get rid of the ".cfm" in the URL, you really do have to use a URL rewriting tool; there's no way around it.
From two years working with CF, for me the biggest gotchas are:
If you're mainly coding using tags (rather than CFScript) and formatting for readability, be prepared for your output to be filled with whitespace. Unlike other scripting languages, the whitespace between statements are actually sent to the client - so if you're looping over something 100 times and outputting the result, all the linebreaks and tabs in the loop source code will appear 100 times. There are ways around this but it's been a while - I'm sure someone on SO has asked the question before, so a quick search will give you your solution.
Related to the whitespace problem, if you're writing a script to be used with AJAX or Flash and you're trying to send xml; even a single space before the DTD can break some of the more fussy parsing engines (jQuery used to fall over like this - I don't know if it still does and flash was a nightmare). When I first did this I spent hours trying to figure out why what looked like well formed XML was causing my script to die.
The later versions aren't so bad, but I was also working on legacy systems where even quite basic functionality was lacking. Quite often you'll find you need to go hunting for a COM or Java library to do the job for you. Again, though, this is in the earlier versions.
CFAJAX was a heavy, cumbersome beast last time I checked - so don't bother, roll your own.
Other than that, I found CF to be a fun language to work with - it has its idiosyncracies like everything else, but by and large it was mostly headache free and fast to work with.
Hope this helps :)
Cheers
Iain
EDIT: Oh, and for reasons best known to Adobe, if you're running the trial version you'll get a lovely fat HTML comment before all of your output - regardless of whether or not you're actually outputting HTML. And yes, because the comment appears before your DTD, be prepared for some browsers (not looking at any one in particular!) to render it like crap. Again - perhaps they've rethought this in the new version...
EDIT#2: You also mentioned URL Rewriting - where I used to work we did this all the time - no problems. If you're running on Apache, use mod_rewrite, if you're running on IIS buy ISAPI Rewrite 3.
do yourself the favor and check out the CFWheels project. it has the url rewriting support and routes that you're looking for. also as a full stack mvc framework, it comes with it's own orm.
It's been a few years, so my information may be a little out of date, but in my experience:
Pros:
Coldfusion is easy to learn, and quick to get something up and running end-to-end.
Cons:
As with many server-side scripting languages, there is no real separation between persistence logic, business logic, and presentation. All of these are typically interwoven throughout a typical Coldfusion source file. This can mean a lot more work if you want to make changes to the database schema of a mature application, for example.
There are some disciplines that can be followed to make things a little more maintainable; "Fusebox" was one. There may be others.
I am familiar with both Python and C++ as a programmer. I was thinking of writing my own simple web application and I wanted to know which language would be more appropriate for server-side web development.
Some things I'm looking for:
It has to be intuitive. I recognize that Wt exists and it follows the model of Qt. The one thing I hate about Qt is that they encourage strange syntax through obfuscated means (e.g. the "public slots:" idiom). If I'm going to write C++, I need it to be standard, recognizable, clean code. No fancy shmancy silliness that Qt provides.
The less non-C++ or Python code I have to write, the better. The thing about Django (Python web framework) is that it requires you pretty much write the HTML by hand. I think it would be great if HTML forms took more of a wxWidgets approach. Wt is close to this but follows the Qt model instead of wxWidgets.
I'm typically writing video games with C++ and I have no experience in web development. I want to write a nice web site for many reasons. I want it to be a learning experience, I want it to be fun, and I want to easily be able to concentrate on "fun stuff" (e.g. less boilerplate, more meat of the app).
Any tips for a newbie web developer? I'm guessing web app frameworks are the way to go, but it's just a matter of picking one.
I would go with Wt because:
You already know C++
It has a nice layout system, so you don't need to know lots of HTML
It is very well written and a pleasure to code in
Your deployed apps will handle 50 times the load of the python app on less hardware (from experience with pylons apps, 10,000 times the load of a plone app :P)
It has all the libraries that the guy in the first question says it doesn't and more
In built development webserver
Templating language
ORM
unit testing help
open-id and user+password authentication
A brilliant widget library
Web 2.0 isn't an after thought; it wasn't designed on a Request+Response model like all the python frameworks (as far as I know), but on an event driven interactive model.
It uses WebSockets if available
Falls back to normal ajax gracefully if not
Falls back to http for browsers like linx
It is more like coding a gui app than a web app, which is probably what you're used to
It is statically typed and therefore less error prone. Does def delete(id): take an int or a string ?
The unit tests (on my apps at least) take 10-100 times less time than my python app unit tests to run (including the compile time)
It has a strong and friendly community. All my email list posts are answered in 0-3 days.
If you'd like to avoid writing HTML, you could try GWT. However, in my experience, using an intermediate framework to generate HTML and ECMAScript never works anywhere near as well as hand-writing the pages.
[edit] nikow mentions in the comments that Pyjamas is a port of GWT to Python.
Regarding the language, if given the choice between C++ and Python I would pick Python 100% of the time. Even ignoring the obvious difference in abstraction between those languages, Python simply has more useful libraries than C++. You don't have to write your own development-oriented web server -- Django comes with one. You don't need to write a custom template library -- Python has Genshi. Django comes with a capable ORM layer, or for even more control you can use SQLAlchemy. It's barely a contest.
Django is good point to start web development it is great framework
If you look for C++ take a look on CppCMS, it is much more close to Django, it is not like Wt that mimics Qt.
In any case, it is really depends on your needs. C++ can be used for embedded or high performance web applications, but for medium range web sites Django would be better. (and I'm developer of CppCMS)
I think you better go firt python in your case, meanwhile you can extend cppCMS functionalities and write your own framework arround it.
wt was a good idea design, but somehow not that suitable.
If you are exploring Python frameworks (based on the excepted answer I think you are) I think you really owe it to yourself to check out CherryPy. When you write CherryPy apps, you really are just writing Python apps. The framework gets out of your way in a real hurry. Your free to choose your own templating, ORM (if you choose to use ORM), etc. Seriously, take 10 or 20 minutes and give it a look.
The only reason you might want to use C++ over Python is when speed is paramount.
If this is going to be your first web-app, you'll probably be ok with just Python, and your development speed will be orders of magnitude better than with CPP.
Django's templating language is far from powerless, to me it actually seems very pythonic. You actually can write pure python in a template(although this is generally not recommended).
Even better, it's possible to replace Django's templating system with the one you like.
My personal favourite language for this is HAML.
Here's some data on this:
Is there a HAML implementation for use with Python and Django
Having looked several ones, like django, pylos, web2py, wt. My recommendation is web2py. It's a python version of "ruby on rails" and easy to learn.
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 maybe I'm wrong. I get the sense that Oracle Apex is for DBA with little or no programing knowledge to setup a web app quickly sort like MS Access for none programmer.
If you have Oracle Apex working experience, can you share your thought? From Wikipedia's entry, it doesn't seem like you need to know any programming language at all but just the PL/SQL?
edit: Is Oracle Apex scalable? Can it handle traffic like Facebook's size?
edit: after working nearly two years on Oracle Apex 3.2. I can safely said that I hate it and I don't see why anyone would want to create web app/page on browser, pl/sql and no way to do version control.
Thank.
Jack
Please note my experiences are with APEX 2.x-3.0.
I used Apex for a few internal apps over a 12 month period but eventually dumped it for ASP.NET.
Some Oracle evangelists claim it is capable of creating highly dynamic content on par with the more mainstream frameworks like ASP.NET/J2EE. Technically this is true, but then technically its also true that you could cross the atlantic in a one man canoe. If you are tempted to throw yourself into a APEX project of even moderate complexity then I suggest you look at the APEX sample of a simple discussion forum. Compare it to an ASP.NET MVC discussion forum sample or a RoR implementation.
Having said that:
The Good
Incredibly easy to generate a respectable web app with basic CRUD data entry, simple reporting and populate it with data. If you're the IT guy who's been tasked with consolidating a company's mess of Excel/Access dbs into a central DB/web environment then you should take a look at APEX, it very well suited for this task. If you expect the scope to grow to something of even moderate complexity then I would move straight to a more flexible framework.
If you are a DBA/PLSQL guru but have no experience with traditional web development you'll be well prepped to expose existing business logic in a web app without stuffing around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript if you dont want to.
APEX support forum has a ton of info and is well staffed by APEX devs.
The Bad
My experience with Apex began to go downhill when apps moved beyond CRUD data entry and required more dynamic and event driven behaviours.
The web based GUI is not cool. Debugging is painful.
Version Control? Who needs version control?
When you (inevitably) need to do anything outside the limited scope of the framework, you'll have to get your hands dirty with PL/SQL. Writing business logic against the database is fine, but generating HTML from PL/SQL procedures felt uncomfortably archaic in 2007.
Given the large number of sneaky places you can hide page and redirection logic, the program flow is both difficult to visualise and not naturally conducive to modular, separable and reusable code. OOP developers will be not be impressed. It's possible to have well structured maintainable applications with APEX but its harder than it should be. This is worlds away from MVC.
Unacceptable number of framework bugs in the versions I used. I'd hope this has improved with recent versions, but the paradigm of integrating the IDE into the APEX platform itself caused me some of the darkest, soul destroying debugging sessions of my life. As an example, I was trying to reproduce an intermittent bug that would cause a user to lose their session data. Using the session information popup I saw that occasionally the session data would change when it shouldnt have. I spent 2 days trying to find the error in my code with no luck. Near delirious, I noticed by pure chance that I could reproduce errorous session data in the debug window but the application itself wouldnt go into an error state. My heart sunk when I realised what might be happening. Oracle later confirmed that I'd found a bug in APEX that caused the session information window to intermittently show me data from a prior session. I'd wasted 2 days debugging a session related bug with a buggy session debug window. That was the last Apex app I built.
PL/SQL is not and will never be the Next Big Thing in web development. After working with APEX for a while I realised it wasnt going to make me a better web developer. Mastering APEX is really about PL/SQL. Thats fine if you plan to focus your career on Oracle technology, just be aware that APEX is so tangential to the direction of mainstream web technologies that the portable set of skills you can take from APEX to other web frameworks is minimal.
If you are considering APEX to provide simple web based data entry and reporting, its worth a look. If you are looking for an alternative to .NET/JAVA/PHP for dynamic web content and rich UI interaction I'd advise you to look elsewhere.
I read this page with great interest. Our development team has using Apex for about 2 years now, and I'd like to sum up our experience.
For building basic CRUD applications, Apex really is excellent. In fact I recommend you try it yourself. We did face some initial minor difficulties setting it up, but these seem to have been ironed out in the 3.2 release.
The good
Great for simple applications. If you app will grow in complexity, consider an alternative solution.
The built in templates mean your app looks quite professional (although some will debate this).
A good support forum and community, with plenty of eager people on hand to assist you.
Some superb built in controls. Love the graphs and reports (but see below).
The bad
The debugger is abysmal. If you have used Visual Studio (and even ancient versions of Microsoft Access), you will cringe at the debugger. No breakpoints, debug messages spewing out to screen in a big list, having to manually print debug messages to the screen. Horrible. The cause of many, many hours lost to support.
As soon as your application becomes complex or requires any rich functionality, you have to resort to Javascript and HTML / CSS hacks, which make debugging and support even more complicated (although you can use tools like Firebug or Visual Studio to assist with this).
We've encountered unexplained session state bugs, and stylesheets becoming 'detached' from the application without explanation - to name a couple of issues.
Supporting unfamiliar apps can be challenging, as it can be difficult to follow the page logic flow without a good debugger. And I don't buy the stock response of 'well - apps should be coded better'. Because in the real world, they aren't - especially when you're using a contractor.
Reports look good but not much good if you can't print them or export to PDF. Of course you can shell out for a reporting server, in the end we used another solution.
Overall
I would say by all means use Apex for simple CRUD apps. For anything of more than mild complexity go for .Net or Java. I wouldn't take any notice of the Wiki article on Apex as it's very skewed. Note how 'difficult to debug' (in my opinion the biggest failing) has been erased from the article.
Something to be very wary of as well is the ludicrous claim that you can quickly convert Access databases straight to Apex. Yes it will work if you Access DB is very, very simplistic. Anything moderately complex, forget it, as we found.
We would definitely not use it for web facing apps, only internal. There are simply too many difficulties doing things you would take for granted in say, .Net. I know there are sites out there such as AskTom, but these are not exactly complex. Will we see the next Facebook on it? I think not - although I am sure someone reading this will have a crack at it.
Apex is summed up in a previous comment - managers see the demos, and quickly buy in, convinced that they've found a silver bullet that will slash development times. I've had managers calling me and saying, we need a db app with 40 tables building in a week in Apex please - that's how far the myth has perpetrated. The reality is somewhat different. Yes some things are quicker, substantially quicker, but you will lose the time in other areas - debugging, support, and customisation.
Of course you are best deciding for yourself. Install it, give it a go, you may like it. But don't be fooled by the fast development time claims until you've given it a good going over on a realistic application.
I am involved in a huge project to migrate a 5000 module Oracle Forms application to APEX. This is an extreme use of APEX, but it's working just fine. It is a complete myth that APEX is suitable only for small internal apps built by DBAs, interns or end users: it is certainly suitable for those too (and more suitable than most other tools), but it can also be used to build extremely sophisticated applications.
To build a sophisticated application (rather than a default out-of-the box APEX one) you will need someone on the team with Javascript skills, and someone with CSS skills. But most developers will just need PL/SQL initially.
Is it scalable? Yes: probably more scalable than most other solutions! APEX adds very little overhead to the database server, and only the most minimal of application servers is required. "Facebook size"? I don't know for sure but I don't see why not, assuming you have an Oracle database on a machine large and powerful enough to handle "Facebook size" data and transaction volumes. Like any Oracle project, scalability is impeded mostly by bad database designs and poorly written SQL, not by the tool. Not many people ever find themselves building "Facebook size" systems though: are you?
APEX is a framework that uses the database and PL/SQL to produce web pages. If you can figure out what the output to the browser will need to be you can create it in APEX. If you find any part of the framework inhibiting you can write PL/SQL procedures and expose them to the web server directly but still take advantage of the security, logging, session state, etc that the APEX system manages for you.
You should know PL/SQL, SQL, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Sure the interface looks like a big data entry application but the data you enter will mostly be code snippets in each of these languages.
It scales as well as the database does. It typically uses Apache as a web server but is only used to serve static files and pass requests back to the database, where the web pages are created by the PL/SQL code in the APEX schema. You can use AJAX to minimize the size of the traffic traveling up and down the pipe. You can set caching for specific items, lists, page regions, pages, etc.
Since most things are pretty simple to do with the framework, naturally there will be some things that are a little more complicated to do within the framework. The color coding example given above might be something you do with CSS or maybe you would need to turn to print statements to produce the output you need. The thing is to learn the how the framework makes life easier and then when you hit a limit you can easily resort to more direct methods.
Coming from VB.Net you will miss the step by step debugging and the drag and drop. You will never miss the fact that some part of the page lifecycle will do a bind and reset the values you bound to an object in another part of the page.
Good luck.
Greg
I am a DBA and I never had to program with APEX or recently anything else (aside some bash scripting and custom SQL scripts for administration purposes) because my job is far away from developing applications (except being pain in the ass of developers that is). Of course my background is developer though and I do believe APEX is future for strictly Oracle based data centric programs.
Now the keyword here is data centric since I disagree with many other DBAs that all applications are data centric (you know the kind of DBAs who still think ODBC stands for ORACLE Database Connectivity). Of course all applications involve data but are all applications data centric? I doubt, just as I doubt APEX would be ever used for image processing or mobile gaming kind of apps. However, despite all the hype with RIA and Web 2.0 the fact is most of businesses around us are hungry for those plain old data centric applications and Oracle is best database around and I can assure you Oracle and APEX can handle much much more than Facebook scalability provided of course you have put the same amount of money as Facebook guys in underlying infrastructure.
By the way I also hate Oracle's design of APEX themes (awful unprofessional UI, just imagine it as main UI for a bank or airline business), limited capabilities (although that seems about to change in the future), many many more issues (professional PDF reporting without paying amount of Enterprise Database license for BI publisher??) but most of all marketing of APEX as substitute of Access or Excel because it gives bad impression it is for kids and I can assure you my friend I would never allow kids to touch my databases :)
You see, Oracle has a gem called PL/SQL which was perfected over the years to handle data in much more intutitive way than any other language. Now that gem is withering with slow death of Forms/Reports and I am positive no fresh graduate will ever bother learning it strictly for database stored procedures (just see the raging war between Java and .Net developers and you realize that once you touch curly brackets {} anything else becomes a heresy). Alas for thousands upon thousands of excellent PL/SQL developers APEX remains the only sanctuary where they can remain productive and develop outstanding data centric applications and without APEX PL/SQL will surely become next COBOL. This is why PL/SQL community will drive Oracle to transform APEX to grade A platform much more powerful than what we are seeing today. Either that or say bye bye to PL/SQL and join curly brackets front (by the way it is never a bad idea to at least try different technologies when you are developer, at least you get an idea why it is not neccessarily greener at the other side).
I'm not sure why you don't consider PL/SQL a programming language...
APEX is ideal for internal applications where you want a lightweight UI on top of your data. You can build that rather easily without having to write any code.
I also find APEX to be very good for developing smaller customer-facing applications. I wouldn't want to build a giant application that is going to have hundreds of developers working on it using APEX. But if you have a case where 3 or 4 developers are building a smallish site, APEX is likely to be just as good as Java/PHP/ASP.Net/whatever assuming equally skilled developers. If your developers all have lots of ASP.Net expertise, for example, they're going to have a learning curve to write APEX apps. You'd have at least the same level of difficulty, though, if you had a bunch of PL/SQL developers try to learn how to build ASP.Net sites.
That Apex is only suitable for non-programmers and DBAs is an unfortunate misconception. We have used it to build several line-of-business, mission-critical, customer-facing web applications.
The GUI is handled by Apex page templates (HTML), CSS and a bit of Javascript to enhance the user experience. All business logic is placed in PL/SQL packages. This is key to making your application easy to maintain, and to reuse the business logic in other Apex applications and from other client tools, such as C# WinForms, Delphi, Java apps, etc.
As for performance, the Apex engine adds little overhead and the response times and scalability of your application depends largely on the quality of your SQL queries (and the data model). Think about it this way: With Apex, the only thing between your user and the database is a thin layer of PL/SQL. It's only common sense that this has to be faster than a typical .NET or Java application that has seventeen layers of complexity (typically including lots of web services and object-relational mapping layers) between the GUI and the database.
Don't put buisiness logic into Apex. Use it for presentation only.
If you put the code in the app your will not be able to maintain it, and you'll get RSI from all that clicking. I always create a wrapper layer, and in the oracle world follow Tom Kytes advise - put the business logic as close to the data as possible. This also means that you PL/SQL modules can be called by other systems etc - and best of all - the real meat of your applicaiton will be in straight text files that can be manipulated with your favourite text editor / IDE.
Create a view with all of the data to be retrieved for each screen.
Create a single wrapper package for all CRUD operations. (Thats is Create, Read, Update and Delete I presume)
In short:
DO NOT PUT YOUR APP LOGIC IN APEX.
Thats my advise . . . .
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.
On my project, we use Oracle APEX for internal views of our system. It works very well for that purpose.
There's no programming required. PL/SQL and even SQL are optional. As a result, our DBA and operator can mold the view to their liking.
On the downside, if there's a feature you need which is not programmed into the system, it's very hard to add it. For instance, we wanted to color-code our output and have not been able to do that.
I would not want to have a customer-facing site built on APEX.
On the question of scalability, one nice thing about APEX is that it's built on Oracle. Focus on writing good SQL and designing the tables properly, and things should scale just fine. I'd be more concerned about getting enough users for scalability to be the problem.
Enjoyed very much reading the thread from top to bottom, as it felt like a hot debate. To remind the start of the thread it started as "I believe we're moving to Oracle Apex for future development..." jack being a .NET programmer was worried about the decision of his management and thought of finding counter facts for Oracle Apex which ultimately ended up washing the dirty linen (of all web frameworks) in public.
Despite the fact that the victim was Oracle Apex, the same could happen to either .net or j2ee if the debate was between .net and j2ee gurus. My point is all frameworks has their own pros and cons. That is why actually we have so many. Its a waste of time debating over what is more important to live (sex, food or water?) Naturally we select the most appropriate item when that is needed.
Oracle APEX suites for environments where you have lots of Oracle Databases and when you really have Pl/SQL enthusiasts. Can really build rich, complex, web 2.0 Data Centric applications really easily (Apex 4.0) but debugging and version control is still a mess and you also will have to stick to an Oracle database(yes you can have workarounds but not robust).
If you'd like to see an external web site done in APEX, I suggest looking at the Oracle Tools Users Group site, or Ask Tom. Both are large, frequently used sites with much customization.
Your impression from the Wikipedia article is correct. The only programming knowledge you need is PL/SQL. If most of your site will be simple reports, you don't even need to write the SQL queries, and the wizard interface will build the query and the output for you. If you want cool client side work, you will need to know CSS and Javascript. The PL/SQL is only for the more complex data validation.
I disagree. It is not only suitable to devs with a few developing skills or DBAs.
We actually produce highly customized apps using CSS templates of our own, a lot of dynamic actions and interaction (using jQuery and several frameworks), fine-tuned security, our own apex plugins and complex PL/SQL processes.
Of course, I am using apex > 4.0.
So, you can build complex apps (we have up to 100 different processes/validations and dynamic actions per pages) if needed. And it could require strong programming skills to code properly in javascript and PL/SQL(OOP) or Java stored procedures + a good knowledge of SQL to define opimized queries of up to 500 lines of code using recursive SQL and some funny features.