Here is a recent press release from our partner Insum Solutions inc.:
A couple things to observe:
- The customer, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, decided upon an Oracle Application Express solution before putting it out for bid.
- The application (over 100 pages, 1,500 companies, 3,000 contacts, 5,000 students) is certainly more than an Excel or Access replacement application.
8 comments:
Joel,
I can verify that APEX is VERY usefull when building real (and large) IT systems. We are currently building an APEX system for a Danish client, and have 200 screens (after 3 months). The total number of screens will be 600-700, and is estimated to be ready in the summer 2011.
Brgds
Martin
Hi Joel
Our main APEX application has just under 400 screens (used to be more), with 60,000 contacts.
I'm sure people have much larger APEX apps than that, but it does agree with your point that APEX happily scales as much as the database scales.
Mark
Hi Joel,
Excel replacement? Haha! That reminds me of the HTMLDB 1.5 time in 2004/2005, when we build Dance-tunes.com with a back-end of more than 150 screens, Reports integration, etc. Even the whole shop was build in a dynamic region.
You could also point at the first customer quote on http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/overview/index.html. An application of more than 1500 Forms, replaced by APEX. Also a 3500 Forms application will be replaced.
Regards and keep up the good work,
Learco
While I totally agree with this post & the respective comments, I think that this statement: Excel or Access replacement it taken too lightly in general.
We have many customers who we have replaced their Excel or Access applications. That sounds so cute when you say it, but in reality, these Excel and Access applications were mission critical, enterprise-wide systems. All of the businesses depended on these systems to function on a daily basis.
And these systems were not tracking who was supposed to buy the bagels for the Friday meeting; they were being used for multi-million dollar projects in support of even larger organizational goals.
In almost every case, the customer was at a dead end. They knew Excel & Access were well past their limitations, but could not afford the downtime and/or the cost to migrate to other technologies. Thus, they chose to use APEX, as both the time & cost were significantly lower than any alternatives.
So, is APEX only good for Excel & Access replacement? Of course not. It is capable of so much more, as evidenced by Joel's post and the other comments. But until all of the Excel & Access that need replacing are replaced, it will be good at that, too.
- Scott -
Scott,
Make no mistake - the problems of small mission-critical applications in Excel and Access are abound in every enterprise, even my own. And I personally don't mind the "Excel or Access replacement" reputation of APEX, because that opens the door. And once people start using it for these smaller applications, they quickly realize it can do much more.
My blog post was targeted more at the CIO who I recently presented to, and he began with "show me what you've got, because I hear this is only good for small applications." It's for the corporate IT architect (http://joelkallman.blogspot.com/2010/05/oracle-application-express-and.html) who, out of ignorance, deemed Application Express for "quick and dirty applications that don't scale." I'm simply trying to correct the false impression that it's solely good for small applications, but then you quickly reach an upper bound. There's nothing like tangible evidence to refute this conjecture.
Joel
I know of an Access 2003 based application (files on a network shared drive) that was working fine until some users decided to upgrade their PCs to Office 2007 and use the application. The Access database file(s) were automatically upgraded to 2007 format and lo and behold the Office 2003 users can no longer use the application. Wow!
I know of an Access 2003 based application (files on a network shared drive) that was working fine until some users decided to upgrade their PCs to Office 2007 and use the application. The Access database file(s) were automatically upgraded to 2007 format and lo and behold the Office 2003 users can no longer use the application. Wow!
I've just spent the last 6 months successfully delivering a 90 screen APEX application which my US and UK based client is very happily using to manage its PCI compliant Enterprise Role Management system. They are extremely pleased the way APEX performs and how easy and quick it is to adapt and maintain. Another big plus was that it also uses LDAP for authentication.
Kind regards,
Tony Quinn
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