[geeks] Oracle's "Application Express" (aka HTMLDB) worth learning?

[Francois Dion]

On 9/9/06, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
> I have a customer now who is using Oracle.
>
> Though I think Oracle is large and unwieldy, I have to say that the
> full text indexing portion is pretty neat and probably quite useful.
>
> Oracle has a free version of Oracle 10g2 called "XE", and also bundles
> their browser-based build-a-web-app tool with it.
>
> Anyone have experience with this stuff?  Is it worth learning or should
> I stick to straight SQL / sqlplus / emacs ?
>
> Cordially
> Patrick Giagnocavo
> patrick at zill.net

It is definitely worth the time to go through the tutorial and decide
for yourself. Visual query builder is easy to use and I was able to do
feature rich support apps in no time flat. It takes longer to create
tables to support an app than to make it. Particularly if you use LDAP
already, you can have authorisation and authentication going really
quick. Or you can use the builtin authentication and your own
authorisation etc... I ended up building my own
authentication/authorisation to use what I already had in place for my
B2B app. You'll be able to create web based interactive drill down
form/reports/graphs really easily. But again, do go through the
tutorials and give yourself a week to explore Apex in your spare time.
You'll quite likely find it time well spent.

Francois