Wednesday, December 03, 2014

From Zero to Hero....In About 2 Hours



This is an example of a real-world problem, an opportunistic one, being solved via a mobile application created with Oracle Application Express.

First, a brief bit of background.  Our son is 9 years old and is in the Cub Scouts.  Cub Scouts in the United States is an organization that is associated with Boy Scouts of America.  It's essentially a club that is geared towards younger boys, and teaches them many valuable skills - hiking, camping out, shooting a bow and arrow, tying different knots, nutrition, etc.  This club has a single fundraiser every year, where the boys go door-to-door selling popcorn, and the proceeds of the popcorn sale fund the activities of the Cub Scouts local group for the next year.  There is a leader who organizes the sale of this popcorn for the local Cub Scout group, and this leader gets the unenvious title of "Popcorn Kernel".  For the past 2 years, I've been the "Popcorn Kernel" for our Cub Scout Pack (60 Scouts).

I was recently at the DOAG Konferenz in Nürnberg, Germany and it wasn't until my flight home that I began to think about how I was going to distribute the 1,000 items to 60 different Scouts.  My flight home from Germany was on a Sunday and I had pre-scheduled the distribution of all of this popcorn to all 60 families on that next day, Monday afternoon.  Jet lag would not be my friend.

The previous year, I had meticulously laid out 60 different orders across a large meeting room and let the parents and Scouts pick it up.  This year, I actually had 4 volunteer helpers, but I had no time.  All I had in my possession was an Excel spreadsheet which was used to tally the orders across all 60 Cub Scouts.   But I knew I could do better than 60 pieces of paper, which was the "solution" last year.

On my flight home, on my iPad, I sketched out the simple 4-page user interface to locate and manage the orders.  As well, I wrote the DDL on my iPad for a single table.  Normally, I would use SQL Developer Data Modeler as my starting point, but this application and design needed to be quick and simple, so a single denormalized table was more than sufficient.



Bright and early on Monday morning, I logged into an existing workspace on apex.oracle.com.  I created my single table using the Object Browser in SQL Commands, created a trigger on this table, uploaded the spreadsheet data into this table, and then massaged the data using some DML statements in SQL Commands.  Now that my table and data were complete, it was now time for my mobile application!

I created a simple Mobile User Interface application with navigation links on the home page.  There are multiple "dens" that make up each group in a Cub Scout Pack, and these were navigation aids as people would come and pick up their popcorn ("Johnny is in the Wolf Den").  These ultimately went to the same report page but with different filters.



Once a list view report was accessed, I showed the Scout's name, the total item count for them, and then via a click, drill down to the actual number of items to be delivered to the Scout.  Once the items were handed over and verified, the user of this application had to click a button to complete the order.  This was the only DML update operation in the entire application.



I also added a couple charts to the starting page, so we could keep track of how many orders for each den had already been delivered and how many were remaining.



I also added a chart page to show how many of each item was remaining, at least according to our records. This enabled us to do a quick "spot check" at any given point in time, and assess if the current inventory we had remaining was also accurately reflected in our system.  It was invaluable!  And remember - this entire application was all on a single table in the Oracle Database.  At one point in time, 8 people were all actively using this system - 5 to do updates and fulfill orders, and the rest to simply view and monitor the progress from their homes.  Concurrency was never even a consideration.  I didn't have to worry about it.



Now some would say that this application:
  • isn't pixel perfect
  • doesn't have offline storage
  • isn't natively running on the device
  • can't capitalize on the native features of the phone
  • doesn't have a badge icon
  • isn't offered in a store

And they would be correct.  But guess what?  None of it mattered.  The application was used by 5 different people, all using different devices, and I didn't care what type of devices they were using.  They all thought it was rocket science.  It looked and felt close enough to a native application that none of them noticed nor cared.  The navigation and display were consistent with what they were accustomed to.  More importantly, it was a vast improvement over the alternative - consisting of either a piece of paper or, worse yet, 5 guys huddling around a single computer looking at a spreadsheet.  And this was something that I was able to produce, starting from nothing to completed solution, in about two hours.  If I hadn't been jet lagged, I might have been able to do it in an hour.

You might read this blog post and chuckle to yourself.  How possibly could this trivial application for popcorn distribution to Cub Scouts relate to a "real" mobile enterprise application?  Actually, it's enormously relevant.

  • For this application, I didn't have to know CSS, HTML or mobile user interfaces.
  • I only needed to know SQL.  I wrote no PL/SQL.  I only wrote a handful of SQL queries for the list views, charts, and the one DML statement to update the row.
  • It was immediately accessible to anyone with a Web browser and a smart phone (i.e., everyone).
  • Concurrency and scalability were never a concern.  This application easily could have been used by 1,000 people and I still would not have had any concern.  I let the Oracle Database do the heavy lifting and put an elegant mobile interface on it with Oracle Application Express.

This was a simple example of an opportunistic application.  It didn't necessarily have to start from a spreadsheet to be opportunistic.  And every enterprise on the planet (including Oracle) has a slew of application problems just like this, and which today are going unsolved.  I went from zero to hero to rocket scientist in the span of two hours.  And so can you.

A demo version of this application (with fictitious names) is here.  I left the application as is - imperfect on the report page and the form (I should have used a read-only display).  Try it on your own mobile device.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Is Oracle Application Express supported?


Time to clear up some confusion.

In the past 60 days, I have encountered the following:
  • Two different customers who said they were told by Oracle Support that "APEX isn't supported."
  • An industry analyst who asked "Is use of Oracle Application Express supported?  There is an argument internally that it cannot be used for production applications."
  • A customer who was told by an external non-Oracle consultant "Oracle Application Express is good for a development environment but we don't see it being used in production."  I'm not even sure what that means.
To address these concerns as a whole, let me offer the following:
  1. Oracle Application Express is considered a feature of the Oracle Database.  It isn't classified as "free", even though there is no separate licensing fee for it.  It is classified as an included feature of the Oracle Database, no differently than XML DB, Oracle Text, Oracle Multimedia, etc.
  2. If you are licensed and supported for your Oracle Database, you are licensed and supported (by Oracle Support) for Oracle Application Express in that database.  Many customers aren't even aware that they are licensed for it.
  3. If you download a later version of Oracle Application Express made available for download from the Oracle Technology Network and install it into your Oracle Database, as long as you are licensed and supported for that Oracle Database, you are licensed and supported (by Oracle Support) for Oracle Application Express in that database.
  4. Oracle Application Express is listed in the Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Technology Products document.

As far as the customers who believed they were told directly by Oracle Support that Oracle Application Express isn't supported, there was a common misunderstanding.  In their Service Requests to Oracle Support, they were told that Oracle REST Data Services (formerly called Oracle Application Express Listener, the Web front-end to Oracle Application Express) running in stand-alone mode isn't supported.  This is expressed in the Oracle REST Data Services documentation.  However, this does not pertain to the supportability of Oracle Application Express.  Additionally, a customer can run Oracle REST Data Services in a supported fashion in specific versions of Oracle WebLogic Server, Glassfish Server, and Apache Tomcat.  To reiterate - running Oracle REST Data Services in standalone mode is the one method which is not supported in production deployments, as articulated in the documentation - however, you can run it supported in Oracle WebLogic Server, Glassfish Server and Apache Tomcat.

Oracle Application Express has been a supported feature of the Oracle Database since 2004, since it first shipped as Oracle HTML DB 1.5 in Oracle Database 10gR1.  Every subsequent version of Oracle Application Express has been supported by Oracle Support when run in a licensed and supported Oracle Database.  Anyone who says otherwise is...confused.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 now available!

Just in time for the ever-awesome ODTUG KScope 14 conference...we are happy to announce the availability of Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2.  The response from Early Adopter 1 was overwhelming (with over 4,000 participants), and we look forward to the same great contributions from the APEX community for Early Adopter 2.  You can access the Early Adopter 2 at https://apexea.oracle.com.

As before, the authentication for Oracle Application Express requires an Oracle account.  This is the same account you would use for many Oracle sites, including the OTN Community discussion forums.  If you don't have an account, then simply follow the instructions on the login page to "Sign up for a free Oracle Web account".  However, ensure that you specify the same email address as your Oracle Web account when requesting a new workspace.

The Known Issues will be populated soon, as well the application to review your submitted feedback.  Our team has made tremendous strides since Early Adopter 1, and we continue to believe that APEX 5.0 will become a watershed release for APEX and the community.

Thank you for all of your support.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 is on the Horizon



Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 is on the horizon.  This also means that the current instance of Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 (https://apexea.oracle.com) is going away soon.  This involves deleting the current database and creating one anew.  Nothing will be migrated or saved.  To try out Early Adopter 2, you will need to sign up for a new workspace.  So if you have anything in your workspace in Early Adopter 1 that you would like to save, now is the time to copy it or export it.  Also understand that there is a good chance that application export files from Early Adopter 1 may not import or function properly in Early Adopter 2.

The response and feedback we've received from Early Adopter 1 has been extraordinary.  There were 4,164 workspaces and over 5,200 users who tried out Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1.  The suggestions and bug reports and feedback have all been enormously valuable, and for which the entire Oracle Application Express team is grateful.

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Oracle Application Express. Fast. Like a Veyron Super Sport.



A partner from the United Kingdom recently asked me for some statistics about apex.oracle.com, as I had authored something similar in a blog post back in 2009.  This gentleman was proposing a magazine article and sought some updated statistics.  Since I compiled this information for him, I reasoned it was worthwhile to also share this same information with the APEX community.

In the past 7 days on apex.oracle.com:
Total Page Views:              4,875,173
Distinct Applications Used:        5,842
Distinct Users:                    9,048
Total Number of Workspaces:       20,974
Total Number of Applications:     77,478
New Workspaces Approved:             904

As most people know, apex.oracle.com is the customer evaluation instance, for anyone on the Internet to come and "kick the tires" of Oracle Application Express.

However, what I find even more interesting is the internal instance of Oracle Application Express (apex.oraclecorp.com), hosted inside of Oracle for anyone in the company to come along and build applications, requiring nothing but a browser.  It is run and managed by professionals in Product Development IT.  It's used by virtually every line of business in the company (e.g., HR, Product Development, QA, Sales, Marketing, Real Estate & Facilities, Manufacturing & Distribution, just to name a few).  Instead of merely kicking the tires, these are real applications that the business depends upon, even if some of them are opportunistic applications:

In the past 7 days on apex.oraclecorp.com:
Total Page Views:              2,389,593
Distinct Applications Used:        2,023
Distinct Users:                   18,203
Total Number of Workspaces:        2,759
Total Number of Applications:     14,592

And lastly, we have an internal application which is really nothing more than a sophisticated mini data warehouse serving as an employee directory.  Most Oracle employees know it by the name of Aria People.  Tom and others had written this application in lovingly hand-crafted PL/SQL before I even joined Oracle, and we eventually rewrote it in APEX.  As you can imagine, it's used by virtually every employee in the company.  We average 1.4M - 1.5M page views per day.  In reviewing the last 100 days of activity, there was one day (18-MAR-2014) where this application did 3,132,573 page views from 45,767 distinct IP addresses.  The median page rendering time was 0.03 seconds.  In this same application, again looking back across the last 100 days, the busiest hour we had was on 11-MAR-2014, with 171,156 page views in a single hour, from 6,254 distinct IP addresses.  That averages out to 47.543 page views per second.

Oracle Application Express is as scalable as the Oracle Database.  And with some mad Oracle skills, you can scale to great heights.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 now available

Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 is now released and available for download.  If you wish to download the full release of Oracle Application Express 4.2.5, you can get it from the Downloads page on OTN.  If you have Oracle Application Express 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 already installed, then you need to download the APEX 4.2.5 patch set from My Oracle Support.  Look up patch number 17966818.

As is stated in the patch set note that accompanies the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set:
  • If you have Oracle Application Express release 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 installed, download the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set from My Oracle Support and apply it.  Remember - patch number 17966818.
  • If you have Oracle Application Express release 4.1.1 or earlier installed (including Oracle HTML DB release 1.5), download and install the entire Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 release from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).
  • If you do not have Oracle Application Express installed, download and install the entire Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 release from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).
As usual, there are a large number of issues corrected in the Application Express 4.2.5 patch set.  You can see the full list in the patch set note.

Some changes in the the Oracle Application Express 4.2.5 patch set:
  1. A number of bug fixes and functionality additions to many of the Packaged Applications.
  2. One new packaged application - Live Poll.  This was the creation of Mike Hichwa.  Live Poll is intended for real-time, very brief polling (in contrast to a formal survey, which can be created and administered via Survey Builder).
  3. One new sample application - the Sample Geolocation Showcase, created by Oracle's Carsten Czarski, who did a masterful job in demonstrating how Oracle's spatial capabilities (via Oracle Locator) can be easily exploited in an Oracle Application Express application.  Try it for yourself today on apex.oracle.com!
  4. A handful of bug fixes in the underlying Application Express engine and APIs.

APEX 4.2.5 should be the end of the line for Oracle Application Express 4.2.x.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Yet Another Post How to Link to Download a File or Display an Image from a BLOB column

On an internal mailing list, an employee (Richard, a long-time user of Oracle Application Express) asked:

"...we are attempting to move to storing (the images) in a BLOB column in our own application tables.  Is there no way to display an image outside of page items and reports? "

Basically, he has a bunch of images stored in the BLOB column of the common upload table, APEX_APPLICATION_FILES (or WWV_FLOW_FILES).  He wishes to move them to a table in his workspace schema, but it's unclear to him how they can be displayed.  While there is declarative support for BLOBs in Application Express, there are times where you simply wish to get a link which would return the image - and without having to add a form and report against the table containing the images.

I fully realize that this question has been answered numerous times in various books and blog posts, but I wish to reiterate it here again.

Firstly, a way not to do this is via a PL/SQL procedure that is called directly from a URL.  I see this "solution" commonly documented on the Internet, and in general, it should not be followed.  The default configuration of Oracle Application Express has a white list of entry points, callable from a URL.  For security reasons, you absolutely want to leave this restriction in place and not relax it.  This is specified as the PlsqlRequestValidationFunction for mod_plsql and security.disableDefaultExclusionList for Oracle REST Data Services (nee APEX Listener).  With this default security measure in place, you will not be able to invoke a procedure in your schema from a URL.  Good!

The easiest way to return an image from a URL in an APEX application is either via a RESTful Service or via an On-Demand process.  This blog post will cover the On-Demand process.  It's definitely easier to implement via a RESTful Service, and if you can do it via a RESTful call, that will always be much faster - Kris has a great example how to do this. However, one benefit of doing this via an On Demand process is that it will also be constrained by any conditions or authorization schemes that are in place for your APEX application (that is, if your application requires authentication and authorization, someone won't be able to access the URL unless they are likewise authenticated to your APEX application and fully authorized).

  1. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Items
  2. Click Create
    • Name:  FILE_ID
    • Scope:  Application
    • Session State Protection:  Unrestricted
  3. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Processes
  4. Click Create
    • Name: GETIMAGE
    • Point:  On Demand: Run this application process when requested by a page process.
  5. Click Next
  6. For Process Text, enter the following code:

begin
    for c1 in (select *
                 from my_image_table
                where id = :FILE_ID) loop
        --
        sys.htp.init;
        sys.owa_util.mime_header( c1.mime_type, FALSE );
        sys.htp.p('Content-length: ' || sys.dbms_lob.getlength( c1.blob_content));
        sys.htp.p('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' || c1.filename || '"' );
        sys.htp.p('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');  -- tell the browser to cache for one hour, adjust as necessary
        sys.owa_util.http_header_close;
        sys.wpg_docload.download_file( c1.blob_content );
    
        apex_application.stop_apex_engine;
    end loop;
end;

Then, all you need to do is construct a URL in your application which calls this application process, as described in the Application Express Application Builder Users' Guide.  You could manually construct a URL using APEX_UTIL.PREPARE_URL, or specify a link in the declarative attributes of a Report Column.  Just be sure to specify a Request of 'APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE' (or whatever your application process name is).  The URL will look something like:

f?p=&APP_ID.:0:&APP_SESSION.:APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE:::FILE_ID:<some_valid_id>

That's all there is to it.

A few closing comments:
  1. Be mindful of the authorization scheme specified for the application process.  By default, the Authorization Scheme will be "Must Not Be Public User", which is normally acceptable for applications requiring authentication.  But also remember that you could restrict these links based upon other authorization schemes too.
  2. If you want to display the image inline instead of being downloaded by a browser, just change the Content-Disposition from 'attachment' to 'inline'.
  3. A reasonable extension and optimization to this code would be to add a version number to your underlying table, increment it every time the file changes, and then reference this file version number in the URL.  Doing this, in combination with a Cache-Control directive in the MIME header would let the client browser cache it for a long time without ever running your On Demand Process again (and thus, saving your valuable database cycles).
  4. Application Processes can also be defined on the page-level, so if you wished to have the download link be constrained by the authorization scheme on a specific page, you could do this too.
  5. Be careful how this is used. If you don't implement some form of browser caching, then a report which displays 500 images inline on a page will result in 500 requests to the APEX engine and database, per user per page view! Ouch! And then it's a matter of time before a DBA starts hunting for the person slamming their database and reports that "APEX is killing our database". There is an excellent explanation of cache headers here.

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Finally...the official sizing guide for Oracle Application Express

The following question was recently posted on an internal mailing list:
"Is there a sizing/capacity/scalability guide available for APEX?"
I'm always fascinated by this question.  I appreciate the fact that this is a standard, acceptable practice in the industry, and people come to expect it.  How else could architects and planners appropriately allocate resources without some form of estimate?  This impacts capital expenditures and budgets and rack space and energy costs and support costs and human capital.  People seem to be looking for some simple formula like:
(X number of pages in an APEX application) * (Y number of concurrent users) = (W number of processors) + (Z number of GB of RAM)
Voila!  Plug that formula into your favorite spreadsheet and away you go.  Well....if I lured you in with the title of this blog post, I have to be honest - it's all fiction.  There is no such thing.  But why not?  There are a number of reasons.

  1. There is no such thing as a representative, typical application.  As I've often bloviated in the past, Oracle Application Express is as fast or as slow as you, the developer, make it.  The overhead associated with the APEX engine itself is fairly static (measured in hundredths of a second). If you have a query that takes 30 seconds to execute and you put this query in a report in an APEX application, you can expect the execution of that page to take just over 30 seconds per page view.

  2. What does "concurrent" mean?  Is that the total number of users in an hour?  Total number of users in a 5-minute interval?  Or is that the high-water mark of number of users all clicking the mouse or hitting the Enter key, all at the same time?

  3. What is the typical "think time" of an end user?  Effectively, resources are only being consumed when there is a request actively being processed by the APEX engine.  So while the end user is interpreting the results of a report or keying in data in a form, they aren't (typically) making any requests to the APEX engine.

  4. How much memory will be consumed by the typical page view?  Does your application allocate GB's of in-memory LOBs, per user per page view?  This would have a definite impact on scalability.
The total number of pages in an application has close to zero correlation to scalability and throughput.  You can have a 1,000-page application, each page with sub-second performance, which will be far more scalable than a 1-page application that consumes 15 seconds per page view.

As the Oracle Database Performance and Tuning Guide states, there are many variables involved in workload estimation, and it's typically done via either benchmarking or extrapolation from a similar system.  But what is "a similar system" for an APEX application?  Does a call-center application at one enterprise approximate the back-office order processing system at another company?

I can understand how a formula can be prepared for a COTS application.  If you're deploying Fusion Applications or the eBusiness Suite or JD Edwards or SAP, those applications are created, the business logic is written, the queries and transactions are crafted, and concurrency has been measured on representative systems for a given workload.  But I don't understand how someone can produce a sizing guide for any application development framework - Application Express, ADF, .NET, Java.  It's like asking "how scalable is C?"

An application that our team wrote and runs for Oracle is quite scalable (the oft-mentioned Aria People employee directory).  Yesterday (05-MAR), there were 2.1M page views on this system with a median page rendering time of 0.03 seconds from 45,314 distinct users.  The busiest hour saw 129,284 page views through the APEX engine (35.9 page views/second).  If another team within Oracle wrote this same system but didn't tune the SQL like we did, is that a reflection on the scalability of APEX?  And if the answer to that question is "no", then is the hardware configuration all that relevant?

Back in 2007, my manager Mike Hichwa took a draft note that I wrote and published an article for  Oracle Magazine entitled "Sizing up Performance".  There is a very simple formula which can be used to estimate the throughput of an APEX application.  This isn't going to help you determine how much hardware to buy or how to estimate the size of your VM, but it will help estimate (in back-of-the-napkin form) how scalable an existing APEX application will be on an existing system.

With all this said, we, on the Oracle Application Express team, have been deficient.  At a minimum, we should have a list of systems developed by our customers, with specific information about the hardware configuration, purpose of the system, and number of end-users served.  Maybe we should also obtain the level of expertise of the developers.  We will gather this information and publish it online (without specific customer names).  If nothing else, this can serve as the foundation for extrapolation by architects and designers.


Friday, January 31, 2014

Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 now available



We are quite happy to announce the beginning of the Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter program, at https://apexea.oracle.com.  This is our open-to-the-public beta program where we encourage our customers (new and old), and also those just interested in Oracle Application Express, to kick the tires of our forthcoming release.  Click the big blue "Request a Workspace" button to get started.

You'll notice right away that the authentication for Oracle Application Express requires an Oracle account.  This is the same account you would use for many Oracle sites, including the OTN Community discussion forums.  If you don't have an account, then simply follow the instructions on the login page to "Sign up for a free Oracle Web account".  However, ensure that you specify the same email address as your Oracle Web account when requesting a new workspace.

The list of new features in Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 1 can be reviewed here.  Not everything is ready for prime time, so these are the features we are specifically looking for feedback.

We plan on having an Oracle Application Express 5.0 Early Adopter 2 program.  When that happens, the entire instance will be rebuilt, so don't get too married to any of the data or applications - they will be removed.  Also, there is no guarantee that the applications you create can be imported into any future release of APEX.

The Known Issues will be populated soon, as well the application to review your submitted feedback.  However, we encourage you to use this Early Adopter instance and provide your unvarnished comments.  We still have some miles to travel for Oracle Application Express, but we believe that this will eventually become one of the watershed releases for APEX and the community.

Thank you for all of your support.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Happy Birthday, Oracle Application Express!



Happy birthday, Oracle Application Express!

In January 2004, Oracle Database 10g was released.  And bundled with the Oracle 10g Database distribution was an additional disc called the Companion CD, which included both Oracle HTTP Server, mod_plsql and this new tool called Oracle HTML DB 1.5.  This was the date of the first officially distributed and supported software from Oracle which has grown into today's Oracle Application Express.

To recap the years:

  • 2004  HTML DB 1.5 - Initial release
  • 2004  HTML DB 1.6 - User interface Themes
  • 2005  HTML DB 2.0 - SQL Workshop
  • 2006  Application Express 2.1 - Embedded with Oracle 10gR2 Express Edition (XE)
  • 2006  Application Express 2.2 - Packaged Applications
  • 2007  Application Express 3.0 - Flash Charts, PDF printing, Microsoft Access migration
  • 2008  Application Express 3.1 - Interactive Reports, runtime-only installation
  • 2009  Application Express 3.2 - Oracle Forms to Oracle Application Express conversion
  • 2010  Application Express 4.0 - Plug-ins, Dynamic Actions, Team Development
  • 2011  Application Express 4.1 - Data Upload, improved Tabular Forms, Error Handling
  • 2012  Application Express 4.2 - Mobile support, mobile and responsive themes, RESTful Web Services

Oracle Application Express has been delivered with every version of the Oracle Database since 2004.  Beginning with Oracle Database 11gR1, Oracle Application Express moved to the database distribution and was treated as a "standard" database component.  Beginning with Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Application Express is installed by default in every Oracle database.  Oracle Application Express is the development framework for both Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall and the 12c Multitenant Self-Service Provisioning applications.  apex.oracle.com, the customer evaluation instance of Oracle Application Express, keeps chugging along - with an average of 1,000 new workspace requests per week.

In 2004 / 2005, customers would "dip their toe in the water" with HTML DB.  Today, Oracle Application Express is an approved development framework in countless large enterprises, managing literally hundreds of applications on a single Oracle Database instance.

To say that Oracle Application Express has matured over the past 10 years can be a bit misleading.  Some perceive maturing as "getting old".  I would much rather characterize this as adapting and evolving...and growing.  The story with Oracle Application Express is far from over.  Not only are there vast improvements which need to be made in the framework itself (especially with respect to developer productivity and enterprise deployment), but we need to improve in many other ways - documentation, examples, videos, communication, usability, and a plethora of excellent customer-provided enhancement requests.  The industry is constantly changing and evolving as well, and Oracle Application Express must adapt and evolve and, in some respects, lead.

For now, though, let me just offer a simple "Happy birthday!"