Top 10 Technology Trends for 2015
For years now, internal IT organizations that have installed Oracle databases have been taking advantage of free tools that enable them to quickly develop Web applications. Now Oracle wants to see more “citizen developers” taking advantage of the same capabilities.
Today, Oracle released an upgrade to Oracle Application Express, a Web application development framework that is embedded within the Oracle database engine.
Oracle Application Express 5 features a new integrated development environment and modernized user interface along with support for tablets and a set of 19 packaged applications covering functions such as project management and survey management.
Michael Hichwa, vice president of software development at Oracle, says rather than requiring developers to know JavaScript or HTML, the Oracle Application Express development framework makes use of wizards that enable individuals with no coding skills to create applications that can run in any browser.
Hichwa says internal IT organizations have been taking advantage of Oracle Application Express to build applications for their organizations for years without having to actually hire a programmer. Those same capabilities can now be accessed by citizen developers within roughly 400,000 organizations that have Oracle database licenses without having to acquire any additional development tools or hire outside contractors, says Hichwa.
The degree to which end users will actually develop applications varies greatly from one organization to another. But given the backlog of application development projects that most internal IT organizations face these days, it is definitely worth taking a page out of “Tom Sawyer” to see just how much of the proverbial application development fence end users may be willing to paint on their own.
