​Full disclosure, I have absolutely no experience in trying to convince my boss to try APEX or ORDS. I do, however, have experience in basking in the glow of clients who have reaped the benefits of implementing mission critical systems using these two no-cost options of the Oracle database.
 
TL;DR; If you are a boss, try out APEX and ORDS today. If you already have an Oracle database, it costs you nothing extra and the upsides for you and your business are tremendous.

​If you are a developer looking to convince your boss to adopt APEX and ORDS, then this post is for you. My goal is to arm you with the material you need to make a compelling case for adopting APEX and ORDS. I have broken the post into several major talking points. At the start of each talking point, I have a headline statement (for bosses with short attention spans). I then go on to explain my reasoning in a little more detail (for bosses that need some evidence).

​Data Centric - APEX, because of its architecture, is very data centric. Both the code and the data exist in the same database enabling zero data access latency. This architecture did no come about by accident; there are good reasons why your code should be right next to your data. I have been using APEX for a while now, but I love this new term ‘zero data latency’. Of course, this has been true since the days of HTMLDB. But in this world of super complex, mega frameworks that are so abstracted from the data they need a map to find it, it is very relevant today.
 
Stateless – Much of the scalability of APEX comes from its stateless nature. The API calls to the Oracle APEX engine use the standard Oracle database connection pool. This means that once an API call is processed and the response is sent back to the browser, the connection is returned to the database connection pool and can be used by any other request. The database sessions are only active when performing a request, otherwise, the they are inactive and do not consume any database resources. This allows APEX to handle tens of thousands of users simultaneously.

APEX is very stable, easy to upgrade and new features are coming thick and fast.
 
You may think stability and innovation don’t belong in the same sentence. When you are talking about APEX, however, they really do. I have never undertaken a large JavaScript framework project. I can imagine, however, that as a boss it is a little un-nerving heading into a multi-year project with half a dozen technologies, many of which may not exist by the time the project is over. APEX has been around for 15+ years and there is no sign of it going anywhere. You may think, “So what, Windows has been around for longer and it is still awful.”. APEX is different. The pace of new (and useful) features over the past 2-3 years (especially in the areas of UI, Single Sign On and integration capabilities) has been fantastic. BTW, there is no sign of that pace letting up. With multiple releases a year you get the option of up taking these improvements at regular intervals.
 
Hold on a minute, that doesn’t sound very stable. What I haven’t mentioned is that the APEX development team is world famous for providing upgrades that do not break your existing Apps. One of the ways they achieve this is by allowing apps to run in previous versions with ‘Compatibility Mode’. This means that in most cases, you can do the upgrade and then switch on new functionality in individual apps, as and when you need it. There are stories every month of APEX users who have upgraded from APEX 3 (released in 2007) to the current version without anything breaking. Can you imagine doing that with any other development framework?

Your users will love using APEX Applications!
 
If you had experience of APEX from version 4 (or before), boy are you in for a treat. Applications built with APEX look as good as any other framework and are quite frankly a joy to use. We are long past the dystopian days of automaton workers using systems they are forced to use. When people use Enterprise systems these days they expect more. While you may feel like dark mode is a fad, Apple is about to release it across all of the Operating Systems. Believe me, your Enterprise users will be using dark mode soon enough. Wouldn’t it be great if your development platform could make dark mode happen at the flick of a switch? APEX has your back. Dark mode is already available in APEX Builder and will be coming soon as an end user theme style. It goes much further than that too. APEX’s Universal Theme delivers UI components that would otherwise consume hundreds of hours of custom development. For a peak at what is available, check out the Universal Theme demo App https://apex.oracle.com/ut
 
Finally, with accessibility concerns finally being taken seriously, it is good to know that the APEX team has baked accessibility checks right into the product. They even have accessibility tested themes available. Check out this video for more details on Accessibility in APEX.

​APEX and ORDS provide you everything you need to host and consume REST based web services to meet all of your integration needs.
 
Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) has two roles in an APEX world. One is to service APEX pages to end users and the other is to host REST based web services. The ability to host REST based web services based on SQL and PL/SQL is extremely powerful. It allows you to provide external systems secure access to the data in your Oracle database. This can be useful for integrations and even for hosting web services to be consumed by native mobile applications. See our post on ORDS for details.
 
APEX comes with a number of features to facilitate consumption of any REST based web services. For example, Web Source Modules provide a wizard-based approach to configuring components that allow you to create reports and forms directly on web services. This extends the reach of APEX outside the database and prevents un-necessary syncing of data to and from other systems. 

With APEX Social Sign-In you can use just about any OAuth identity provider to authenticate your users.

Authentication can be a complex proposition. If you store usernames and passwords yourself you really need to know what you are doing. The last thing you want is for your user account data to be compromised. It is generally far safer to outsource this task to a trustworthy identity provider such as Okta or Auth0. You could also outsource this task to platforms your users already use such as Office 365, Google and even Facebook. 

​By providing the ability to create custom authentication schemes, APEX has always provided flexibility in authenticating users. Custom authentication schemes allow you to create code that could use just about anything to authenticate a user. Since APEX Social Sign-In was introduced in APEX 18.1, APEX authentication has reached a whole new level. You can now setup declarative authorization schemes for OAuth-capable identity providers and APEX handles calling the necessary web services to authenticate your user. Taking Okta for example. Okta can now be your source of truth for handling all authentication in your company. All of your other systems (Email, ERP and your APEX Apps) can then use Okta to authenticate your users. See our post on APEX Social Sign-In for more details.

​APEX provides many useful features and utilities out of the box, that would otherwise require numerous third-party libraries.
 
To name a few:

• Out of the Box Authorization
• Multi-Language and globalization features
• Sending Emails
• Email Templates
• Extensible plugin framework with hundreds of available plugins
• Building and parsing JSON
• Excel and CSV parsing
• Zipping and Unzipping files
• JWT Handling
• String manipulation utilities
• and many more…

 
The benefit of having these utilities bundled with APEX are that fixes and enhancements are handled by Oracle and released with each new version of APEX. In contrast, having these types of utilities spread out amongst a number of providers means you get fixes when they feel like. It also means that as those providers drop by the wayside you are left having to merge new libraries into your applications.

​APEX applications can be hosted in the cloud just as easily as on-premise.
 
The APEX architecture lends itself well to running in the cloud and there are numerous options for hosting APEX in the cloud.
 
PaaS - There are turn key PaaS solutions (e.g. Exadata Express from Oracle) that host the entire APEX and ORDS architecture at a very reasonable price. All you need is a credit card and a browser to get started. See our post on using APEX to extend Oracle ERP Cloud.
 
IaaS - You can also install APEX and ORDS yourself on infrastructure from just about any cloud provider. This allows you complete flexibility to size the environment as you wish, but you will need to perform much of the maintenance (backups, upgrades etc.) yourself.

​APEX is building on its high productivity heritage to establish itself as a legitimate contender in the Low Code space.
 
APEX has always been known for allowing developers to build useful, scalable applications in a very short period of time. Over the past year and a half, more and more features have been added to establish APEX as a top contender in the low code pace. These features include wizard-based development of web service integrations and pre-built components that can be added to existing applications or used to build brand new applications. APEX is already at the stage where you can build fully functional applications starting from the upload of an Excel spreadsheet. These kinds of features are allowing APEX to break out of the IT department and into the business. It is here where (handled the right way), citizen developers can become productive with APEX with just a small amount of oversight from IT. 

​Many of our customers run Oracle e-Business Suite and have a number of PL/SQL developers on staff. How to leverage this talent and still provide your users with applications they will love using? An experienced PL/SQL developer can be up and running on APEX in a matter of days. Five years of Oracle database, SQL and PL/SQL experience gives you about 70% of the skills to be a high performing APEX developer. Sprinkle in a little JavaScript, CSS and web services experience and you are 100% of the way there.

​APEX and ORDS are no cost options of the Oracle Database.  If you own an Oracle database license you own APEX and ORDS.
 
I purposely left this item to last because in my opinion, APEX and ORDS stand on their own against any enterprise-ready development platform. Having said that, if you own an Oracle database license you really should be using APEX and ORDS because it isn’t going to cost you a penny extra. In addition to the no extra cost for the software, you will also need very little additional hardware.  A VM with 4GB of RAM and 15GB disk is more than enough to host ORDS, which is the only other component you need.

It’s very hard to write a pithy conclusion to summarize everything I have said in this post. There are also, no doubt, a number of important APEX benefits that I have not included. If you read this post and you are a developer keen to bring APEX and ORDS into your organization, I encourage you to use some of this material to make a case. If you are a boss and you are looking to adopt a development platform that will deliver real value to your business, then I urge you to visit the following links to learn more about what APEX and ORDS can offer your organization:

• APEX Shortcuts
• APEX Office Hour Videos
• APEX Learning

​I continue to be impressed with what may seem like minor features released by the APEX development team that turn out to be a big deal because they end up saving hundreds of lines of code. One such feature is APEX Email Templates introduced in APEX 18.1. In this post I will describe how we used them for much more than just Email Templates when building a notification framework for one of our customers.

​The goal of the project was to build a notification framework that could be used to handle just about any kind of notification that you can imagine. This includes email (via APEX_MAIL and Mailgun), SMS via Twillio and push notifications to iOS Apps using Firebase. We ended up building a generic notification queue which we processed on a schedule to send out the actual notifications. You may ask, how do APEX Email templates apply to all of these communication methods? The answer lies in the APEX_MAIL PL/SQL API apex_mail.prepare_template. Read on to find out why.

The goal of templating in the context of notifications is to separate the content of the  notification from the format and layout of the notification. This allows you to alter the template without having to change any code (most of the time). All of the notification methods I mentioned above can benefit from templating.
 
Let’s take email as an example. Let’s say we have an email we want to send to a customer when they place an order. In the email you want to provide information related to the product they purchased, how it will be shipped, and when they can expect it to arrive. You could build a PL/SQL function that generates the complete HTML document and then use that for the content of your email. This would mean, however, that when the marketing department needs to change the layout of the email, you have to change that function, regression test and deploy code. Being able to just change a template has obvious advantages.
 
As we move forward, I will use the example of the New Order notification and create an APEX email template which can be used for SMS, APEX_MAIL and Mailgun.

​Since APEX 18.1, under Shared Components, you will see an option ‘Email Templates’. Click that option then click ‘Create Email Template >’ to create a new template. 

On the right-hand side, you have the option to start with a ‘Sample Template’. Clicking one of the samples will pre-populate the template with the sample. This is a great way to see how templates work.

Placeholder Variables
The template works using boilerplate text (and HTML) and placeholder variables. These must be enclosed in a #, must be uppercase and must have no spaces. In the email subject above, you can see an example #ORDER_NUMBER#. Placeholders are replaced at run time by apex_mail.send and apex_mail.prepare_template (more on that later).
 
HTML Header, Body and Footer

In this section you provide the boilerplate text, HTML and placeholder variables that you need to format the data elements in your notification. Although the HTML you enter here impacts the format of your notification (e.g. bold text, links, tables etc.), it does not drive the overall structure of the email. This is driven by the ‘HTML Template’ field in the ‘Advanced’ section.

You can load a default Template by clicking the ‘Load Default HTML’ button.  The APEX team has provided a pretty nice-looking template that works well with browsers and email clients (see below for a screen shot). Of course, you can change this and even copy and paste templates from open source providers like Zurb.
 
Plain Text
Finally, there is a section for Plain Text. There are still some email clients out there that only support plain text, so it is good practice to provide a Plain Text as well as an HTML formatted email body. This section also comes in handy for SMS templates.

I have a template now but how do I know exactly how it’s going to look? This introduces the first use case for apex_mail.prepare_template. Create a simple PL/SQL block like the following and run it.

​Note: p_application_id refers to the APEX Application that the template was created in.
Note: The placeholders in the JSON passed in p_placeholder are also substituted in the subject and the Text Body.
 
The API will substitute all of the place holders in the template ‘NEW_ORDER_NOTIFICATION’ with values in the placeholder JSON. Save the results from the dbms_output into a file with a .html extension and open it using your browser. You can now iterate until you have the template looking just how you want it. Of course, it wouldn’t take much additional effort to create an APEX page to show a preview of the template.

​As well as prepare_template, APEX 18.1 brings a new ‘send’ function which handles the call to prepare_template as well as sending the actual email.

​How is this useful for other notification methods like Mailgun and Twillio? Well, just because it says APEX Email Templates on the box does not mean that is all it is good for.
 
Mailgun
Just like APEX_MAIL.SEND, the Mailgun API looks for three main parameters: subject, text (body) and html (body). We can get all of these values from our APEX Email Template using the apex_mail.prepare_template. We then use the results from this API call to call the Mailgun API to send the actual email.

​Twillio
The Twillio Messages API also expects a message body to send an SMS, but as you may expect we would not want to send HTML in the body. For SMS templates we need to focus on the Plain Text Format portion of the template. You also do need to provide values for subject and HTML body, but it can just be dummy text.

​The call to the prepare_template API is identical to the one above; we just need to pass different placeholders and we only want to consume p_text from the response.

​All you need to do then is send the content of p_text using the Twillio API, and Voila!

​Multi-language is also covered. If you have multi-language enabled for your app, when you seed an publish your APEX application, a language translated version of the template is also generated. Once you provide translations for the text, the template can be generated in the users session language.

​APEX Email Templates are a great feature, I think there is still room for improvement though and here are my suggestions for the APEX Dev Team:

• Provide capabilities to store and retrieve templates by language.
• Create an API to create and update templates. That way, developers can create a template building page for end users to manage the templates.
• Create an ‘apex_’ view on the templates table WWV_FLOW_EMAIL_TEMPLATES.

​APEX Email Templates, like many other APEX features have been well thought out and provide real value to developers (and their end users). They can also be used for much more than just email templates so don’t let my examples limit you.

​APEX Social Sign-In has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for authenticating users into APEX. Whilst it is a catchy name, I propose the name ‘Social Sign-In’ is selling these new authentication capabilities short. I believe ‘Social Sign-In’ actually has far wider reaching implications for both Enterprise and B2C APEX applications.

For sure, APEX Social Sign-In allows you to authenticate users using Google and Facebook and that is great. Many enterprises, however, are using dedicated cloud-based identity management providers such as Okta and Auth0 to authenticate their employees. In addition, B2C web sites and mobile Apps also use these products to handle identity management for their customers. These products provide a host of identity management features such as Single Sign-On, Lifecycle Management, User Management, Multi-factor Authentication to name a few. Being able to use products like these with APEX just by entering a few configurations in a setup page (rather than having to write hundreds of lines of code) is a game changer. It also raises the profile (and credibility) of APEX in an enterprise and consumer setting.
 
Level set on what is federated identity management
Instead of me taking up space in this post, I came across the following article which is a great primer on federated identity management aimed at developers. https://hackernoon.com/federated-identities-a-developers-primer-655a160d66cb

So, why do I even need a third part identity provider? As with most things ‘Cloud’, the answer is security and convenience. Let’s take a look at each of these justifications in a little more detail.

Security
My job is to develop secure, scalable web applications that provide real business value. I am not an expert in cryptography or how you should best prevent user accounts from being compromised. Reputable companies that do nothing else but build identity management solutions, on which their reputation depends, will do a better job than me. Also, in this day and age, you do not want to be responsible for the safe keeping of your user’s credentials. There are more than enough documented nightmare scenarios out there to convince us of that.
 
Convenience
Let’s say my IT department demands that all users start using two-factor authentication. If I had built my own authentication solution, I am now on the hook for building two-factor authentication into my application. While that sounds like a fun side project, it is certainly not a cheap one. Again, we are back to can I implement this more securely than an expert? Using products like Okta and Auth0, it is simply a matter of enabling the feature (and paying for it). Products like these also take care of forgotten passwords, user on-boarding and many other tedious aspects of providing identity management for your users.

So, what did we have to do before Social Login was available? I was rudely reminded of this recently when I was asked to build a custom authentication scheme (in APEX 4) to allow users of an internet-facing B2B APEX application to login via Okta. I had to hand code every URL re-direct, every web service call and don’t get me started on how I had to implement the callback to APEX after authentication into Okta. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that this was even possible in APEX 4 is a testament to the flexibility of the APEX Authentication Scheme. There was, however, clearly room for improvement.

All this changed with the introduction of APEX Social Sign-In. For a basic authentication scenario, all you need to do on the APEX side is create a set of Web Credentials and fill out 4 fields in an Authentication scheme. Zero code required!
 
In a bid to convince the same APEX 4 customer to upgrade to APEX 18.2, I created a demo showing them how easily we could authenticate Okta users using Social Sign-In. For the remainder of this post, I will focus on what configurations were required to complete this demo and authenticate Okta users into APEX.

​Let’s start with the obligatory diagram to show what is going on when you authenticate an Okta user into APEX.

1. The user accesses a page in the APEX application. If the user already has a valid APEX session, then they will be allowed to access the page. If they do not, then the APEX authentication scheme will direct the user to Okta.
2. If the user already has a valid Okta session, then they will be immediately re-directed back to APEX, otherwise they will be directed to an Okta login page.
3. The user will enter their Okta username and password.
4. Assuming login is successful, Okta will re-direct the user back to APEX.
5. When Okta calls the ‘Callback URL’, it provides a Java Web Token (JWT) which includes the following information:
   1. The ‘state’, which is a value APEX passed to Okta at the beginning of the flow. APEX will verify that the ‘state’ returned in the JWT matches the one it created at the beginning.
   2. The user name of the Okta user.
   3. An authorization code which can be used to use to get a token to call additional Okta web services.
6. Once logged in, we can call web services in Okta to get additional information about the user e.g. what groups they belong to, their full name, address etc.
7. At this point, APEX will direct the user to the home page of the APEX App.

 
There, aren’t you glad you didn’t have to code any of that (well at least up until step 6)! 

​Before we get into the APEX configurations, we need to create an Okta account and configure our application in Okta. Okta has a free developer account (https://developer.okta.com/signup/) which allows you to try Okta out.
 
As previously mentioned, Okta has a whole bunch of features which I won’t get into in this post. Instead I will review the Okta configurations needed for the Demo APEX App to login using OpenID Connect (OIDC). Note: The example below was created using our corporate Okta account, but this should also work using an Okta developer account.
 
Application Definition
You need to define each application you want to authenticate in Okta. This is much the same as you would for Google or Office365 authentication. Start by Adding an application in Okta, be sure to select Platform = ‘Web’ and Sign on method = ‘OpenID Connect’.

​The following screen shots show the already configured application followed by descriptions of what values to provide.

​At this stage, we are essentially just picking the Application type and saying we want to use the ‘Authorization Code’ grant type OAuth flow.

This is the interesting part:

• Login redirect URIs
  • This is the APEX URL that Okta will re-direct to when your user has successfully logged into Okta. apex_authentication.callback is a special URL that accepts a JWT from the identity provider and authenticates the user into APEX.
• Logout redirect URIs
  • This is the URL that Okta will direct your user to when they logout.
• Login initiated by
  • Here you can decide if only your App can initiate login or if login can be initiated by Okta. We want ‘App Only’.
• Initiate login URI
  • This is not applicable when Login initiated by is ‘App Only’.

​Okta will generate client credentials for each Application you create. We will use these when creating our APEX ‘Web Credentials’ below.

​In the above section, we are identifying that we want to use OpenID Connect as our authentication method.

​Finally, in the above section, we can determine which Okta users (and or Groups) should have access to our Application.

​With our Okta configurations complete, we can now configure our APEX Authentication Scheme.
 
Web Credentials (these come from Okta)
Start by creating a set of ‘Web Credentials’. Here you will provide the Client ID and Client Secret provided by Okta above.

• Credential Store
  • This is the credential store we defined previously.
• Authentication Provider
  • I chose ‘OpenID Connect Provider’ because a) it is supported by Okta and b) it involves the least configuration. It essentially self discovers all of the information it needs to authenticate against the provider from a JSON document which is publicly accessible.
• Discovery URL
  • This is the discovery URL which APEX uses to find out everything it needs to know to authenticate against the provider. Okta provides this information via a JSON document. The JSON document includes all of the web service end-points (/token, /userinfo, /logout etc.), supported scopes etc.
• Scope
  • The list of scopes determine what pieces of additional information about the user you are allowed to fetch after login to Okta. This information can be accessed by calling the Okta /userinfo web service. In this example, I can get openid information, email address, user profile information and the groups a user belongs to.
• Username Attribute
  • This is the attribute returned from Okta that APEX uses to set the APEX username (:APP_USER) of the logged in user.

And, that is it, the APEX configuration is complete!
​

Patching for APEX 18.2​
If you are running APEX 18.2, be sure to apply the PSE bundle patch for APEX 18.2 ‘Patch 28727865: PSE BUNDLE FOR APEX 18.2 (PSES ON TOP OF 18.2.0.00.12)’. This fixes a bug when using ‘OpenID Connect Provider’ as the ‘Authentication Provider’ in your authentication scheme.

Firewalls, Wallets and Proxies
If you are working with APEX on-premise you have to consider how APEX is going to call out to the identity provider and how the identity provider is going to be able to callback into APEX. For the call out to happen, you have to either install the appropriate certificates from the identity provider in a wallet on your database server or create a proxy to facilitate this. You may also have to create ACLs to even allow network traffic to leave your database. For the identity provider to make the callback, your APEX environment must be accessible to the internet.

In this post, I have tried to illustrate how easy it is to configure APEX Social Sign-In to authenticate APEX users with products like Okta. Okta is one of many cloud identity management providers that you can use to for handling identity management for your APEX users. With APEX Social Sign-In there are less and less reasons to store passwords in your database. 

Hopefully I have convinced you that its scope reaches far beyond Twitter and Facebook. So, what name should we use instead of 'APEX Social Sign-In'? My vote goes for 'Super simple mechanism for logging users into APEX using just about any consumer or enterprise identity provider you care to mention with zero code'. Something tells me, however, this won't fly with the marketing folks!