​As you may be aware, Exadata Express is coming to the end of its life. If you like us have found this platform both useful and affordable, then you will be wanting to know what’s next? Where in the cloud can I deploy my RAD (REST, APEX, Database) stack now? In this post I will explore an alternative which we have implemented here at JMJ Cloud.

​We have been using Exadata Express and JMJ Cloud for more than 2 years. During that time, we helped five of our clients implement Exadata Express. Use cases ranged from custom cloud point solutions to ERP Cloud PaaS extensions. I have also blogged about this platform on a number of occasions. Exadata Express offered a highly functional PaaS solution for as little as $175 a month. We (and our customers) were very happy with it. In fact, I thought this product was a sign that Oracle had finally turned the corner to becoming a major cloud player. It provided a very low barrier to entry with more feature rich alternatives ready and waiting when your business grew into them. This is essentially how AWS became so successful. One day you start with half a dozen EC2 servers for a couple of hundred dollars a month and a few years later you are spending a million dollars a month (think Netflix). Oracle on the other hand typically starts by charging a lot and then work their way up from there.

A month or so ago, our Salesperson emailed us… Here is where I need to pause for a small rant. Why on earth, if you are selling automated cloud solutions should I ever have to deal with a Salesperson? I want a server; I know what size server I want, and I know how much I want to pay for it. From my perspective, having a Salesperson in the middle of this is expensive from Oracle’s point of view and extremely frustrating from my point of view. OK, back to the story… Our Salesperson reached out and said we could not renew our Exadata Express contract and oh, by the way, you have a month to get off the platform. After a little discussion (i.e. an hour of my time on the phone) we converted that 1 month into 3 months. We bought ourselves some runway, but we still needed another platform. Enter the Salesperson (again). After another one hour of my time he proceeded to explain the wonders of the Autonomous Database Cloud Service. Don’t get me wrong, this service shows a lot of promise and it is going to be great for our larger customers. At more than $1,200 per month, however, it is not going to fly for us or our smaller customers wanting to run the RAD stack in the cloud. It is nearly 7 times more expensive than Exadata Express. If you wanted to use Autonomous Database with APEX for a Cloud ERP extension and you need a DEV, TEST and PROD instance that is $3,600+ per month instead of $600 / month.
 
To add insult to injury, there is not even a button push migration path from Exadata Express to Autonomous Cloud. This means that even if you have the money to pay for Autonomous Cloud, you are going to have to fork more money to migrate.

I would love nothing more than to say I whole heartedly recommend folks move to the Autonomous Database Cloud Service but that is not where I am going. The answer to our problem was in a service we have dabbled with before which is Amazon’s RDS (relational database service) service along with an EC2 (elastic compute) server running ORDS. I have never really been completely happy recommending this approach for the RAD (REST, APEX, Database) stack before, two things have changed to make this a much more appealing approach.

• You can now perform a full ORDS install on an RDS instance. This is thanks to new functionality in ORDS 19.1 which allows you to run the install as a user other than SYS. This is especially important now that REST services are no longer available in APEX alone.
• AWS have started making the latest version of ORDS available on RDS much sooner than they used to. For example, as of right now, September 2019, you can run ORDS 19.2 and APEX 19.1 on RDS, whereas Exadata Express is running ORDS 3 (ouch) and APEX 18.2.

​The diagram below shows the architecture we are using at JMJ cloud.

Here is a cost breakdown for the above architecture.

There is no perfect solution and there are certainly some things you should consider when moving to AWS.

• Although the database is almost fully managed by AWS, you are on your own with regard to the ORDS server. You need to standup an EC2 server and install ORDS, Tomcat, setup your load balancer etc. This means it is not as hands off as Autonomous Database Cloud Service.
• At time of writing, there is no way to install APEX PSE Bundle Patches to an RDS instance. Depending on the bug, this could be a big deal.
• For license included versions of the Oracle Database, Standard Edition 2 is way more affordable than Enterprise Edition. If you have specific use cases that require Enterprise Edition features, then keep an eye on your costs.
• Although AWS takes care of patching the DB server, you will be responsible for patching the EC2 server and upgrading Java, Tomcat and ORDS.

​I am not saying RDS is a magic bullet that allows you to achieve the hands-off capabilities of the Autonomous Database Cloud Service at a fraction of the cost. If you have the budget and you want absolutely nothing to do with the underlying architecture, then Autonomous Database Cloud Service is for you. If you want lower level access to the database (and / or ORDS) but want to be absolutely sure the database itself is being backed up and patched for you then it offers a great alternative. If you throw in easy access to other AWS services, this soon becomes a very compelling solution.
 
After all, for developers, the health and welfare of the database is really the scariest part of running your own RAD stack. If AWS is essentially taking care of this for you, the rest is reasonably straight forward.

​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

​Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) provides many options for authenticating users. These include OAuth client, APEX User, Database Schema User and OS User. While it is important to ensure your ORDS web services are secured, you also need to consider what a client has access to once authenticated. As a quick reminder, authentication confirms your identity and allows you into the system, authorization decides what you can do once you are in. In this post, I will dive into roles and privileges and explain their part in authorizing access to ORDS web services for OAuth clients.

​Let’s start with a diagram to show how roles and privileges fit into the overall OAuth security model for ORDS.

A role acts as the link between one or more users and one or more privileges. You assign a role to one or more OAuth clients.
 
A privilege details what is secured by that privilege. When creating a privilege, you can secure either an entire module or secure based on URL patterns.
 
A URL pattern is part of the full URL for a web service or group of web services. If you have a module called ‘ev’ then you can secure all services in that module using the URL pattern ‘/ev/*’.

Take the following three modules in an ORDS enabled schema called ‘XXORDS’.

Let's say we want to do achieve the following:

• Allow services in the twillio module to be completely open (i.e. no authentication)
• Protect the 'utils' and 'ev' modules
• Allow the OAuth client ‘ADMIN_CLIENT’ access to any services in the 'utils' and 'ev' modules
• Allow the OAuth client ‘EV_CLIENT’ access to services in the 'ev' module

 
Note: Prior to creating any privileges, all of your ORDS web services will be publicly accessible.
 
Roles
Based on the above, we will need to create two roles ‘ADMIN_ROLE’ and ‘EV_USER_ROLE’.

We will also need to create two privileges. One to protect web services in the ‘ev’ module and one to protect web services in the ‘utils’ module.

Privilege 1 - EV_DATA_ACCESS
While creating this privilege, we will at the same time, link the privilege to both the 'EV_USER_ROLE' and the 'ADMIN_ROLE' roles. An OAuth client associated with either of these roles will be able to call the charge points web service:

• https://example.com/ords/xxords/ev/charge_points

​Note: The pattern ‘/ev/*’ starts after the base URL for your ORDS enabled schema. In our case, this is anything after https://example.com/ords/xxords.
 
This is what the privilege looks like from SQL Developer:

Privilege 2 - UTILS_DATA_ACCESS
While creating this privilege, we will only link the privilege to the 'ADMIN_ROLE' role. Only OAuth clients associated with this role will be able to call the 'dbinfo' web service:

• https://example.com/ords/xxords/utils/dbinfo

​If we stopped here, then there would be no way to access any web services in the ‘ev’ or ‘utils’ modules. The act of associating a privilege with a module or URL pattern effectively locks them down. We need to create OAuth clients and link them to the roles we created so that these clients can access web services in these modules.

OAuth Client 1 - EV_CLIENT
This script creates the OAuth client EV_CLIENT using the grant type ‘client_credentials’. It then grants the newly created client access to the EV_USER_ROLE. At this point the EV_CLIENT can call web services in the ‘ev’ module.

​OAuth Client 2 - ADMIN_CLIENT
This script creates the OAuth client ADMIN_CLIENT using the grant type ‘client_credentials’. It then grants the newly created client access to both the EV_USER_ROLE and the ADMIN_ROLE. At this point the ADMIN_CLIENT can call web services in the ‘ev’ and ‘utils’ modules.

In this post, I demonstrated how to use roles and privileges to provide fine grained access to your ORDS web services. ​​This is important when ensuring OAuth clients only have access to the web services they are supposed to. Unless your web service has to be public (e.g. if it is a Web-hook) then you should seriously consider adding OAuth security. 

Click here for more on OAuth security in ORDS.