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Comment by phartenfeller | Hacker News Reader

Even though it is Oracle, Oracle APEX is exceptional at creating CRUD applications. The main benefit to other low code tools is that it doesn't want eliminate code but just the repetitive UI code. It still expects you to have skills in database development so you can achieve everything but generating a Report, Grid or Form from a SQL query takes as long as you need to write the query. And everything is customizable and maintainable in the end.

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A former employer of mine banned Microsoft Access, because they didn't want critical business functions running from random desktop machines. I imagine they'd take the same view today to home made LLM-generated Rails apps.

They instead said "if you need to write your own little CRUD apps, use our APEX instance that we support and have backups for."

> imagine they'd take the same view today to home made LLM-generated Rails apps.

Sounds like an effective solution. Even though some people might build a great application, but someday they might leave, and nobody knows how to administer this.

You can still write bad PL/SQL code, but at least everything is centralized and stored in a single database where you have an admin making sure that everything is fine. For other developers, it is straightforward to make small changes because 95% of the complexity just lies in the data model and the database code. You don't need to adapt to a specific infrastructure, frameworks and other dependencies, etc.

> It still expects you to have skills in database development so you can achieve everything but generating a Report, Grid or Form from a SQL query takes as long as you need to write the query. And everything is customizable and maintainable in the end.

Isn't this what people thought about Oracle Forms before it going the way it did?

Yes, it similarly just builds around developers storing the code in the database layer. Forms is still around, with some giant companies relying on it, but of course, it is slowly dying. APEX is also 20 years old already, but based on the web stack. This choice aged perfectly, so it went from a niche inside Oracle to now the default application framework inside Oracle around 2020. Oracle Forums[0] is build on APEX for example.

[0]https://forums.oracle.com/ords/r/apexds/community/home

Is it me, or is that forum site very slow?

Apex is nice, but it becomes hard to maintain larger applications.

It also makes it so easy to create opportunities for SQL injection if you don't have careful coders. And it is also a great target for DoS attacks.

Having said all this, it really is the only low code platform I would ever consider using, in spite of it being Oracle's.

> It also makes it so easy to create opportunities for SQL injection if you don't have careful coders.

This is not the case. If you bind values with :ITEM_NAME and use compiled statements (never dynamic string concatenated ones with "execute immediate') there is no chance of SQL injection.

You can set items from the URL, which you usually can't do with most web frameworks. Of course you can enable Session State Protection, but you have to be vigilant.

You can also inadvertently leave a page public.

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