Oracle APEX 24.1 is now generally available for download and is being rolled out to OCI APEX Application Development and Autonomous Database Cloud Service regions across the globe. Learn how to build your first low-code app with GenAI with this latest release. You can watch the replay of the launch announcement here.
This release delivers on three primary pillars of innovation that enable you to build compelling enterprise-grade apps with ease: AI-assisted app development, harnessing the power of Oracle’s next-gen data platform, and powerful enterprise-grade components for building sophisticated cloud and mobile apps.
With this release, we are bringing AI directly into low-code development to enable all developers to easily build sophisticated cloud and mobile apps. Developers can now use AI as an assistant to help build their apps with less time and effort; with APEX AI Assistant, developers no longer need to use multiple windows to locate table names and column names.
With APEX 24.1, we have introduced a native AI-powered APEX AI Assistant that enables natural language–based development of cloud and mobile apps. Now with APEX AI Assistant, all developers can use natural language to generate SQL, enabling them to more easily build apps, perform one-click syntax correction, and eliminate the need to remember table names. Developers can also create entire apps simply by using natural language prompts to specify desired capabilities and components, and easily iterate using an intuitive conversational interface.
Key components of AI-assisted app development include:
Additionally, Oracle APEX 24.1 offers developers the ability to select the LLM of their choice. To better understand how this simplifies and speeds app development, take a look at the demo video:
APEX is built on top of Oracle Database, and as developers, you can access all the key capabilities and features of the world’s most powerful data platform. Moreover, our newest release of Oracle Database 23ai introduces three new and enhanced capabilities that are of particular interest to APEX developers:
With Oracle Database 23ai, we introduced AI Vector Search, a powerful new technology that enables you to leverage a new generation of AI models to generate and store vectors. These vectors, sometimes referred to as embeddings, are multidimensional representations of documents, images, videos, sound, and other types of unstructured data. By encoding these objects as vectors, you gain the ability to look for semantic similarities between them using mathematical calculations.
The real power of Oracle Database 23ai is that you can combine these similarity searches with searches on your business data using simple SQL. Anyone with a basic understanding of SQL can write powerful queries combining similarity and other search criteria. These queries provide LLMs with additional context, augmenting their knowledge and making their responses more accurate and relevant to your customers' or organizations' context, a process popularly known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
If you run APEX on top of Oracle Database 23ai, you will natively get access to all the AI Vector Search capabilities and can include them in your app at no additional cost.
This technology allows you to leverage the power of relational and the simplicity of JSON development approaches all within a single app.
Oracle APEX fully supports server-side JavaScript. Together with the power of Oracle Database 23ai, which comes embedded with a Multilingual Engine (MLE), developers can write JavaScript code on the server side. This will enable JavaScript developers to implement server-side business logic using their language of choice. By having a central code repository for the back-end code inside the database, your business logic is centralized in one location. The execution of SQL from within server-side JavaScript eliminates expensive network round trips. Developers can leverage the vast amounts of open source libraries. JavaScript programmers can now concentrate on what really matters: solving business problems.
Along with the focus on AI, we introduced and enhanced a number of capabilities within APEX to deliver support for enterprise-grade features. We have added more than 30 new features to the platform. Here are some of the highlights for enterprise-scale app development:
In November 2023, with APEX 23.2, we introduced a native workflow engine as part of the unified platform. APEX 24.1 introduces several enhancements to workflow functionality, including a new workflow dashboard page, termination function for asynchronous activity plugins, workflow diagram region, and the ability for the initiator of the task to approve/reject the task and vacation rules for tasks.
With APEX 23.2, we introduced a collaborative development feature called Working Copy that enables developers to create a copy of an app to fix a bug or add a feature, then selectively merge their changes back into the main application. APEX 24.1 adds several enhancements to Working Copy to better enable native team development of enterprise apps. These include a visual indicator in Page Designer that shows when a page is changed or locked in another copy of the application. Also, the Working Copy menu now includes a new option, Compare Current Page with Main, that lets users compare changes between working copies by clicking on the View Changes in Other Copies button on the Page Designer toolbar.
The ability to print pixel-perfect reports has been a common request from APEX developers, who have typically used a third-party plugin for this functionality. With APEX 24.1, developers can now leverage the Document Generator pre-built function to print pixel-perfect reports. The service is integrated into APEX, and you can generate PDF documents from a combination of JSON data and Microsoft Word templates.
This release also includes numerous additional features and bug fixes, resulting in even higher quality and stability for APEX apps. For more information about the new features in Oracle APEX 24.1, as well as many of the other exciting enhancements, please see the Release Notes or visit What's New. You can also watch our four-part APEX 24.1 New Features video by visiting Oracle APEX Office Hours.
Oracle APEX is powered by a vibrant community of more than 850,000 developers who are building sophisticated apps to address their organizations' most demanding challenges. APEX developers are building apps across ERP, content management, CRM, freight management, payment processing, fraud detection, and even simple spreadsheet replacement. Compared to high-code technologies, APEX enables developers to build enterprise apps with world-class features 20X faster with 100X less code while reducing the application development effort by 65%.
Oracle APEX is available as a standalone, fully managed service in OCI (all global cloud regions) as a pay-per-use model. You pay for only the resources you consume, there is no per-app or per-user fee hassle. There is also a free version included in OCI Always Free services. It’s also included as a no-cost feature with any Oracle Database service, including Autonomous Database. There is no extra charge for specific features—all features are available to all customers. You can learn more about the different Oracle APEX services via the Oracle APEX pricing page.
Try Oracle APEX 24.1 now by signing up for a free online workspace or download the product. Within minutes, you can build your first low-code app. If you are interested in learning more about Oracle APEX, we encourage you to register for the free online learning courses. These self-paced courses offer every developer an opportunity to become proficient with APEX at their own pace and convenience. Check out our latest course, Empowering Low-Code Apps with AI, to learn about the GenAI features in APEX 24.1 and earn an APEX+AI Champion badge on completion. Read what leading industry analysts have to say about the latest APEX 24.1 release.
Oracle APEX 24.1 is a major new release that introduces a number of exciting new features. The Al-assisted development features of APEX 24.1 have the potential to revolutionize the way that applications are built. If you are a developer who is looking to build next-gen AI-powered applications, try Oracle APEX 24.1 today. When you do, we'd love to hear your feedback via apex.oracle.com/forum.
I am the Vice President of Product Management for Oracle APEX – low code application platform. I am passionate about building great products and solutions for our customers. Prior to Oracle, I was the General Manager for the technology incubator at Bertram Capital, a private equity firm, where I incubated and launched four Cloud startups focused on DevOps and hybrid clouds including Morpheus Data. I was also the Chief Marketing Officer at NuoDB, a cloud database company. Before that I held various product and marketing leadership roles at Salesforce and Symantec.