Generative AI's productivity promise is exciting, but not all generated artifacts are created equal. The reams of code streaming from large language models are impressive, but enterprise apps get enhanced over decades. A generated jump-start is only valuable if teammates can understand and evolve it over time. Model-driven, low-code tools offer a higher-level of abstraction by capturing application intent in metadata. Developers use visual tools to interactively assemble pages from pre-built components, specify the data to work with, configure various display options, and impose conditional and dynamic behavior. The platform directly executes these developer definitions to let end-users get their jobs done from desktop and mobile devices. Low-code app definitions with a simple text format are succinct, easy to understand and compare, and simple to evolve as new requirements arise. Targeting higher-level abstractions like these with generative AI is a superior option. That approach reduces technical debt by keeping generated definitions human readable and evolvable.
Oracle APEX is core to generative development for enterprises (GenDev), introduced by Juan Loaiza at CloudWorld 2024; an AI-centric data infrastructure first introduced with Oracle Database 23ai, offering a low-code application platform that lets you build scalable, secure web and mobile apps with world-class features to deploy anywhere. It is model-driven by design, with app definitions that have a simple text format. Oracle APEX’s AI Assistant and developer-centric features let you use natural language to help generate SQL and application blueprints, and let end-users ask questions in natural language in a chat dialog. Combined with other key technologies in Oracle Database 23ai such as JSON Relational Duality Views and AI Vector Search, APEX is part of GenDev, an innovative development infrastructure to accelerate the benefits of AI while helping to mitigate its risks.
Enterprise app developers use the declarative SQL language to express the intent of what data is required to retrieve, create, update, or delete for a given use case. While SQL's concepts are simple, in a large enterprise data model with many tables and relationships, developers could use some help remembering all the table and column names and join conditions to produce the data required for the task at hand. In Oracle APEX, wherever you can type SQL you can summon the APEX AI Assistant to help you generate any required SQL instead by explaining what you need in natural language. While creating a chart to visualize the top 10 classrooms in use at a university, in Figure 1 the developer asks a question in the conversation pane on the right. “SM” requests the top 10 classrooms for the current calendar year offering the most courses. APEX AI Assistant can help generate the corresponding SQL that you see on the left. The query joins tables for buildings, classrooms, and courses, with where, group by, order by, and fetch first 10 clauses.
To fine-tune the result, just ask APEX AI Assistant to help adjust it. For example, in Figure 2 notice in the conversation on the right that the developer asks to concatenate building and room in the query. This helps produce the updated query on the left.
With this kind of help, providing end users the Top Classrooms in Use page with the chart shown in Figure 3 is a simple matter of describing the data to visualize in natural language and choosing a chart type.
To quickly jump-start application creation, you can explain the app you need to build in natural language. APEX AI Assistant can help generate an app blueprint as shown in Figure 4. Again, you can iterate on the prompt until the proposed blueprint is perfect, and then click (Create Application) to help get the job done. This generates a set of application and page definitions, with declaratively specified data sources. These crystallize your intent into understandable, evolvable metadata. From there, you can proceed to adjust the definitions to add functionality that only you would know how to build. No generated code to understand or worry about breaking!
When your app needs an AI-powered chatbot, it's easy with Oracle APEX. Simply configure a button to open the chatbot dialog using the built-in "Show AI Assistant" action, provide the system prompt that gives the chatbot its mission, and enter a welcome message. In short order, your app's end-users can be asking questions to a chatbot assistant like the Sequoia University Assistant you see in Figure 5. Using simple SQL statements, it’s easy to include your own application data into the chatbot's system prompt to let the AI service generate even more useful and specific answers. This technique is known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
A key strength of Oracle APEX is its industry-leading set of highly functional, data-savvy components. These are well suited to generative development because you simply configure their data, behavior, and display options using high-level metadata. While the full set of components also includes forms, reports, grids, calendars, maps, cards, trees, and more, three of APEX's most popular components include:
The Courses page in Figure 6 features an Interactive Report component. You start by configuring the data source using a table name or SQL query, possibly generated from natural language with the help of the AI-powered APEX AI Assistant. And that's it. This one configuration step taps into a wealth of features that end-users love. The Interactive Report lets users view data in a tabular format, choose the columns they want to see, filter the data to find a subset they are looking to focus on, format the data with break groups and conditional highlighting, sort, aggregate, or derived computed formulas based on the data, chart and group the data, and pivot the rows into columns when useful. Users can save one or more named reports to re-run later, download the formatted results in multiple formats, email the report to a colleague, or subscribe to receive in email a periodic report run. Developers have never worked so little to offer so much rich, functionality to their end-users.
The Course Search page in Figure 7 shows an example of an e-commerce-like faceted search experience. It was created in a few clicks of the Create Page Wizard. It only required choosing the COURSES table as the subject of the search and reviewing the intelligently-selected set of columns to use as search facets. Using a process familiar to anyone who has done online shopping, end-users narrow the results by clicking one or more options in any combination of search categories. Oracle APEX handles filtering the facets to show only applicable, remaining choices, and provides counts for each one. By configuring an action on the Cards region displaying the results, you could let the end-user drill down to get more information on a particular course.
When your app needs to visualize data of any kind, Oracle APEX lets you do that quickly. The chart component supports all the different kinds of chart types you see in Figure 8. Just configure the data you want to see. As you saw above, you can do that using natural language to explain what info needs summarizing over what time frame and along what dimensions and the APEX AI Assistant can help create the SQL that the chart component uses to retrieve the data to display.
These are just three of the most frequently used data-savvy regions Oracle APEX developers have in their toolbox. However, this familiar approach works with any component. Whether configuring an interactive report, faceted search, grid, form, app search, map, chart, or other kind of region, you configure your intent in the same way. Simply indicate what regions and items to add to your page, configure what data they should work with, set the display options to get the result you want, and configure any interactivity the page requires.
Oracle APEX is a strategic platform for the generative development of enterprise apps. Whether you and your colleagues are low-coders or pro-coders, you can all collaborate using Oracle APEX to quickly describe, iterate, and deliver sophisticated, data-centric enterprise solutions with AI assistance throughout. Using both natural language and declarative builders, you capture the intent of your business solutions and the data they require, staying focused on the WHAT instead of the HOW.
Learn more about GenDev and how you can benefit from this technology here.
Visit apex.oracle.com to get started today with a free evaluation workspace to try out every Oracle APEX feature, and if you like what you see you can provision an Always Free Oracle Cloud tenancy with Oracle APEX running on Oracle Autonomous Database as the next step. From this page you can also explore hands on labs, training and certification opportunities, and see the network of Oracle APEX partners and community components produced by the worldwide Oracle APEX developer community that is over 800,000 strong. You'll be in great company!