The Visual Builder Studio that comes packaged with Oracle Fusion Apps allows you to create new Redwood based pages in Fusion Apps that access data from Fusion Apps. The pages are natively integrated into Fusion Apps providing the same UI (using same Redwood templates), same users and roles for security, and same session management at runtime. These pages are implemented as AppUI extensions.
However, right now, AppUI extensions are limited in terms of accessing data from external services and databases. AppUI can access services from the Fusion Apps catalog, custom objects created with App Composer, and external services that don't require authentication and support CORS. (Two workarounds for accessing other sources of data is to use Oracle Integration Cloud that is in the same identity domain as Fusion Apps, or use custom code in App Composer). Customers who can't use the workarounds might still opt to create standalone VB apps.
Standalone VB apps allow you to create your own business objects to store data and access REST services with a variety of authentication approaches. In addition, they can use the Redwood page templates and components, and access services from the Fusion Apps service catalog. You can configure the VB instance they run on to use the same identity domain as Fusion Apps or use identity propagation for single-sign-on experience.
For more on the differences between VB, VB Studio, and AppUI see this entry.
In the demo below we show how embed a standalone app into Fusion Apps using AppUI functionality.
AppUI enables you to create a new page that will embed the standalone app using an iFrame tag. The AppUI extension can also pass parameters to the standalone apps on the URL it invokes.
The result is a new menu option in Fusion Apps that will invoke the app keeping the Fusion Apps menu in the page to simplify further navigation.
Check out the demo: