Visual Builder Studio is the development platform for the new generation of Oracle Cloud Apps. In addition, VB Studio provides an ideal platform for configuring and extending Oracle Cloud Apps with a host of built-in features specific for these scenarios. In fact, Oracle Cloud Apps comes with a free instance of Visual Builder Studio out-of-the-box to let customers configure and extend the apps. Up until now customers could have used that instance to configure VB-based module in Oracle Cloud Apps to do configurations such as hide and show fields, introduce new calculated fields, etc. Now the same VB Studio instance can be leveraged to create and publish new pages and apps that interact with Oracle SaaS data sources.
With the 2207 version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio we introduce a new architecture and a set of features for creating Oracle Cloud Apps extensions called "App UI". With this new architecture, Oracle Cloud Apps customers can create new pages and apps and run those directly on their provisioned Oracle SaaS infrastructure.
The apps that are created with this new approach can interact with both the built-in Oracle SaaS objects and custom objects. In addition, the app can access external REST services that don't require authentication. The extensions can be leveraged by Oracle SaaS users using their existing credentials and privileges.
For these type of extensions customers no longer require a separate Visual Builder runtime service or an instance of IDCS configured for SSO. This further simplifies and removes barrier for extension creation by any Oracle Cloud Apps user.
For scenarios where you require data from REST services that requires authentication, or cases where you want to build apps that are accessed by non-SaaS users, you can spin up a separate Visual Builder runtime instance, and point the VB Studio instance to use that VB instance as an environment to host these apps.
In the demo below we show this new development and publishing experience:
For more details about creating these extensions read the Extending Oracle Cloud Apps with Visual Builder Studio guide.
In our next blog entry we cover how to work with custome objects and external REST services in your App UI extensions.