We have been getting questions about the differences between Visual Builder and Visual Builder Studio, what some of the older product names mean, and how various services are packaged. Let's try and clarify some of these issues by explaining the role each service provides and how they work together.
Two Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services
There are two distinct cloud services:
- Oracle Visual Builder – VB for short (previous name was Visual Builder Cloud Service – or VBCS for short)
- Oracle Visual Builder Studio – VB Studio for short (previous name was Developer Cloud Service – or DevCS for short)
Visual Builder is a service that offers a managed platform to host visual applications. It also includes a visual development environment to develop these apps. The hosting platform includes a web/app server, a database, a proxy for authenticating and calling REST services, and integration with the Oracle's identity service for authentication.
Visual Builder Studio is a platform for teams to manage their development process and source code, as well as to automate CI/CD. VB Studio includes Git, CI/CD pipeline, issue tracking, development dashboards, wiki and more. VB Studio also includes the development environment for developing visual applications that will deploy to Visual Builder, as well as features for Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps customers to develop extensions that are then deployed to Fusion instances. Visual Builder Studio doesn’t include a hosting platform for hosting your application and data.
Visual Builder requires a license – the license is based on the number of OCPUs that you provision.
Visual Builder Studio is a free entitlement for any paying Oracle Cloud customer. It is automatically provisioned for every Oracle Fusion Cloud Application customer.
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To learn more about the functionality that the combination of the tools offers see our Overview to Visual Builder Studio seminar.
VB and VB Studio in the Context of Oracle Fusion Applications
The new modules across Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps are being developed based on the Visual Builder user interface layer leveraging the design time environment in Visual Builder Studio. Note that Fusion Apps are not leveraging the Visual Builder hosting platform – they already have their own solutions for DB, App Server etc. (Note – a couple of CX modules – Digital Customer Service and Partners Finder – do use Visual Builder to host template applications that customers can modify and build on top of.)
Visual Builder Studio acts not just as the development environment for Oracle's own developers building Fusion Apps, but also as the development tool for customers who want to customize and extend those apps. For that reason, Visual Builder Studio is provisioned as part of every Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps tenancy.
There are three types of things you can do with that Visual Builder Studio:
- Modify existing pages in Oracle Fusion Apps – Specifically, the Fusion Redwood pages that Oracle built leveraging visual builder tech stack.
- Create new pages in Oracle Fusion Apps – New pages that customers create and deploy into Fusion Apps. These pages are integrated into the Fusion Apps menus and appear as part of the original App.
- Create standalone apps – These apps are deployed to the hosting platform provided by the Visual Builder service, which you'll need to provision.
The VB Studio instance that comes with Fusion Apps is pre-configured for the Fusion integration functionality and also offers all the functionality provided in a standalone Visual Builder Studio.
Visual Application vs Application Extension
Using the Visual Builder Studio that is provisioned as part of Fusion Apps you can create two types of applications
- Application Extension – also known as AppUI Extension
- Visual Application – also known as a Visual Builder Applications
Application extensions are deployed into the Fusion Apps instance, while a VB app is deployed onto a Visual Builder instance. This difference indicates what functionality you can get with each one.
Application extensions are created as additional pages in your Fusion instance – they are an integral part of the UI experience (not iFramed), appear in the Oracle Cloud Application menus, and leverage the same users and roles for authentication and authorization. Extensions are only accessible by Fusion Apps users and have the same look and feel as the rest of Fusion Apps
Visual applications function as standalone apps that are accessible from anywhere, with their own security implementation. They can use different look and feel schemas, have their own custom domain names, and have their own database for storing data in custom objects.
While both types of apps can integrate data from external REST services, they differ in the authentication types that are supported out of the box, since the VB app can leverage the REST proxy server. For more on that see the authentication topic in the documentation for Visual Builder vs the topic in AppUI.
For more on the differences between AppUIs and Visual Applications, as well as demonstrations of how they are developed see this recording from our Extending Oracle Fusion Apps seminar.