RishOraDev's Oracle Blogs

I have been thinking of writing a series of blogs about Integrating Oracle APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite, for quiet a while now. When I saw the following post from Tim Hall couple of weeks ago, I said to myself that there is no better way to pay tribute to the great man, #JoelKallman, by writing something about the application that I have been working on years, Oracle E-Business Suite, and how it can be modernized by integrating Oracle APEX.

This will be an introductory post, where I will discuss the architecture of Oracle APEX and how it fits into Oracle E-Business Suite R12. In the subsequent posts, I’ll show how to integrate Oracle APEX with Oracle R12, and finally will discuss some use cases or benefits.

What is Oracle APEX ?

Oracle APEX is a rapid web application development tool for Oracle database. It is an enterprise low-code application platform, using which developers can easily build scalable, secure enterprise applications and deploy them on both cloud or on-premises.

Using Oracle APEX, Oracle E-Business Suite functionalities can be easily and seamlessly extended, without almost no impact on the existing E-Business Suite Implementation. Some of the use cases of integrating Oracle APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite are as follows:

• Move away from old-school Oracle Forms and develop feature-rich web-forms with modern look-and-feel
• Easily provide default values and validations in forms
• Develop forms only with what is needed for business users, hiding the complex Oracle Forms
• Create interactive reports
• Streamline business processes
• Develop forms supported on any device.
• Integrate with other custom applications, integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite
• Reduce development time

Oracle APEX Architecture

Oracle APEX resides within Oracle Database in a different schema. The Middle Tier requires a Java application called Oracle REST Data Services(ORDS), which acts as the bridge between HTTP requests coming from the browser and the Oracle Database. It can be deployed Standalone or with Oracle Weblogic or Apache Tomcat.

Recommended Architecture for APEX-EBS Integration

For Database Tier, Oracle recommends to install Oracle APEX within the same DB Server where Oracle EBS is installed. A separate custom schema should be created. Since, we will be integrating Oracle APEX with Oracle EBS R12.2 instance, the custom APEX schema should be updated to enable Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR).

For Middle Tier, Oracle REST Data Services(ORDS) is recommended to be installed within Oracle WebLogic Server, on a separate application server to the one configured for Oracle E-Business Suite, so that each Application Server can be managed separately. Apache Tomcat or Standalone ORDS can also be used.

This is on a very high-level, the architecture of integrating Oracle APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2.X. In my next post, I shall show the step-by-step process of integrating them.

References

Extending Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 using Oracle APEX