Another advantage of APEX above ADF, which you don’t mention in your balanced opinion, is that the APEX architecture, without a required application server, is much cheaper than the ADF configuration. WIth an APEX application, you don’t have to pay any application server license. For some companies, this is an important reason to opt for APEX instead of ADF.

Regards,

Rik

Please, never say that again: “… that I feel in to the same old trap”
If cosmetic wrapping paper prevails over functionality, what would you have?
A beautiful box, but it would be empty! Not a nice gift i.m.h.o.
Your priorities were right (but I am a “grey” Designer/Developer guy .

I posted my feedback on Marco’s blog. http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=2671
What I said to both of you was: “Dimitri, Lucas, that was a wonderful achievement”.

Regards,

JB

On the security discussion: corporate databases with corporate data are the resources most to be protected in any organization. Much more so than firewalls, web servers or application servers, the database contain the stuff that really matters: the data itself. So any attacker from the outside should be kept away from the data and the database as far as possible. In most Web Application architectures, that means having a web server in the DMZ that can be accessed from outside the corporate firewalls – through HTTP/HTTPS. The web server can use a different protocol or port – or use some other less public, less well known way – to communicate with the application server that is not in the DMZ but within the second firewall. The application server can provide another layer of security before it finally communicates with the treasure of them all – the database. With APEX, the database can be all of web server, application server and data source. Without the benefit of all the security measures and protective layer that the multi-tiered architecture provides.

One way of dealing with security challenges could be to use a database (Oracle XE for example) for just serving one or more APEX applications. The data required for and collected by the APEX application is in that database, but the rest of the corporate data is not. Background processes, possibly organized through a SOA infrastructure, synchronize these front-end databases with the deeper layers of corporate data.

Lucas

I do have one question though. Please elaborate on your statement: “I have some reservations about publishing an APEX application on the internet, unless the database underpinning that application is detached from the corporate database infrastructure and just a standalone application serving database.” What are your specific concerns?

Thanks!

Nice post! As you could read on my blog too, I really enjoyed the session.

Of course I was *pro* APEX and when I’m talking about it I can be really passionate
The people should have been there, it was a unique atmosphere where we had some good laughs… and I think we both played a nice role.
Nevertheless I also said next to when you’ve lot of Java developers, ADF would also be a good fit for rich/fat applications.

As a comment on Marco, concerning the security. John Scott, hosting a lot of APEX applications, is specialized in this topic. There’re definitely some ways to make it more secure (for ex. with two Apaches in front of the db).

Thanks,
Dimitri

I started to write a reply and noticed that’s getting longer and longer. Because I know that your blog doesn’t really support formated comments, I wrote a reply posting at my blog. http://inside-apex.blogspot.com/2007/12/reply-to-amis-query-on-apex-and-adf.html

Regards and happy holidays
Patrick