Apex Web Resources (Oracle)
Apex is Rapid Application Development tools for developing web applications. Data is immediately available to other users and because it resides in the Oracle Database is it very scalable.
apex.oracle.com is the main starting point for all things Apex.
Oracle is hosting an Apex online trial area on the web. You have to request an
Apex workspace for yourself. Link:> Request Workspace. Once you have a workspace you can connect using this link.
Oracle SQL Developer
SQL Developer is a client/server development and reporting tools. The tool is very useful for developing PL/SQL code. It has some nice functionality on code insight. The tools is similar to TOAD. The other good thing about the tools is, is that it is free.
The development tools is also starting to provide Modeling tools. If you going to develop a medium sized application then it worthwhile to invest time in developing a proper data model. A data model is a representation of the data structures and very effective communication tools for developers. Data models has some rules that has to be followed. You can find a summary at DataModel.org
Oracle PL/SQL
The Apex application has been written in PL/SQL because this is the language that the Oracle database uses. I lot of information about PL/SQL can be found on the Oracle Technology site.
Oracle Database Server
Having many different variations in the Oracle Database Server is sometimes confusing.
Here is some guidance:
- Oracle XE:
This is at the bottom of the scale. It is intended from personal and small application usage. It has upper limit constraints on memory and storage. Oracle XE is free but has some conditional usage clause, - Oracle RDBMS - Standard Edition
This requires a license and does not have the resource limitations as with the Oracle XE version. There are some functionality that is not included in the Enterprise Edition so it is a much cheaper option. We would recommend this for small to medium applications that important but people can still perform the majority of their task if it is unavailable for some reason, - Oracle RDBMS - Enterprise Edition - Single Instance
Enterprise Edition is recommended for critical applications and you can do things link Data Guard for disaster recovery and fail over. - Oracle RDBMS - Enterprise Edition - Multi Instance (RAC)
This option is for mission critical applications. You need to have an enterprise license and a Cluster license. You will also need additional hardware and maybe file system clustering software also but this option will give you a high available database. To make your environment highly available you may also have to consider having multiple web server and load balancers.