Two large new releases by the Oracle Corporation that I’ve written about the last few days, Oracle Application Express 4.0 and Oracle BPM Suite 11g, got me thinking. The one focused at delivering Web 2.0 interfaces in an extremely short amount of time, the other on combining static business processes with Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. What will happen when we combine the two?
Oracle Application Express came a long way from simply developing Database applications. APEX version 4.0 gives us a wide variety of additional feature in order to really combine the fast delivery of applications within a Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. Building an APEX application on top of web services isn’t new (we’ve done it before), but with APEX 4.0 it just gets simpler. REST assured.
This means that the days that APEX will only run on data that’s inside the database are really over. Of course, this is still (and will be) the main implementation of the tool. But we don’t have to anymore. Web services will give us the possibility to combine data from different sources and finally give end users a real interface on their business.
Looking at the power of Oracle’s BPM Suite 11g, we can also model these web services according to the business process that it will support. The combination of the two would mean that we can give end users a personalized web interface on their own business processes. The BPM Suite (read: BPEL and OSB) will provide the APEX application with relevant data and authorization on that data.
Think about it: a universal interface for the business, changed and developed in short iterations, that provide access to data based on the role of the user. Managers that get insight from the progress of certain processes while, in the same application, the sales manager uses data from his sales management application and CRM. Think about it.
Combining the two Oracle product will give us a much appreciated combination of complete application integration, modeled business processes and interactive and intuitive web interfaces. What other large possibilities would you see?
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