Low-AI-Code Development

  In my previous post , I showcased adhoc sub processes with my demo app "IT-Support". What I didn't mention is that this app also uses another feature of 26.1: Async processing*. The task "Search Knowledge Base" calls a LLM that returns a decision used by the exclusive gateway. With "async before" turned off, the end user would have to wait until the LLM has returned with a response. This might take longer then 3 seconds, after which the user starts to suspect the app isn't working correctly. After submitting a ticket to the IT help desk, we need to immediately return control to the user again. This is exactly what happens when "async before" is turned on. Technically, the LLM call is now handled by a database job. Turning this feature on might require you to handle a new state the application is in. Before async processing, there was "before the LLM gets called" and "after the LLM returned a response", now you have ...

A marquee feature of Flows for APEX 26.1 are adhoc sub processes*. It allows you to combine deterministic with non-deterministic process steps. Let us take a look at the following diagram that could be used by an IT support help desk to better understand this feature. This process has deterministic steps and events like creating a ticket, search the knowledgebase and notify the customer. However, to come up with a solution an engineer might request logs, run a remote session, consult a LLM or might escalate to a level 2 support engineer. The order in which they occur is not known up front and some of these activities might even occur multiple times. To handle such situations, an ad-hoc sub process is what you will need (the box in the middle containing all activities).  For choosing the next activity, there are several modes in which an ad-hoc sub process can be modeled: - manually  - with or without a recommendation from a large language model - hybrid  - AI decides the ...

Want to start developing web applications with Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX)? Make sure you don't reinvent the wheel and adapt good practises from industry experts right from the start. Here are some tips for beginners: 1. If you don't already have Oracle APEX installed, don't install it yourself, but get a free workspace within minutes on apex.oracle.com  to be used for demo purposes. To learn about Oracle APEX in the Oracle Cloud, you can use the always free tier on cloud.oracle.com/free with two databases up to 20 GB database storage each without any cost. For production purposes, we recommend that you pay 120 USD/month (as of 22-JUN-2026) for the Oracle APEX Service on the Oracle Cloud or Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud. 2. Start making your first apps using one of the Oracle APEX tutorials: HyPlus (German):  apex.hyplus-group.com/development  (includes good practises!) Oracle (English): apex.oracle.com/hols 3. Read the APEX Developer's Companion: d...

The Data Reporter section in Oracle APEX 26.1.0 is for business users that normally work with this in a production environment. A production environment should always be configured to leverage some form of Single Sign-On (SSO). To enforce this, Data Reporter features aren't available in a new APEX 26.1.0 instance where APEX authentication is set by default for Data Reporter authentication*. *) 15-JUN-2026 Good news: The APEX team provided APEX Authentication Scheme support for Data Reporter with the 26.1.1 patchset, so you can test drive Data Reporter without the steps outlined in this blog post. When you would like to demo Data Reporter in your personal APEX enrvironment, setting up SSO might not always be an option, so how can you setup the authentication in a way that lets you use Data Reporter? Here are the steps to undertake. Logon to the internal workspace. Unser "Security Settings", configure the HTTP Header Variable Authentication Scheme. Important here is to set ...

Low-code platforms like Oracle APEX have a clear advantage in the AI era, as the LLM generates the metadata for the app out of your functional specification, not the actual code itself. As the low-code platform vendor is in charge of the underlying code, you can rely on it to be maintainable , more secure and legally bulletproof . Let's go through these in more detail. Maintainable Vibe coding quickly leads to a code mess as the LLM doesn't really optimize the code, it just implements your request. On code level, an identical function might be implemented multiple times by the LLM. A low-code platform returns HTML/JS/CSS to the web browser out of the metadata in runtime based on optimized, proven internal code. This means that your app is always state-of-the-art when upgrading the low-code platform and should bugs arise, they are the responsibility of the vendor to solve, not the developer. More Secure Many security features in Oracle APEX are turned on or are restrictively se...

I have been vibe coding in my spare time lately and managed to create and publish an iOS app called SnoreBuzzer  within 2(!) days. Do I have knowledge of the underlying Swift programming language? Zero. I created the app solely by prompting and focusing on the functional specification. OpenAI Codex did the heavy lifting: code generation, improving code quality, and documentation (incl. generating a data privacy statement). I specified my intent and tested the outcome. As a developer, I still kept an eye on the code to make sure it did not end up in a mess, so understanding the code is still required, but you definitely do not need to write it yourself anymore. As I let Codex make changes to my code, I regularly checked in to Git so I could easily revert changes if Codex messed things up, but that happened for only 5% of my prompts. Now to the big picture of this: a new age for developers is rising. In a couple of years, every developer will be using prompts for most of his developm...