Pique Solutions conducted a study comparing a no-/low-code application development approach with a traditional JavaScript framework approach to seek the quantitative and qualitative differences in developing two real-world application modules—interactive grid and faceted search. Specifically, we compared development on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Oracle Application Express (APEX) with a traditional approach using a JavaScript framework (ReactJS) while leveraging existing libraries and writing code to produce comparable deliverables to the greatest extent possible.
Oracle APEX is a popular low-code development platform for rapidly building opportunistic and data-driven enterprise applications. APEX, combined with Oracle Database, provides a fully integrated environment to build, deploy, maintain, and monitor data-driven business applications that display well on mobile and desktop devices. React is an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces or their components. It is maintained by Facebook by a community of individual developers and companies. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications.
Using a time and motion methodology, we defined and broke down the development activities for both environments in Oracle Cloud and tracked the time and the lines of code written for both application modules. The developer who designed and executed the study is a professional developer with 25 years of experience using a variety of development tools and languages but, by design, had no prior experience with APEX.
