Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder

Boost productivity by building web and mobile applications efficiently using the drag-and-drop approach

Ankur Jain

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800569478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Build web and mobile apps quickly with Oracle Visual Builder and delve into real-time end-to-end use cases, exploring best practices, recommendations, security, and debugging techniques

Key Features

• Execute various real-time use cases and develop web and mobile applications quickly
• Enhance your skills by extending Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS applications using VB
• Gain the knowledge needed to take on projects directly and work independently

Book Description

Organizations are moving their applications, data, and processes to the cloud to reduce application costs, effort, and maintenance. However, adopting new technology poses challenges for developers, solutions architects, and designers due to a lack of knowledge and appropriate practical training resources. This book helps you get to grips with Oracle Visual Builder (VB) and enables you to quickly develop web and mobile applications and deploy them to production without hassle.

This book will provide you with a solid understanding of VB so that you can adopt it at a faster pace and start building applications right away. After working with real-time examples to learn about VB, you'll discover how to design, develop, and deploy web and mobile applications quickly. You'll cover all the VB components in-depth, including web and mobile application development, business objects, and service connections. In order to use all these components, you'll also explore best practices, security, and recommendations, which are well explained within the chapters. Finally, this book will help you gain the knowledge you need to enhance the performance of an application before deploying it to production.

By the end of this book, you will be able to work independently and deploy your VB applications efficiently and with confidence.

What you will learn

• Get started with VB and explore its architecture and basic building blocks
• Gain a clear understanding of business objects and learn how to manage them
• Create service connections to connect to the external API and Oracle SaaS
• Build web and mobile apps and run them on various devices
• Develop Oracle Cloud and non-Oracle SaaS app extensions
• Get to grips with data and application security using practical examples
• Explore best practices along with troubleshooting and debugging mechanisms
• Connect your VB application with VBS for application versioning using Git

Who this book is for

This book is for IT professionals working with UI technologies to develop web and mobile applications for various industries. Developers and UI designers who want to understand how to use VB, develop scalable web and mobile applications using drag-and-drop features, and design applications in a better way with the help of real-time example apps and code samples will find this book helpful. Prior experience in any UI technology, JavaScript, and REST APIs will be useful.

Section 1: Exploring the Building Blocks of VB

In this section, we'll start with the Visual Builder (VB) basics. This part will help you to understand VB, its benefits, and its features. You will become familiar with all the tools that are required to start VB, what technologies are used in VB, and what you should know in advance.

This section explains the VB architecture, which helps to understand different components of VB and how they communicate with each other in order to build web and mobile applications. In further chapters, you will learn about the creation of a VB instance, how to log in to it, and the directory structure of the web application. The purposes of different navigations are also explained. We will explain various building blocks of VB with examples.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, What, Why, and How (WWH) of Visual Builder
• Chapter 2, Provisioning and Understanding the Visual Builder Instance
• Chapter 3, Exploring Visual Builder Ingredients

Chapter 1: What, Why, and How (WWH) of Visual Builder

The first chapter of every book is one of the most important chapters as it mainly focuses on the introduction of the technology covered in the book. So, the first chapter of this book will help you to know more about Visual Builder (VB), why you need to use it, and how to use it.

At a high level, the VB is the cloud offering by Oracle that helps you to build engaging web and mobile applications by dragging and dropping the UI components. VB is a declarative approach for building cross-platform applications.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introducing VB
• Reviewing the features and benefits of VB
• Knowing the tools required to use VB
• Knowing the technologies used in VB
• Understanding the VB architecture

After completing this chapter, you will be familiar with Visual Builder, its features, and the benefits of using VB. In this chapter, we have explained what tools are required to start the VB, and what technologies you should know or you should learn. Along with this, we have drawn out the VB architecture, which explains how different VB components work together in order to develop web or mobile applications.

Technical requirements

You don't require any software or hardware to follow this chapter.

Introducing VB

VB is an Oracle Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that enables us to build web and mobile applications declaratively by dragging and dropping a wide variety of built-in User Interface (UI) components. VB helps you to build enterprise-grade applications that can be developed and deployed quickly and can be accessed from anywhere at any time. You don't need to install any additional software on the local machine to use VB. The complete development life cycle is managed by the browser interface. From development to testing to deployment, everything is managed by a single unified tool called Visual Builder.

VB allows developers to access the source code of visual development, which makes it easy to write custom code (HTML, JavaScript, JSON) to enhance the functionality of applications. You don't require any programming experience to develop applications using Visual Builder. The VB uses the open source Oracle technology called Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) for visual development. All the visual UI components belong to the JET family; however, you have the option to use HTML tags and/or the code editor when required.

VB provides a way to store and manage data into the embedded database and a mechanism to call any type of external REST API to interact with a wide variety of external applications. VB provides a declarative way to call any REST API without any coding. VB allows us to call REST-based integrations developed in the integration cloud seamlessly. A VB application interacts with an embedded database or external REST APIs to interact with data.

Having understood what VB really is, next we will have a look at its features and advantages.

Reviewing the features and benefits of VB

It is worthwhile knowing the benefits VB offers. In this fast-growing world, organizations are looking for a development tool that can help to deliver responsive web and mobile applications quickly and efficiently. VB allows quick development, requires no additional software cost, is a drag and drop tool, has a user-friendly interface to develop UIs, and more. It's a browser-based tool that helps to deliver engaging web and mobile applications.

VB is best suited for situations when you need to extend Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS applications quickly. Using the inbuilt catalog of the Oracle SaaS application, you can extend the Oracle SaaS application very easily.

Let's try to understand with an example. Let's say there is a set of external users who want to access the Oracle SaaS procurement module in order to create Purchase Orders (POs), approve POs, list POs, and so on, but the organization is not willing to accord access to the Oracle SaaS application to the external users.

If the organization has VB, then as a solution, the organization can plan to build a web or mobile application in VB and create different flows and pages. Developers can use the built-in catalog of Oracle SaaS to communicate with the Oracle SaaS application in VB and create/approve/list POs and so on in real time from the VB application directly instead of logging into the Oracle SaaS application.

Once the VB application is developed, you can deploy it with a single click and provide access to the external users so that external users can use SaaS application functionality using the VB application as required.

The features that VB offers are as follows:

• Embedded database: Oracle VB comes with an embedded database that helps you to manage transactional data. Using the data manager of the embedded database, you can import and export bulk data quickly from .csv or .xlsx files. This database has a set of features that makes it easy to maintain the data in the database.
  Important Note:
  An embedded database has a limit of 5 GB storage space.
• Connect to different database: Oracle VB is provisioned with a local database automatically, but VB gives you the option to switch the local database to another Oracle database such as Database as a Service (DBaaS) or Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP). Once you connect to a different database, all t...