Application Express, or APEX, is one of the most innovative products to come out of Oracle in years. APEX is an application development framework for developing database-backed applications. It's easy enough to get started in that power users can quit storing data in random spreadsheets and instead centralize their data in the powerful Oracle database, all without developer help. Developers aren't left out, however. Those who choose to do so can go deep and leverage the full power and flexibility of Oracle's database engine.

Getting started with APEX is easy; learning how to take...