Some of our customers know FOEX, a manufacturer of add-on modules that accelerate programming in APEX, even a low-code framework. Oracle bought FOEX in 2022 and the former FOEX team is now part of the APEX Development Team at Oracle.
The support of existing FOEX plug-ins therefore lies with Oracle and the manufacturer is keeping quiet about the roadmap for the future. This can lead to major challenges with new versions of APEX, which are known to be released twice a year.
In addition, the APEX framework has become even better with new features and a clear roadmap from the manufacturer, also thanks to the additional expertise of the extended APEX development team.
Some of our customers have therefore decided to remove FOEX from their environment and replace it with native APEX functions. We welcome this decision.
Reasons for a customer to switch from FOEX to APEX-Native:
Unclear future of FOEX plug-ins, and therefore theoretical risk of deactivated features in future APEX upgrades.
FOEX is built as a complete framework, it can be problematic to mix it with native APEX sites.
Developers for FOEX are hard to find and it is likely this gap will widen due to the unclear prospects mentioned above - quite different with APEX, where the community is growing.
Most FOEX functions can be made 1-to-1 in APEX, directly or with workarounds.
Maintenance of existing FOEX environments is becoming more complicated as the forums and blogs are very limited compared to APEX.
A truly closed system with a lot of custom configurations and know-how base that is dwindling - see above.
What to do?
The world of APEX offers fully-fledged replacement options for the FOEX infrastructure and - as always with APEX - free of charge, without licence fees. On the one hand, you can stay with the current APEX and thus keep the functions - but this will lead to major challenges in the medium term, because support for older APEX and Oracle DB versions will one day be discontinued, including all compatibility and security challenges.
On the other hand, the impending challenges can be addressed immediately and the existing FOEX environments analysed in order to future-proof the company's APEX infrastructure.
At Datasense, we deal with this topic. We are happy to help you analyse your existing FOEX environments and transition plans to get your company in shape for the future.Get in touch with us - we will be happy to advise you!
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