http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/forms/pdf/apex_forms_jdev.pdf is probably a good middle of the road and sensible view.

As a very sweeping generalisation - Apex fits will in the "departmental - I used to use an Excel spreadsheet" kind of application where as JDev/ADF/Fusion etc is much more of the "my enterprise business applications like HR"
As I said, that is a very wide generalisation but one that fits the typical use cases.

As a side note - Oracle are using JDev/ADF/SOA for their business application - so you can say that Oracle are betting their Enterprise level business applications on the Java/ADF stack.

Regards
Grant

Thanks Grant. The referenced article was informative. It would seem that the greatest benefit of JDeveloper/ADF over APEX is the flexability to use different technology and maybe to have a nicer looking UI. According to the APEX forum, APEX scales better than Forms and it looks like APEX will be around for a while. I think that perhaps reporting is more difficult to integrate into APEX (unless you purchase an Oracle reporting tool). I know that APEX is advertized as a departmental quick development tool, but if you don't need the flexibility, (other than reporting) I cannot see what the downside is. I will try to develop a prototype using JDev and APEX to compare the experience and the end product.

If anyone else has some comments, I would appreciate hearing from you.

Wael,

Thanks, that link was helpful too. And the comments included an article by Dimitri Gielis comparing APEX and ADF, although that was a year ago. The flexibility of JDev versus the ease of use of APEX comes up again.

Grant,

I don't know about the scaling issues comparing Forms and Apex, but apparently Apex scales well based on the database server configuration. Yes, if you want to develop a J2EE application, JDeveloper seems like a great choice. This is not a criticism of JDeveloper, but I seriously question the assumption that Apex is not suitable for enterprise applications. It keeps coming back to JDeveloper is flexible and has more options, but if you don't need those options and you don't have a large budget and a team of developers and you want to develop a web application on Oracle, I cannot see any reason why Apex cannot be used to develop an 'enterprise application.' Also, Apex has fewer moving parts (and pieces to break) since it doesn’t use an application server. It is also not clear what an 'enterprise application' might be, but it would seem that the Oracle party line is that is must be able to interface to different services, platforms, technology, etc. But it certainly depends on your enterprise. Or perhaps my small-medium sized 'enterprise' might be Oracle's 'department'. I think that there is a big paradigm difference between the J2EE/Java world and the RDBMS world, where database centric view tends to value robustness, performance, scalability, maintainability (and succinct code) more than flexibility and portability. I think JDeveloper/ADF is a great tool and the integration of the MVC layers from a single vendor is a huge advantage, but it might be overkill for my enterprise app. I will continue to develop my prototype using ADF and will look at Apex too. At this point I have only played with an older version of Apex, so I might find that it is not acceptable for my purposes, but I only need CRUD and some reporting, so we will see. Thanks for your response (all responses) since this has helped me to clarify my understanding of the technology.

Leslie

Grant - I think we are in 100% agreement.

Thanks.