Last weekend VBCS was upgraded and in this new version (18.2.3) it is so much more technical to look at.
I first saw this release at the PaaS Forum in March and was deflated, I loved that the product was so easy to use and felt that it did have a market in the system support teams as EBS customers moved to Cloud Applications.
The Product Management team were very helpful, at the PaaS Forum, John Ceccarelli gave me an in-depth demo of the product and whilst I absolutely see the value to developers I felt it was going to be too technical for the user base I was looking at.
John and Angelo Santagata explained the changes were based on feedback from customers, and although I suspect they were talking to IT, I have to accept that.
I tried to get a beta version of the system that didn't work out until just a week before the upgrade, but as I am a paid user of VBCS I got the upgrade last weekend anyway.
My interest in VBCS is for extending the applications, although it wasn't ADF the technology the applications are written in, it did have an apps UI template, so was ideal for this use case. Oracle are now investing a lot in enhancing the applications user experience, the first of which can be seen in the current R13. This initiative which is ongoing is based on JET, the technology behind VBCS, so this is going to be an even better way to extend the applications.
A few weeks ago at Collaborate 18 I presented my low code version of VBCS twice to application users and cemented my view that there is a market here. When I got back from the Forum in March I also spoke to a local Business Development Manager in UK and I haven't changed my mind.
I took the opportunity at Collaborate to visit the demo grounds and the VBCS stand. I didn't get a chance to speak to Shay Shmeltzer, but I would like to say, look at his blog, he has always had good training material and I see he has added some great back to basics concepts for people using the new VBCS.
I did speak to Brian Fry, who finally got me the beta demo sorted and explained to me that this was the technology being adopted more and more by internal development. So long term this is the right answer.
Brian also told me the most important thing, that the no code isn't going away it has been rebranded 'classic' and I can still use it. There is no upgrade (as far as I can see) from classic to standard, so if you create an app using classic you need to use classic to amend it.
So the upgrade happened and I opened the app with a little trepidation. There were some issues previously with upgrades but this time all was well. It opened in 'Visual' mode and there were no applications.
However once I selected 'Classic' they were all there. This weekend I had a chance to test and amend them and happy to say, all is well.
I am a member of the Vsual Builder Cloud Service "Design Advisory Board" and regularly take part in UX projects around this product. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program I have great access to product management.
For developers the increased functionality in VBCS is excellent, but they haven't switched off the low code which I and some of my customers are interested in. I suspect the Visual side will grow and grow but that is OK, because as that maturity grows, so will the need to extend applications cloud and then it will be over to the developers.
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