Oracle Visual Builder is a very effective tool for significantly reducing the time spent coding, for example, from weeks to just a day or two. This tool is one of the great options available to build add-ons for other existing services provided by Oracle Cloud, for example, Finance Cloud, Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, and CRM Cloud. As technology moves slowly toward the cloud, this tool is a leap forward in this technological movement. Future work includes a remote working concept, and this cloud-based tool is expected to help employee productivity.

This book is targeted to all users of Visual Builder, from beginners to experts. The overall content is organized in a logical fashion: building simple web applications (scaffolded with building business logic), connecting to a data source, user interface design, adding security, deployment, and finally an explanation of workflow. This book covers all the aspects required for developing a production quality solution. Chapter 1 provides a Visual Builder architectural overview, including front-end and back-end details. Next, chapters 2 through 5 deal with defining and implementing business objects and working with data. Chapters 6 and 7 cover adding business logic into the business object, and chapter 8 provides an additional method for data handling using Microsoft Excel worksheets. Chapter 9 introduces a mobile app building option for common platforms like iOS and Android. Then, chapter 10 focuses on enabling security for web and mobile apps. Chapter 11 runs through the various stages of development. The last two chapters (12 and 13) wrap up the book by explaining enterprise development workflow and integration with other Oracle cloud services.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is very true in this context. The book is filled with numerous relevant screen shots of the various tool features, including the steps needed to configure and enable them. The presented details will provide beginner engineers with a step-by-step understanding, while at the same time serving as a reference for experts.

Visual Builder highlights a low-code approach; no prior programming experience is required. However, readers should have basic knowledge of cloud technologies and hands-on programming experience. Prior knowledge of representational state transfer (REST), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and Git will also help readers.