I just had the opportunity to participate in an Application Builder Cloud Service Hands-On Lab here at Oracle OpenWorld, and this is a very promising product. The development experience is somewhat similar to Application Express (APEX) in that you can build your entire application in the browser. A nice enhancement over APEX is that ABCS supports versioning of the application. This means that when you place an ABCS application in production, you automatically get a new version of the application for you to continue development on. The process to take an application live also has an intermediate "staging" step, and as you move the application through staging to production, you even have the option to move the test data with it (or not). For now, ABCS supports only data sources that you create yourself inside the tool - there is no way to connect ABCS to your existing tables. But once that feature becomes available, probably through REST web services, ABCS will become a real contender for your lightweight application development.
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