5 Work with Services
Many of the UI components in your application are bound to data that comes from REST APIs, which in turn are provided by services, like Oracle Cloud Applications. These services are made available to your visual application through backends and service connections.
A backend is a representation of an external system whose data you wish to consume. A service connection provides basic information about a service, including the REST endpoints and schema provided by the service, in an Open API-compliant format.
Service connections are defined at the visual application level, which means that all the web apps in your visual application can use them.
Backends help you manage the servers on which the REST APIs are hosted. By gathering server details together in one place, backends make it easier to create service connections, as well as to manage the server details themselves. For example, the "Oracle Cloud Applications" backend, which is automatically provided for most visual applications, points to the servers hosting the Enterprise Resource Planning and Supply Chain APIs, the Human Capital Management APIs, and more:
