Part II Connect Applications to Data
All business applications require some type of data, and when working with applications in Oracle Visual Builder, you can connect to multiple sources of data—as long as you're able to access them through REST.
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Business objects which are data objects you create to implement your app's business logic. A business object is a complex data type that groups together related data. For example, if you’re creating an application that requires information about an employee, you might create a business object that stores the name, address, salary, and other information about the employee.
When you create a business object, a REST API is automatically created for you (with GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE endpoints). You interact with the data in your business object through these REST endpoints. Your data is by default stored in an embedded database associated with your Visual Builder instance, but you can use your own Oracle database if an administrator has configured one for you.
- Service connections which are data objects that you connect to. They can be endpoints exposed by Oracle services, like Oracle Cloud Applications or Oracle Integration, as well as external REST services. For example, your employee application can use a service connection to access data exposed by HCM endpoints in the built-in service catalog, even access an external REST service to get information about the country that an employee works from.
No matter what form your data takes (business objects or service connections), the basic principles of creating an application are the same. The key difference between the two data sources: business objects store data as part of the app itself, service connections receive data from REST APIs.
If you know the structure of your objects or the data sources you want to use in your application, you can start defining your application's business objects, service connections, or both.