The Basics

What Is Oracle Visual Builder Studio?

Oracle Visual Builder Studio (VB Studio) is a robust application development platform that helps your team effectively plan and manage your work throughout all stages of the app dev lifecycle: design, build, test, and deploy.

In addition, VB Studio makes it easy for your entire team to develop the artifacts they need, including:

Oracle Cloud Applications developers, who need to extend their applications with business-specific customizations;
Low-code developers, who want to create web or mobile apps using a visual designer;
Experienced programmers, who want to modify the source code for web and mobile apps created by others, or to develop bespoke apps using the web programming language of their choice.

With VB Studio you get:

Built-in repositories for hosting code in Git and for hosting binaries, such as Maven dependencies
A continuous integration service so you can automate your build and test systems
A continuous delivery service that tightly integrates with Oracle Cloud Applications
A rich visual designer integrated with source control (Git) so that developers can manage changes, apply version control best practices, and collaborate with their teammates to develop applications
The ability to build and display different flavors of the UI to meet the needs of discrete users of certain Oracle Cloud Applications (those built with VB Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (Oracle JET)), also within a Git framework
Agile boards and an issue tracking system for tracking sprints, tasks, defects, and features

VB Studio enables developers to easily deploy their applications to their preferred target, whether it’s a staging or production instance of Oracle Cloud Applications or an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service instance.

What's an Extension?

The changes you make to your Oracle Cloud Application in VB Studio are stored in an artifact called an extension. Physically, the source files associated with the extension are stored in a Git repository. When working on an extension, the best practice is to have only one extension for the base app ( the Oracle Cloud Application you're extending) in the project, and to store the source files for the extension in the same Git repository in the project. Multiple developers can work together to develop the extension, but they should all be working from the same repository.

Description of diagram-appext-project.png follows

Here are the key components of the VB Studio ecosystem as it pertains to extensions:

Within a single VB Studio instance, you and your team members who use that instance are considered an organization. Within your organization, you will likely belong to one or more projects, each of which is devoted to a discrete software effort. For example, you might have a project for building extensions for an Oracle Cloud Application, like Digital Sales, and another project for building a bespoke web or mobile application for use by your own department. A project brings together all the tools you need to create those artifacts, such as a Git repository for storing your source code, a pipeline to provide continuous integration and delivery, an issue tracking system, team wikis, and more.
The best practice is to have a project dedicated to a single Oracle Cloud Application, so that all work for that App is stored in the same Git repository. When setting up a workspace, developers working on the extension should clone the project's Git repository and begin working from there.
When you work on an extension, you do so within the editors provided in the VB Studio Designer. Depending on which aspect of the page you're customizing, VB Studio invokes the proper editor to provide the experience you need.
All of your work in VB Studio is done in the context of a workspace, a completely private area where you can work on your extension.

Build Web and Mobile Applications with VB Studio

VB Studio provides a visual environment to develop, test, and deploy mobile and web applications.

It provides easy access to data from any REST-based service, and enables you to create reusable business objects for storing and managing data. Using the cloud-based visual development tools, you can create and test responsive web applications, progressive web apps, and native mobile applications without the need to install any additional software. The Designer enables you to lay out pages in your applications by dragging and dropping UI components, customizing their attributes, and defining their behavior.

VB Studio uses Oracle JET to create web and mobile interfaces. Reusable JET Web Components, built using the Web Component standard, can be added to the application to further enhance the user experience.

VB Studio also provides the following tools for building and publishing applications:

Robust tools to describe requests and responses to Oracle Cloud Application services in the integrated catalog
Data management tools for managing business objects and importing and exporting data
Tools to configure role-based security and user access management
Tools to access Git repositories so you can share application resources with team members

If you previously developed visual applications in Oracle Visual Builder and now work with VB Studio, you’ll see that some things have changed. For details about tasks that you now do differently in VB Studio, see For Visual Builder Users.

This diagram shows the main artifacts in a visual application project.
Description of project-diagram-visualapp.png follows

Here are the key components of the VB Studio ecosystem as it pertains to visual applications (that is, web and mobile applications):

Within a single VB Studio instance, you and your team members who use that instance are considered an organization. Within your organization, you will likely belong to one or more projects, each of which is devoted to a discrete software effort. For example, you might have a project for building a new Financial mobile app, and a different project for creating an HR web application. A project brings together all the tools you need to create those artifacts, such as a Git repository for storing your source code, a pipeline to provide continuous integration and delivery, an issue tracking system, team wikis, and more.
If you used Visual Builder Cloud Service in the past, you're familiar with the Designer, a declarative graphical user interface that helps you build visual applications. Specifically, you get a page editor, a Components palette, and a Page Structure view, for designing the layout of a page. The Designer remains a key component in VB Studio as well.
All of your work in VB Studio is done in the context of a workspace, a completely private area where you can work on your visual application. Your work is stored in your own clone of the project's Git repository, and is not visible to others until you push it to the project's Git repo, choose to Share it with others for testing, or publish it. A workspace also includes a pointer to the development or test environment where you plan to deploy your app, which must be a separate Visual Builder instance (also known as an environment). You can deploy your app manually, or wire it up to a pipeline to do it automatically, such as when a developer on your project publishes their changes.
The data for your visual applications can come from a database (in the form of business objects), Oracle REST services, or external REST services, just as in Visual Builder.

Use VB Studio to Manage Your Development Cycle

The VB Studio components shown in the diagram are used to manage the development process for applications other than visual applications or application extensions:

Description of project-diagram-generic.png follows

Though many users will rely on Visual Builder Studio to help them create visual applications or create application extensions for Oracle Cloud Applications, you can use VB Studio purely as a tool to help you manage your development processes:

Within a single Visual Builder Studio instance, you and your team members who use that instance are considered an organization. Within your organization, you will likely belong to one or more projects, each of which is devoted to a discrete software effort. A project brings together all the tools you need to create those artifacts, such as a Git repository for storing your source code, a pipeline to provide continuous integration and delivery to the Oracle Cloud, an issue tracking system, team wikis, and more.
Although VB Studio provides a Git repository for you, you can choose to use external repos, such as GitHub and BitBucket.

How Do I Set Up VB Studio?

Using VB Studio's hosted development and delivery platform, you and your team can develop software applications using any language you choose. You can also develop new visual applications or customize certain Oracle Cloud Applications by extending them. These extensions are then managed just like any other VB Studio artifact.

Before your team can use VB Studio you, as the administrator, need to set it up, configure it, add your team members to Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS), and assign them proper roles.

Note

Only one IDCS is supported per service instance.

Most administrators will follow this path to set up VB Studio:

Everyone needs to read and follow the instance setup procedures in Create an Oracle Visual Builder Studio Generation 2 Instance and the ones for the build system in Set Up VB Studio for CI/CD.
Users who deploy their extensions manually or deploy their visual applications using Grunt, don't use the CI/CD system. For these users, setting up the CI/CD system is not required. See Deploy an Extension From Your Local System for extensions or Build Your Application With Grunt for visual applications.
Then, depending on your needs, you can move on to either the Set Up VB Studio to Extend Oracle Cloud Applications or the Set Up VB Studio for Developing Visual Applications chapter.
If you just want to manage the development process, you can stop after you complete the CI/CD setup.

Key Concepts, Components, and Terms

Before you use VB Studio, it helps to become familiar with these key concepts, components, and terms. (If you have general questions about Oracle Cloud features and services, see Oracle Cloud Terminology in Getting Started with Oracle Cloud.)

Term	Description
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)	Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a set of cloud services that enable you to build and run a wide range of applications and services in a highly available hosted environment. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers high-performance compute capabilities (as physical hardware instances) and storage capacity in a flexible overlay virtual network that is securely accessible from your on-premise network.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute (OCI Compute)	Service that hosts virtual machines (VMs) on Oracle Cloud with all the necessary storage and networking resources. VB Studio uses the VMs to run project builds.
OCI Compute VM instance	A virtual machine that runs on top of physical bare metal hardware. To learn more about a Compute instance, see Overview of the Compute Service.
OCI Compute VM shape	A shape is a template that determines the number of CPUs, amount of memory, and other resources allocated to a newly created VM Compute instance. To find more about shapes, see VM Shapes.
OCI region	OCI is hosted in regions and availability domains. A region is a localized geographic area, and an availability domain is one or more data centers located within a region. To learn more about regions and availability domains, see Regions and Availability Domains.
OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) and subnets	A VCN is a software-defined network that you set up in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centers in a particular region. To find out more about VCNs and subnets, see VCNs and Subnets and Overview of Networking.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage (OCI Object Storage)	Oracle Cloud service that hosts containers on Oracle Cloud to store project data. VB Studio uses the buckets to archive build artifacts and Maven artifacts, and export project data.
Oracle Cloud Applications	Oracle Cloud Applications are a set of modular Cloud-ready enterprise applications. To learn more, see `https://www.oracle.com/applications/`.
Application extension (App UI)	An App UI is an application that includes a user interface component in the form of Visual Builder pages and flows. Some App UIs are created by Oracle—like some Oracle Cloud Applications—but you can build your own App UIs and deploy them as peers alongside Oracle’s App UIs in your Oracle Cloud Applications ecosystem.
Visual Builder	A Visual Builder instance that provides the server for delivering pages in web applications, and services your web and mobile apps might use to access data, including the database used to store data and the proxy server for managing connections to REST services.
Visual application	A responsive web or native mobile application developed using VB Studio's browser-based development environment. You deploy a visual application to a Visual Builder instance.
Project	A project is a collection of VB Studio features. You can use a project to host source code files, track issues, collaborate on code, build, and deploy your applications. A project can host multiple Git repositories. Each Git repository can have multiple branches and hundreds of code files. You can create a merge request for each branch of the Git repository and ask reviewers to review the code. You can create and configure multiple build jobs to generate different project artifacts that you can deploy to Oracle Cloud or your on-premise web server.
Organization	The top-most entity in the project structure of VB Studio. Think of an organization as the umbrella for all the projects in a given identity domain.
VB Studio Designer	VB Studio's browser-based development environment.
Git repository	A Source Code Management (SCM) and distributed version control tool to host source code files.
Maven repository	A hosted binary repository to store build artifacts, library files, and dependencies for Maven applications.
Issue tracker	A built-in issue management system to create and track tasks, defects, and features.
Environment	Defines the target Oracle Cloud Applications, Visual Builder, Oracle Cloud SaaS, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service instance as a single entity. You'll define an environment to deploy an application to a service instance or to get information from a service instance.
Merge request and code review	A method to merge a Git repository branch with another branch. Before merging the branches, team members can review differences between files of both branches and provide their feedback.
Wiki	Built-in wiki system to help your team author and manage wiki pages.
Build system	A built-in system to define and automate builds of your applications.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)	Continuous integration is a set of practices that allow development teams to implement small code changes and push the code to version control repositories, such as Git, frequently. Continuous delivery is a practice that enable developers to produce software in short cycles.
VM build executor	An OCI Compute VM instance dedicated to run VB Studio builds. Only one build can run on a VM build executor at a time. To learn more, see VM Build Executors.
Build executor template	A template that defines the operating system and the software installed on a VM build executor. To learn more, see Build Executor Templates.
Docker image	Defines the operating system and software packages your organization needs to run builds on a Docker executor. A Docker image can be either imported from an external Docker registry or created from a build executor template.
Docker deployment VM	An OCI VM Compute instance dedicated to run builds of jobs defined in VB Studio projects using Docker executors.
Docker executor	When a job is created, a Docker image is associated as a build template with the job. Then, when the job's build is triggered, a Docker executor is created using the Docker image and deployed on any Deployment VM to run the build. Unlike a VM executor, a Docker executor is not directly associated with a specific VM.
Job (or build job)	A configuration that defines your application's builds. You can create a job to perform various actions, such as package artifacts, run shell commands, run unit test scripts, and deploy application artifacts.
Build	The result from a job’s run.
Pipeline	A path or a chain of builds. A pipeline helps you run continuous integration jobs and reduce network traffic.
Oracle Java Cloud Service	Oracle Cloud service to deploy web applications to a public Oracle WebLogic Server domain on Oracle Cloud.

OCI Resources in VB Studio

In VB Studio, you use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) build jobs to package and deploy your application. To run builds, VB Studio requires access to your OCI resources, such as your OCI Compute virtual machines (VMs).

You can use OCI resources either from your VB Studio instance's built-in free account, Oracle Free Tier account, or your own OCI account.

Built-in free account: Available in all regions in the OC1 realm and will be made available in select other realms, such as OC2, OC3, and OC4, in the future. The VB Studio instance comes pre-configured with a built-in free account that offers one OCI Compute VM to run builds.
Free Tier account: All OCI accounts have a set of resources that are free of charge for the life of the account. The free tier account offers free micro Compute VMs that your organization's members can use to run builds. To use the OCI Compute VMs, configure VB Studio to connect to the Free Tier account.
OCI account: If you're subscribed to OCI, you can use your own account's OCI Compute VMs to run builds. To use OCI Compute VM, configure VB Studio to connect to your OCI account.

This table summarizes the differences between the built-in free account, free tier account, and your OCI account:

Features	Built-In Free Account	Free Tier Account	Your OCI Account	What it means?
Number of build executors	1	2-4 Depending on the size of the boot volume and the number of OCPUs that you allocate to each Ampere A1 Compute instance, you can create up to four compute instances.	Unlimited	A VM executor can run only one build at a time. The more VM executors you have available, the more builds your organization's members can run at the same time. If members trigger multiple builds while VM executors are already running, they must wait until a build running on the VM executor is complete. If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, you can add multiple VM executors to reduce the build wait time for your organization's members.
Storage for build artifacts	50 GB	200 GB	Unlimited	When your organization's members run builds, VB Studio saves the generated build artifacts in its configured storage space. If you're using the built-in free account or the free tier account, the build artifacts are stored in a limited storage space. If you run out of storage space, builds that generate artifacts will fail. If this happens, you must either remove some artifacts from the storage, or switch to an OCI account. You can't increase the storage space allocated to your built-in free account or free tier account. If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, the artifacts are stored in OCI Object Storage buckets. You can always increase the storage space to store more artifacts.
VM shape	Fixed shape	Flex shape	Custom shapes, including shapes offered by OCI	The built-in free account offers a fixed shape OCI Compute VM. The free tier account offers the fixed VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro micro shape as well as the flexible ARM-based VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape. Docker cannot be used with the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape. See Flexible Shapes. If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, you can choose any VM shape offered by OCI. To learn more about shapes, see VM Shapes.
VCN	VB Studio's default VCN	2 VCNs	VB Studio's default VCN or your custom VCN	If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, you can add VM executors in a custom VCN to access Oracle Cloud services that are running in the same VCN.
Wait time	5 minutes (fixed)	Custom wait time	Custom wait time	After running a build, a VM executor waits for some time to run any queued builds. If no builds run in the wait time period, the VM executor stops. If a build triggers after a VM executor has stopped, the VM executor takes some time to start before it could run the build. If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, you can customize the wait time for your VM executors.
Maven and NPM repositories	Not available	Available	Available	If VB Studio is connected to your OCI account, your organization's members can use their projects' hosted Maven and NPM repositories to upload custom dependencies and binary files.