Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
A Developer's Overview
You're probably anxious to get started, but there are a few concepts that you should un-
derstand before you jump into APEX development headfirst. This chapter introduces the
fundamental development architecture of APEX and then walks you through the differ-
ent areas of the developer interface.
You delve deeper into the details as you go through the topic and put the architecture
to work for you, but it will help tremendously to know how things are structured ahead
of time. This chapter is designed to ease you in, but it isn't a complete guided tour of
every nook and cranny. Be patient; you'll get there.
The Anatomy of a Workspace
APEX was designed from the beginning to be a multi-tenant architecture where many
different development environments (called workspaces ) can exist in a single APEX in-
stance. For instance, apex.oracle.com , Oracle's free hosted instance, holds over
10,000 active workspaces, each of which is a completely separate environment unable to
see or interact with any of the other workspaces. You can think of this as Software as a
Service (SaaS) or a cloud computing architecture, but basically it means each workspace
is distinct and segregated from all others.
In the simple terms, each workspace represents a virtual private container in which
developers create and deploy their APEX applications. The development process takes
place in the context of a workspace, so it's important to know how a workspace is struc-
tured. Figure 2-1 uses database entity-relationship diagram parlance to help explain the
makeup of the objects in a workspace.
 
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