Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Application Bundling and Deployment
The concept of application bundling and deployment is something developers should consider from the beginning
when designing an application. In the case of APEX, built-in facilities help make the job easier. When it comes to
application deployment, there are various ways to accomplish the same end goal, and no two IT organizations do it
exactly the same. This chapter discusses the tools APEX provides to help you bundle and deploy applications and
how to use them in a very APEX-centric way.
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Your organization may already have a standardized way to achieve many of the things being introduced in
this chapter. Before implementing any of these methods, check and make sure you're not reinventing the wheel.
Note
Identifying Application Components
Your APEX application consists of more than just the application export itself. There are underlying database objects,
images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScripts. And these components may or may not be stored on the same
server as APEX, let alone stored in the APEX metadata repository. In essence, you need to know how to assemble
everything it would take to instantiate your application from scratch. Therefore, it's important to understand all
the components that make up your application, where they're stored, and how to bundle them in a way that makes
migration easier.
You can break the various components into roughly four main groups:
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External files
: Your application may access files that don't reside in the APEX repository.
For instance, your company may have a common set of CSS and image files that are used
by several web sites to maintain a standard look and feel.
•
Database objects
: These include all the tables, views, PL/SQL objects, and any other
database objects used by your application. Most of the time, these reside in your application's
“parse as” schema.
•
APEX-based files
: These are files that have been uploaded into the Files section of an
application's supporting objects. They may include images, CSS, JavaScript, static files,
and so on, and are stored in the APEX repository.
•
APEX application export
: This is the core of the APEX application, containing the pages,
regions, items, validations, and so on.
When it comes time to deploy an application, each of these types of files needs to be treated a bit differently.
The following sections address each file type and how to obtain the most recent version for migration to an alternate
platform. Later, the chapter discusses using the Supporting Object feature of APEX to bundle the appropriate items
into the application export.
