Lifecycle Management - Expert Oracle Application Express - page 376

• Minor Release : Whenever you only have a functional change to the application,

increase the minor release digit of the version number.

• Patch : The patch digit is increased whenever you ship only bug fixes (error

corrections) or really minimal functional changes.

• Revision : This is the build counter for each build of the software. In our context
this is a number indicating the internal revision with the test team.
To illustrate the actual usage of such numbers let's take a look at one of our current projects. For
this customer there are four regular releases of the software each year. Therefore you increment the
major release digit once per year and ship four releases all having different minor release digits (e.g.,
1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.3.0 in 2010 and 2.0.0, 2.1.0, 2.2.0, and 2.3.0 in 2011).
The revision number is typically not communicated to the end users of the application, but is used
mainly to support the incremental and iterative collaboration with the test team (see Figure 9-2).

Figure 9-2. Releases and internal revisions

Whenever you install a new internal revision on the test environment (e.g., 1.0.0.1 , 1.0.0.2 ,or
1.1.0.3 ), it is tested by the test team. The internal revision numbers help you to communicate issues in
each delivered internal revision so that defects can be identified and retested in the following internal
revision. This process should be supported by the use of a bug or issue tracking software like Atlassian
Jira, Bugzilla, or others.

Storing Files on the Application Server
We strongly recommend not storing any files for your application in the virtual directory /i/ . It is used
for APEX internal files and images. Once you upgrade your APEX version to a new release this will be
problematic in two areas.

■ Caution Don't store any files in the virtual directory /i/ !