Development Standards for APEX

Question

We are close to making APEX an official development method within our company. We have managed to produce everything that has been asked of us using APEX and are very happy with the outcome.
The one thing that is missing and I suspect would take a long time to produce, and be prone to naive decisions, are development and release standards.
Does anyone have a document that they are willing to share with us?
Regards,
Rob.

Answer 1

One thing APEX is quite poor at is concurrent development, ie people working on different areas of the application at the same time. Whilst it is true that one can export page by page, shared components can be tricky because it really isn't feasible to start exporting each component individually.
What we do is this:
Export the application as a whole for the initial release, then extract each page as a module and check into our CVS system as a module per page. Then check out the shared components into CVS too as a single module. So developers can modify and release pages without affecting each other however if shared components are being updated then there needs to be some coordination and/or cvs branching.
We also try to maintain as much as possible on the database - ie, complex queries built into views and then in APEX just select from that view. Any updates are written into a database package and called from APEX. That way most of the changes that need doing to code can be done in the database objects rather than having to modify it in APEX - ie, we treat APEX as more of a presentation layer rather than a data manipulation layer. Having the code like this also allows re-use across multiple systems, either in APEX or otherwise.
We have a peer review system where somebody else reviews all developments before going live to verify coding quality, pick up any bugs, security issues etc.
We use APEX quite a bit in our production environment now so any specific questions, please feel free to ask!