Large and Complex Applicaton development process in Apex

Question

Hi,
Apex can scale well in terms of Data size, number of users etc. We are trying to decide if Apex is suitable for our next large and complex application (Large and complex in terms of quantity and efforts of work and business logic). We have already identified that Apex can handle complexity of our transaction/business logic management. My question is about scaling application development process in Apex. I am curious to know about what other people are doing with Apex in terms of:
* What is the largest Number of Pages, Forms, Reports etc. within a single application one has developed
* Assuming with so many pages (objects) to be developed, more than one developers must have worked on the project and the project is divided into multiple phases release. What was/is the max number of developers in your project?
* Did you run into "Code Conflct" issues for Apex Shared Objects when multiple people had to work on them? How did you manage it and merge the changes?
* How did you identify, track and manage changes in Apex objects between various project phases and between various environments (DEV, TEST, UAT, PROD).
* What else you would like to add (in terms of development life cycle only) to my thoughts above that we need to consider while choosing Apex for our next project.
* Based on your experience would you recommend Apex for our large and complex application?
Many thanks in advance for your responses.
Paresh (yparesh at gmail dot com)

Answer 1

Hi Przemek, Jerry and Roel,
Thanks to all of you for your helpful responses. If we follow best practices mentioned like trying to centralize code in Page 0, db packages/procedures, JS libs shared components (especially "Shared App" having Shared components between multiple apps) we can minimize code management efforts and use existing technologies to identify, merge, promote code changes. This still leaves with some code and changes that will localized to individual pages (and we still need to manage page 0 and Shared object code changes. I will explain what I am trying to say with an example below about managing changes in a page.
Przemek, and Jerry,
How are you identifying, managing and promoting changes between applications environments say TEST to PROD. For example we have 2 separate dbs (and hence workspaces) to host Apex TEST and Apex PROD environment. If I have modified page 15 in TEST and now need to promote changes made to page 15 (deltas) to PROD how do I compare and identify the deltas? Apex can not migrate the whole page across apps in different workspaces and even if Apex can I don't think it is a good idea to overwrite page 15 in PROD with page 15 in TEST unless we can compare them, identify the deltas and make sure the changes are what we intended to promote. Exporting pages and comparing using a text editor is time consuming because of various ids and the way New Line characters can get embedded in page export. Logic that the TEST env should have identical copy of prod due to a refresh before promoting changes from DEV won't help because then whole of above will apply between DEV and TEST (albeit with little less risk as the target is TEST and hopefully any unintended changes will be caught during testing).
Apex 3.1 has Apex Applications Compare facility? If you have used it, what is your take on it? I think it is too basic but a good start. Won't it be good if there was a nice full fledged compare tool for Apex objects?
Thanks
Paresh