Understanding Workspaces, Deploying new Apps and Upgrades

Question

Hi all,
I'm learning Oracle Apex, and finished some OBEs about it. I'm very excited about the platform, and liking very much. But a lot of questions come to my mind.
If I understood it, a Workspace, is a "place" to develop some apps, and encapsule it, and from this workspace, I can export an app to deploy on another server, but, I don't see any options about what tables need to be exported.
In one workspace/schema, I can have more than one app, and I don't see where you define wich tables belongs to each app.
I don't see either, how an upgrade works. If I have deployed an app on a customer, and I need to upgrade it, upgrade of the database, without losing data is automatically?
Another thing I don't understad very well, is about runtime installation.
In Learn more Page,Security -> http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=4600:42:0::NO::: , I can read:
For testing and production instances, Oracle Application Express supports the ability to install just a runtime version. This minimizes the installed footprint and privileges. It also improves your application consistency because in a runtime instance developers cannot inadvertently update any application source.
I understand correctly, thath this means I can't modify a deployed app, but I can upgrade it?
Regards.
Edited by: GiuseppeL on 26-dic-2012 12:22
Edited by: GiuseppeL on 26-dic-2012 12:23

Answer 1

GiuseppeL wrote:
If I understood it, a Workspace, is a "place" to develop some apps, and encapsule it, and from this workspace, I can export an app to deploy on another server, but, I don't see any options about what tables need to be exported.Tables and database objects all have to be handled separately from the application. If you look at the SQL workshop in the Apex builder there are some tools to do the database object exports.
In one workspace/schema, I can have more than one app, and I don't see where you define wich tables belongs to each app.You can have one or more schemas per workspace. And an application can use whatever schemas are available to the workspace or whatever schemas the workspace schema has been granted to through database grants.
I don't see either, how an upgrade works. If I have deployed an app on a customer, and I need to upgrade it, upgrade of the database, without losing data is automatically?Application exports can be completely (most of the time) independent of the data and database objects. If you change the structure of your database objects with your application upgrade then you need to upgrade the database objects in order for the application to work. Whatever application features depend on the database changes will not work.
Another thing I don't understad very well, is about runtime installation.Runtime installation basically does not allow any editing of the application definition once it's installed. You need to keep an independent location where you do your application development/modification. Deploying to a runtime application is not reversible, meaning you can't change it to an editable application once you've set it as runtime only.
Earl