The afternoon was kicked off with a presentation on using APEX in large projects by Dimitri Gielis. These re my notes for what Dimitri told us.

Many people feels that APEX cannot be used for anything larger than a singe developers app. 

Sumneva uses EC2 for both demo and development work with their clients.

They have readymade scripts to create new projects that sets up filesystem directories, APEX application, and subversion.

They’re finding that the agile project methodology works very well for APEX-projects.

To automate testing, they’re using Selenium. I find the number of times this product mentioned at OOW interesting. It is a product we have on the list of technologies to know/learn at work, but most people I’ve talked with have not been aware of it. I guess it differs between markets and it may also be a tool that more advanced web-developers are more familiar with.

To check consistency in a large projects with many developers, they recommend to use the APEX advisor to get a report on things to look into.

Sumneva has created their own PM tool to track tickets with. It is aware of APEX specific things such as the url to the app and the alias of the app.

Using the feedback features to collect data from the users works very well for them in their projects. They use the provided features when possible, and a custom version when they cannot access production environments that allos the users to log data into an application on their servers.

Tools they find useful includes:

• Selenium
• Firebug
• SQL Developer
• Subversion
• Jira or other ticketing system
• Reusable APEX components
• Publish defaults to apps via a master app
• Use interface defaults

While the presentation didn’t really tell me what it takes on the technical side to run a large project, it was clear that it is very possible. But, as with all large projects it requires planning for both functional and technical aspects of the project.

The next presentation was moving from mod_plsql in Oracle E-Business suite to APEX. The reason it is needed is that mod_plsql is not supported in the latest version of ebiz.

Unfortunately the presentation focused so much on the solution they had and the specifics of what they needed that it was hard to extract any APEX specific knowledge from the presentation. Most of the presentation was centered on the fact that they wanted to have SSO between ebiz and the APEX application and how they needed links to go from ebiz to the apex application so it felt like one application for the end-users. They succeeded with that, but the presentation did not provide enough details for what they did or even what they main hurdles they encountered was.