Beginning Oracle® Application Express

10.4. Deployment Options

You have a number of different options for deploying your APEX application:

• No Deployment: This deployment option is the choice of no choice. You could run your APEX application in the same environment that you used to develop the application. You could lock down the application and simply distribute the URL to access the application. This option has the virtue of being extremely easy — you don't do anything. But development environments are often more limited than production environments, in many ways, with less data, fewer users and less server horsepower to run your applications and store your data. And, of course, any changes you make to the application in this environment can be immediately visible to users, which is frequently not the most desirable approach. If you have been using Oracle's free hosted APEX environment, then this is provided for development purposes only and running production applications in this environment is strictly prohibited.

• Deploy Only Your Application: As your application is made from a collection of PL/SQL procedures and the parameters that guide them, you could choose to deploy only an application. Exporting an application, as you will later in this section, will also include any shared components that are used in the application. You would move the application to another Oracle instance. That instance would have to have all the data structures that your application is using, as well as any users whom you have specifically ...