Application Support with APEX Applications: Looking After the Users when Development has Finished

Although at Explorer we spend most of our time creating brand-new bespoke APEX applications or completing Forms to APEX projects; sometimes we are asked to work on and/or support an existing APEX application, both for external clients and for our own internal systems.

Having come from a more support orientated background where I have spent a lot of time supporting/fixing/upgrading applications which I wasn’t originally involved with during development or implementation; I have a lot of experience in what users need and want and also what can be done during development to make support life easier in the future.

I recently prepared and gave a presentation on this topic for OUG TECH17 and OUG Ireland 2018 and below is a recording of this.

In the presentation, I look into the following topics

• Environments: Oracle APEX Multi-Tenancy, why might we need multiple, control/access, replication.
• Logging issues: How easy is it for users to report problems; is it any harder than say on any website?
• Investigating Issues: If there is a problem, how hard is it to debug an APEX application with a look to fixing it?
• Releases: How do we manage releases whilst also keeping our users informed and happy?
• Monitoring and Reporting: Is there any built into APEX, how hard is it to view? How we can lift out standard APEX logging to be viewed in the front end and reported on?
• Performance: How do we create applications which are less likely to have performance problems? How can we monitor the performance of our APEX applications?
• Miscellaneous: Some hints at tips aimed at APEX developers

Summary

I set out to find out if application support was any harder with an APEX application, well, no it isn’t; in fact, for some of the biggest challenges facing application support with a little bit of thought being applied during development and with the use of some of the great built-in tools and functionality both in APEX and the Oracle Database; support life can be good!

Author: Paul Jones

Job Title: Oracle APEX Development Consultant

Bio: Paul is a Development Consultant at DSP-Explorer. Paul has a BSc in Computing from the University of Leeds and is now building on considerable experience in development and support using Oracle PL/SQL and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Paul is employing APEX to provide quality, bespoke software solutions both internally and to a range of organisations.