Sunday 29 March 2009

Sharing code between multiple applications

9 months ago when I started this blog I was like a biblical prophet, the only apex developer in my company, the lone voice in the wilderness. However now I am part of an ever-growing team of apex developers, as my colleagues are being converted (rarely kickin'n'screamin) from Forms. I know it's always a mistake to extrapolate personal experience and apply it globally, but I do take it as a sign of Application Express's increasing popularity.

However, with popularity comes extra burdens, and different expectations. We found, for example, that Apex is excellent for rapidly building one-off applications of a small-to-medium size - but are its shoulders sturdy enough to bear the responsibility of being the main development tool of a software company?

First, a little background: my company sells a large database to UK local authorities, and has developed a large (Oracle Forms) application to go with it. We often, however, develop smaller, ancilliary applications to go with it. With Forms we find it easy to share forms between these applications - shipping copies of the same .fmx with various applications, while maintaining a single source code.

How can we do the same with Apex? Yes, we can export pages from one application and import them into another, but Apex doesn't maintain a link between them, and changes in the master copy aren't propagated to its copies. So what should we do?

We decided that we had 2 choices:

1. Build one huuuuge application containing all the pages we would ever need and control the availability of these pages using conditions and build options. So when Customer 1 and Customer B come to us with very different specs we sell them the exact same application but switch on pages 1, 21 and 53 for Customer A and pages 21, 34 and 876 for Customer 2. We'll also need to customise the branching within the app, so page 21 leads to page 53 for Customer i, but to page 876 for Customer ii.

Not an elegant or very practical solution.

So instead we decided to go for (2). We will still build one huge application, but this time we'll use it only as a sort of repository for many dozens of basic pages. Each of these pages will carry out a single, simple task - display the details of a single record, edit a record, or maybe display a report. In addition, these pages will be plain vanilla, lacking any visual flourishes - no fancy javascript or anything.

And then whenever we get an order from a customer for an application all we'll need to do is build a sort of shell app, which will control things like the look'n'feel and the branching, but whenever it needs to do anything it will use an iframe to call the relevant page from our page repository and house it within a region. Of course this means that we'll need to install both applications at each customer site, with them running only the 'shell' app.

Is this system perfect? Of course not, but it is the most manageable way (that we can think of - cos our brains have been addled by drug-use and overexposure to naughty websites) to ensure that we maintain a single source code that we can propagate out to all of our applications, and are able to build new applications rapidly and reliably.

(Oh, and I was joking about that drug-use and pornography thing, by the way. Well, at least for myself - I can't vouch for my colleagues! In fact, now that you mention it...)

However, I'll be very interested in hearing if you've faced a similar issue and what you did to overcome it. How do you share code between your apps? Are there holes in this system that we've come up with that perhaps we haven't thought about? What do you think?

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