Build options and deployment (or Call me Gottfried)

I feel a little like Gottfried Leibniz, y'know the German scientist who in 1675 jumped out of the bath shouting, "Eureka! I have just invented a branch of mathematics that I intend to call calculus," only to be told: "Erm dude, didn't you get the email? Isaac Newton invented calculus last week!"

I'd better explain. I spent all of yesterday working extremely hard (I had to say that just in case my boss gets to read this) on inventing a way to manage all of my app's components and authorisation schemes from one form to enable me easily manipulate the various configurations that my various customers require. I succeeded (I wrote a single page from which I can easily change and apply different authorisation schemes to pages, regions, buttons, tabs etc.) and I promptly wrote about it here...

... only to be told that I was reinventing the wheel, that Application Express's Build Options was designed to help me configure applications for deployment to different clients.

Damn you, Apex!

(Actually, my work wasn't completely wasted because build options will help me include or exclude components, but I also need the ability to manage authorisation schemes because my clients have asked for differing user roles to be able to access different components.)

Build options, in case you know as little about them as I did yesterday, are named shared components that you can apply to page objects. If you set it to "exclude" any component that it is applied to will not be included in the application when you deploy it, preventing clients from getting their grubby little hands on things they haven't paid for.

Thanks to Patrick Wolf for pointing me in the right direction.