A few issues around deployment (or How the world ends)

Apparently, whenever people believe that the world is about to end they tend to react in one of two ways. They either get very prayerful and (re)discover God, or they let go of all their inhibitions and go wild with orgies and alcohol and such. I live in a block of flats, right above a pair of good-looking women, so with all this talk in the news of recent of the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider swallowing the earth in a black hole, I guess it's obvious which way I was hoping they'd go.

Large Hadron Collider or not, I have had a sense of ending of recent because this week I have finally deployed the Apex application that I have been working on (and bitching about in this blog) for the past few months.

I have learned a few things this past week. For instance, I spotted that you can enter a version number against your application (under Shared Components). Ah cool; I was installing my application for user acceptance testing so I entered a version number of 0.9. I applied my changes and ran my application and -

... nothing. Eventually I realised that I would have to edit my page templates to show the version. To do this I added #APP_VERSION# to the footer and voila! (I know I make this complaint all the time, but it's crazy that I had to search for close to an hour to find out about #APP_VERSION#. Go on, stick "#APP_VERSION# Apex" into Google - it's practically a googlewhack!)

Next thing I found out (although I concede that this might be due to some mistake that I am making) is that if you export an application as Run Only (as opposed to Run and Build) you can still import it as Run and Build - thus exposing all the code behind the app. So how am I supposed to protect my intellectual property from the prying eyes of my client - or am I missing something here? Also I found that if you import an application as run only you can't import images into it.

Other than all this - and to be fair all of this is rather insignificant - the deployment of my application went really smoothly. Not a thing to worry about.

Except that pesky Hadron Collider and the end of the world. Forgive me, I've gotta go now: I've got me a bottle of champagne; I'm gonna go knock on the flat downstairs.

I don't know for sure how the earth started, but let's see if I can end it with a big bang.