In the upcoming blog posts I’d like to talk about how we deploy our APEX application from the development database (D) via test (T) and via acceptance (A) to the production database (D) using Continuous Delivery principles. Back in 2013, when there was little written about how to do such things, I wrote a white paper about how my colleagues and I had implemented this for an internal project. The method outlined there was just one possible way of accomplishing continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Another method is to not use a single development database, but to let each team member have its own virtual machine. At conferences, I heard other success stories. Some used Docker in combination with Liquibase, others used other tools and techniques. Each story was different, but they shared a successful outcome. Much greater productivity is achieved, regardless of the exact implementation you choose. Because when moving versions up and down your DTAP environments takes almost no time, you can spend the time actually developing beautiful APEX applications.
At 2017 I started working for a client where Jenkins and XL Deploy (XLD) and XL Release (XLR) were at my disposal. My team developed two APEX applications. For the first application we needed to provide scripts to the DBA team for them to execute the scripts at A and P. For the second application two years later the use of XLD/XLR was encouraged. The benefit here is that end users themselves can now press the button and release a new version to A and P. I will describe how the delivery pipeline was accomplished for each of those two applications and how automated testing was added. Hopefully you’ll get some inspiration and cherry pick some ideas to implement in your environment yourself. So stay tuned.
Here are some other stories I found. If you know some more relevant stories you think I should add here, you can e-mail me at rvwijk@oritech.nl.
Sergej Martens – Continuously Delivering APEX Applications (presentation at APEX World 2018, slides only, 2018)
Gert-Jan Paulissen – How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (link is to the first part of six posts, 2021)
Brian Spendolini & Jeff Smith – CI/CD for Oracle Database & APEX Developers (Youtube, 2021)
