Apex Application Deployment - The Component Approach

Source control and deployment of a small Apex application which consists of a several dozen pages and which is developed by a smaller number of developers is quite simple. But what happens when we have a large application which is being developed by several development teams?In this lecture, I will present an approach which proved to be successful in real-time uses, and exactly in a previously stated situation- large application, many developers. This is the component approach, where the Apex application is literally disassembled into its basic components. These components are individually submitted into a source control system, and the Apex application deployment consists only of those components which were changed during the last development activities.In this lecture I will show how to export individual Apex application components to local files, their versioning and a concept of creating an atomic package for deploying these components to the production environment.The tools used for this will be TOAD, TortoiseSVN and SQLPlus, and the automatic deployment of base objects will be done through a batch script.The initial Apex application production obviously has to have the entire application export, but every subsequent deployment can consist only of individual components. This makes the deployment process easier and insures that only those changes which were meant to be deployed are really deployed.