APEX

Hello All.

I am seeking your opinion on an issue that recently was raised in my work environment.

We are heavy users of Apex 4.x. I recently introduced Apex plugins to several of my fellow developers. They all were astounded.

However, someone questioned if we should incorporate a plugin into our production apps. The concern here is that, despite their usefulness, plugins are not officially supported by Oracle. If we run into an issue with a plugin, our only support would come from the person who authored the plugin. I would not be able to call Oracle/Apex Tech support to ask my question. And so, if the plugin author, for some reason, was not available, the problem would not be addessed. Furthermore, because the plugin code is not available to me (at least I think so; please correct me if I'm wrong), I would be forced to either remove the plugin from my app or come up with custom code to do what the plugin is doing.

Another concern is would the plugin code "survive" an Apex upgrade. I would hate to upgrade, say, from 4.0.2 to 4.1 and find that my previously installed plugins had disappeared. Frankly, I'm not sure this is a realistic concern, still I'm mentioning it because I don't have a sure answer.

Of the two concerns, the former is the biggest. In a "play/test" environment, not having the author answer or correct an issue with their plugin is frustrating but not critical. But in a production setup, this would be a big problem.

These concerns are giving my management pause as to whether or not to incorporate plugins into our production Apex apps.

It's my understanding that several of the popular open source software tools (Linux, perl, mySQL, JQuery, etc.) each have a core team of people who "maintain" the tool. There's a psuedo company giving oversite to the code. And so, such tools sort of have a critical mass of people supporting the tool. On the other hand, an Apex plugin has just one person (the author) maintaining the code. And that sole supporter may, for whatever reason, stop supporting it, making production support dicey.

I would appreciate your opinions about this?

Thank you.

Elie