When developing applications in Oracle Application Express Oracle recommends you follow standard system development life cycle practices by having different environments for development, testing, and production. As a best practice, developers should only be allowed to make changes to applications and related database objects in the development environment.
To further enforce this policy Oracle recommends that you install runtime-only Oracle Application Express environments in your test and production environments. This will prohibit developers from accessing the App Builder and SQL Workshop in these environments. As a general rule, your administrator (DBA) should be the only ones with permission to update the test and production environments. DBAs should use the appropriate provided APIs and import applications from an SQL interface, such as SQL Developer or SQL*Plus.