gareth

Hi,

I need to set up a development environment for a team of coders who are starting to work on a Java app that will run on a Solaris platform. We have been using the Netbeans IDE up til now for individual development, so ideally we'd carry on using that for this project.

I believe Netbeans has built-in CVS support, so one option is to set up CVS on the Solaris box and use that in conjunction with Netbeans. However, all the team's output up til now is in a Sourcesafe database and it would be good to carry on using that if possible...

Main question is, if everyone is individually coding/compiling on their PCs (assuming code is under control as above), what is the best way to manage deployment of the compiled classes onto the Solaris box? Someone will probably say Ant but I haven't seen anything there that works against a remote platform and handles the problem of multiple developers simultaneously trying to deploy their stuff. Does that just come down to working practices/procedures?

Many thanks for any tips

Cheers,
Gareth

was UK WRX with PPP/Full Decat
now Clio 172 and Caterham 7 1.8 VX

Iain Young

Don't know if this helps but we're developing a pretty big java (servlet based running in tomcat) application at the moment. Basically our setup is like this...

Source code is all stored in cvs on a server in the usa (our team is spread between the USA and the UK).

We use the Intellij Idea IDE to code, but it makes little difference to the procedures which IDE you use. Basically each developer is responsible for ensuring any code they write does not break anything else before they check it into cvs, and whenever a new chunk of code is written, we have to create a set of Junit tests to go along with it. This makes the testing of changes / fixes etc in the future alot easier.

Every evening, an automated process runs on a build machine which checks out the latest code from cvs, compiles it, runs the Junit tests, then copies everything to the tomcat server and restarts tomcat (as long as the tests passed ok). The process is all executed using ant, (although it is kicked off by the windows xp scheduler).

Don't know if that helps, but it's what we do and it seems to work pretty well We also use a very similar process when coding C++ apps etc.

Iain

stevencotton

Do you have a QA process? What your developers use, and what version control you use, won't have any bearing on rolling out to live, what you need is a process rather than mating up the technicals.

Usually your QA dept will do all the rollouts. Any CVS-alike version control should allow you to 'export' a module (as opposed to checking it out) to a seperate location (another part of the disk) until it can be deployed. Without knowing exactly what your architecture and networks are like I can't really advise, but it's just the process you need to put in place.

Steve.

Iain Young

Agreed, although it's difficult to advise without knowing the full facts. Basically speaking though, with all the tools available (ant, cvs etc), you can basically make the software fit any setup you want to implement, and so getting the procedures correct in the first place is the most important job.