Collaborative work on Web Dynpro ABAP

Question

Hi guys,
I have to develop a Web Dynpro application with some of my colleagues. As we will be working together, at the same time, I was wonderring the best way to achieve this.
I don't want to have a problem with locks each time someone wants to modify a controller when the other is busy in the view.
Should we cut the application is several components?
Thanks a lot for your input,
Regards
Thomas

Answer 1

Generally multiple people can be editing on the same component - if for instance two people are working on two different views.  However you have to be careful about changes to the shared contexts (like from the component controller).  Also before anyone starts working on the individual views, you should have the component controller completed. You can further separate your work if you properly split your business logic out into a clean model layer as a separate class.
That said, for really large scale projects you should consider multiple components and even Floorplan Manager (if you are on NetWeaver 7.01 or higher).  This gives you the best level of reuse, encapsulation, and parallel work.  You do have to be careful with performance on mutliple component projects.  For instance cross component context binding is very memory intensive becuase the context is duplicated in each component instance instead of the By Reference approach used by inner component mapping.  These issues can be worked around using techniques like a single class instance as your model and cross component data storage. 
If you look at the majority of the SAP WDA applications, they do use multiple components and Floorplan Manager.