Development or Deployment Configuration Management

Question

Forte Users:
I have been using Forte for awhile and have experienced various levels
of pleasure and pain with regard to configuration management. I have
been witness to various strategies for keeping things clean and smooth.
I was at Forte Forum to hear talk and witness some products to help
address issue, but still have only a foggy notion about how to do things
in the here and now.
My request is to gather from some outside chatter and see what other
people are doing. How are people safely managing repositories and
classes in the development environment? Once deployed? Is there a daily
or weekly practice or checklist that addesses configuration issues? Are
people putting together automated processes?
We are actually working to integrate with PVCS today to take care of
some things, but I am really interested in knowing what is working out
there without special tools. Please reply with any insight that may be
shared.
Thanks in advance.
Tres Bain
USAA
**Any opinions you might see up above are surely mine and USAA has
nothing to do with them.**

Answer 1

don't underestimate the need for cm. someone should find the time to
set the ground rules now. otherwise it's going to be a huge mess later
on. here are some things to consider:
o determine your application's package structure.
o determine your development environment's directory structure (e.g.
classes in ~/apps/classes, source in ~/apps/src ...).
o take the time to stub-out the interfaces between the different
layers of the application and your ejbs. this is really important if
you've vertically separated programming tasks and will allow each team
to write their stuff without regard to other teams. as each team
completes their slice they should fit together seamlessly as long as
the interface hasn't changed. this will take some time up-front, but
it's definitely worth it.
o if you really need to share files (veps...) setup a shared dir or
something. if you're going to share these types of files, the second
point is critical.
jason
Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<On 3/11/00, 5:45:00 PM, "Esurance" <[email protected]> wrote
regarding Development Environment and Configuration Management..:
Gang-
Just wondering if any of guys could point me to a paper, book, or any doc
that could help figure out how to organize the dev environment. We're about
5 developers and we need to setup the directories and files to be able to
share EJB jar file and simple java classes (helper classes) through
SourceSafe. We're prototyping and right now and none of us has really time
to look at the CM carefully.
I guess another complication is that we're using Visual Cafe to develop and
would like to share .vep files as well.
Any help would be greatly appreciated (I would hate to reinvent the
wheel...)