Managing Development Workspace

Question

We are using HTMLDB to build applications which may contains hundreds's pages. What will be the best practice to manage the workspace for a team of developers who will be working on the same application at the same time? Should we break it to smaller applications? What will be the effective way to apply same changes to multiple applications?

Answer 1

Frankly, the HTML DB Application Builder environment is not really geared to manage multiple developers working on the same large application.
The best you can do is divide up the application into sensible "page groups" and each developer can work on his page group(s).
Each developer (or team of developers) can also lock the pages they are working on to prevent anyone else from changing them.
When it comes time to deploy the application, each page (or set of pages in a page group) can be deployed independently. Unfortunately, if the application uses application-level components (processes, items, shortcuts Shared Components, etc), the entire application will have to re-deployed.
In addition to the page-level exports, I would keep the entire application export in a source code control software like VSS, PVCS, etc and just maintain version control in that software. Remember an application export is just a plain text .SQL file with a bunch of API calls.
Hope this helps.