c.jones_at_rgu.ac.uk wrote:
>
> The obvious thing is to develop on a local working copy, however this has it's own headache - how on earth do you replicate a huge development server, the databases, application server configurations, interconnections with other systems, etc., for each developer on a standalone machine?
> This must be an issue for anyone developing web based applications, so how do people deal with it out there? Any pointers, sites discussing this or anything at all would be great!
>
> Our problem at the moment is the whole change to SVN seems insurmountable because of this, and it's difficult to see any incremental steps that we could take to get there. Clearly we can't take three months out of 'ordinary work', just to completely revamp our entire development process and environment, so we need to somehow manage this is smaller stages.
You might start by converting your current shared development copy into
a QA site. Then sort out any parts that are mostly static or can be
shared by the developer working copies (database connections, backend
data services, etc.) to save resources.
You may find that modern desktops can match the server environment well
enough for initial testing, followed by pre-release QA on the current
dev setup and a procedure similar to what you currently use to release
to production (something that takes care of any backend database/service
connections, etc.). If you are doing something exotic on the servers
that desktops can't match you might be able to run separate instances of
the web server per developer on different port numbers for testing on
the current dev server, each with a view of the developer's working copy.
If everyone is used to working with a shared copy, a transition strategy
might be to continue to share the dev site as a QA space where you do
nothing but 'svn update' to pull in the changes to test, with all
changes actually being done in separate working copies.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell_at_gmail.com
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Received on 2008-08-21 15:13:16 CEST