One of the annoying things about Smalltalk is that it (usually) requires its own VCS, due to the way that it manages its source code. Squeak and Gemstone (at least in its GLASS version) have a DVCS called Monticello that works passably well. As near as I can tell, VisualWorks' main VCS, StORE, only works in old-fashioned centralized mode. Is there a system similar to Monticello available for VisualWorks? Alternatively, am I misunderstanding the right way to use StORE?
While Store is not structured to be a distributed tool, it can be used that way. Most of the engineers working on VisualWorks and ObjectStudio use a local repository (in their office; most of the team is geographically distributed). There are merging and replication tools that allows them to synch up their local work with the "repository of record" as required/desired.
Having said that, there's a port of Monticello for VW (and thus, for ObjectStudio as well). The only real issue with it is that after publishing, it doesn't "talk" to the tools (browser) about the publish status. That's because it's mostly use to maintain the Seaside port, and not as a mainline versioning tool for VW.
Related
i try to find a good combination of libraries for managing a real-time communication (client/server) using Haxe (only Haxe, not openfl or other framework base on Haxe) targeting flash (swf) for the client and no preference for the server except don't use neko.
The goal is to make a simple tchat and put a display representation of all clients on an aera. Each client can move his representation in this area, and the other sees the movement.
I find some Lib to make this :
https://github.com/soywiz/haxe-ws
https://github.com/MattTuttle/hxnet
haxe-js-kit
But I'm not sure of the best way to adopt.
Do you have any suggestion/remarks/tips to choose the better way ?
Disclaimer: I wrote the library that I am sharing here.
My somewhat new library mphx may be able to help you. It can manage 'rooms' of connections, allows client to server and server to client messaging in the form of events, and best of all, is cross platform. It also works in the web with websockets.
It was originally an extention of HxNet, however I wanted it to be easier to use. Connecting and sending a 'message' with data just takes a few lines.
I have a few examples in the github repository, the simplest being the 'basic' example. One of your requests you have is that it doesn't rely on one of the big libraries (open fl, etc) and mphx doesn't. The basic example proves that, and only runs in terminal. That being said, it can be used with haxeflixel, for that you can see the other examples.
It sounds like your main goal is to have simple, graphic multiplayer. For that you can look at the 'movement' haxeflixel example.
Documentation is still a little skim, and the code is alpha, so it might change or break. That can probably be said for most of the library's you listed though. The best way to install it is like this
haxelib git mphx https://github.com/5Mixer/mphx.git
That will not install the examples though. To run them, either download the repository as a zip, or just git clone it, and go into the examples folder.
Library: https://github.com/5Mixer/mphx
Old video's I made. A little outdated, most likely.
Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07J0wLXwH0g
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUx2CUtsnTU
I've had this setup, but it didn't seem quite right.
How would you improve Content Delivery (CD) development across multiple .NET (customer) development teams?
CMS Server -> Presentation Server Environments
CMS Production -> Live and Preview websites
CMS Combined Test + Acceptance (internally called "Staging") -> Live ("Staging")
CMS Development (DEV) -> Live (Dev website) and sometimes Developer local machines (laptops)
Expectations and restrictions:
Multiple teams and multiple websites
Single DEV CMS license (typical for customers, I believe?)
Enough CD licenses for each developer
Preferably developer could program and run changes locally--was this a reasonable expectation?
Worked
We developed ASP.NET pages using the Content Delivery API against the same broker database for local machines and CD DEV. Local machines had CD dlls, their own license files, and ran/debug fine with queries and component presentation calls.
Bad
We occasionally published to both the Dev presentation server and Developer machines which doesn't seem right now, but I think it was to get schema files on our local machines. But yes, we didn't trust the Dev broker database.
Problematic:
Local machines sometimes needed Tridion-published pages but we couldn't reliably publish to local machines:
Setting multiple publication destinations for a single "Local Machine" publication target wouldn't work--we'd often take these "servers" home.
VPN blocked access to laptops offsite (used "incoming" folder at the time).
Managing publication targets for each developer and setting up CD for each new laptop was good practice (as in exercise, not necessarily as a good idea) but just a little tedious.
Would these hindsight approaches apply?
Synchronize physical files from Dev to local machines on our own?
Don't run presentation sites locally (localhost) but rather build, upload dll, and test from Dev?
We were simply missing a fourth CMS environment? As much as we liked our Sales Guy, we weren't interested in purchasing another CM license.
How could you better setup .NET CD for several developers in an organization?
Edit: #DominicCronin pointed out this is only a subset of a proper DTAP setup. I updated my terms and created a separate question to clarify DTAP with Tridion.
The answer to this one is heavily depending on the publish model you choose.
When using a dynamic model with a framework like DD4T you will suffice with just a single dev environment. There is one CMS, and one CD server in that environment and everything is published to a broker database. The CD environment could be used as an auto build system, the developers purely work locally on a localhost website (which gets the data from the dev broker database), and their changes are checked in an VCS (based on which the auto build could be done).
This solution can do with only a single CMS because there is hardly any code developed on the CMS side (templates are standardized and all work is done on the CD side).
It gets more complex if you are using a static or broker publishing model. Then I think the solution is to split Dev up in Unit-Dev and Dev indeed as indicated by Nuno and Chris.
This solution requires coding on both the CMS and CD side, so every developer has a huge benefit in having its own local CMS and CD env.
Talk to your Tridion account manager and agree a license package that suits the development model you want to have. Of course, they want to maximise their income, but the various things that get counted are all really meant to ensure that big customers pay accordingly, and smaller customers get something they can afford at a price that reflects the benefits they get. In fact, setting up a well-thought-out development street with a focus on quality is the very thing that will ensure good customer satisfaction and a long-running engagement.
OK - so the account managers still have internal rules to follow, but they also have a fair amount of autonomy in coming to a sensible deal with a customer. I'm not saying this will always work, but its way better than blindly assuming that they are going to insist on counting every server the same way.
On the technical side - sure, try to have local developer setups and a common master dev server a-la Chris's 5th. These days, your common dev environment should probably be seen as a build/integration server: the first place where the team guarantees all the tests will run.
Requirements for CM and CD development aren't very different, although you may be able to publish to multiple developer targets from one CM if there's not much CM development going on. (This is somewhat true of MVC-ish approaches, but it's no silver bullet.)
what does the relation between a Web frontend and a smartphone App with identical feature sets look like regarding the development effort? Are there any specific differences regarding the development effort between Apps of different smartphone platforms (iOS, symbian OS, Android, etc.) ignoring training time? A general estimation would completely satisfy me. ;)
Thanks in advance,
Flinsch.
I hesitate to call this an estimate, or even an informed guess, but perhaps by putting down some ideas I might help your thinking.
Ignoring any particular platform specifics I see the fundamental difference of Web v Native is that in the Web case you have some extra work to do:
a). You have presentation separated from the backend, with probably HTTP in between. So there are services to write and issues concerned with notifications and/or polling to deal with.
b). You're likely using a browser to do the presentation so you will be using some JavaScript kind of library, and these are still hard to drive.
So, if you are targeting a single device my guess is that writing native code is likely to be 50% quicker than web-based code - assuming that you really are targetting identical function.
What seems to happend is that we compromise Web Apps, reducing functionality somewhat and hence the overhead is reduced.
Also there's another factor, the UI portions of the Web App are in principle portable, hence in fact the Web App development may be a reasonable investment even if it does take more effort.
I suspect that portability may well end up being a dominant consideration.
specific differences? There are plenty, but each with their own tradeoff:
UI: Web applications have CSS, (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) specifications that is supported by major browsers (although have have their issues). For Smartphone apps, each UI has to be designed and implemented according to the language the apps can be built on. You can effectively create apps like Winamp (having skins). For web applications, this is relatively a quick effort compared to writing UI's for each different smartphone OS models out there.
Language of use/Portability: In Web applications, an application sits in a server, so every request is sent to the server and response is returned from it. This allows that 1) Web applications can be written in any language of choice, as the end user never sees the server nor needs to configure it, 2) It allows the developer to write in a language that he/she is comfortable in. In smartphone apps, for the developer to run his apps to all the smartphone OS'es, he/she has to learn the programming language for the OS, and learn to port their code to work there (if porting is possible). That never exists in Web applications.
Hardware limitations: For smartapps, the developer must be aware of the cellphone capabilities and limitations. Facebook (e.g.) can essentially grow their memory, and add new servers and cluster their environment as the demand grows. You can't do that with smartphone apps. You will have to limit your implementation to run in a capability that your desired smartphone can accommodate.
There are more (feel free to add) but all these are part of the development effort that a software developer has to look at if they want to go a a field of choice.
In my last Drupal project we were 5 people doing coding and installing new modules, at the same type our client was putting up content. Since we chose to have only one server for simplicity there were times were many people needed to write to the same files like style.css or page.tpl.php or when someones broken code would prevent others from working
Are there any best practises for a team that works with Drupal? How can leverage code repositories or sandboxes?
A single server may appear to give you "simplicity", but what it gives you, as you've experienced, is utter chaos -- and you were lucky if it didn't result in unpleasant and hard-to-reproduce, harder-to-fix crashes. Don't settle for anything less than a "production" server (where your client can be working -- on content only -- if they like minor risks;-) and a "staging" one (where anything from the development team goes to get tested and tried for a while before promotion to development, which is done at a quiet and ideally prearranged time).
Second, use a version control system of some kind. Which one matters less than using one at all: svn is popular and simple, the latest fashion (for excellent reasons) are distributed ones such as hg and git, Microsoft and other have commercial offerings in the field, etc.
The point is, whenever somebody's updating a file, they're doing so on their own client of the VCS. When a coherent set of changes is right, it's pushed to the VCS, and the VCS diagnoses and points out any "conflicts" (places where two developers may have made contradictory changes) so the developer who's currently pushing is responsible for editing the files and fixing the conflicts before their pushes are allowed to go through. Only then are "current versions" allowed to even go on the staging system for more thorough (and ideally automated!-) testing (or, better yet, a "continuous build" system).
Basically, there should be two layers of defense against such conflicts as you observed, and you seem to have deployed neither. They're both essential, though, if forced under duress to pick just one, I guess I'd reluctantly pick the distinction between production and staging servers -- development will still be chaotic (intolerably so compared to the simple solidity of any VCS!) but at least it won't directly hurt the actual serving system;-).
Here's a great writeup about development workflow in Drupal. It sums everything so far responded here and adds "Features", "Strongarm" and a few more tricks to the equation. http://www.lullabot.com/articles/site-development-workflow-keep-it-code
I am going to develop my first application (4 members team).I am not aware of source control tool ( Visual
source safe,Tortoise SVN).
My .NET version is 3.5. What is the best source control tool ?
Is CruiseControl a source control tool ?
Definitely avoid Visual Source Safe.
Subversion is probably a safe choice, but you will have to elaborate about your situation (E.g. how big is your team?) to get more specific advice.
Another no vote for Visual Source Safe here.
Might be an idea to get familiar with subversion as - just as others mentioned - it's widely adopted, so might be useful in the future and simply works..oh and it's free too!
TortoiseSVN integrates into the windows explorer and is both easy to use and well documented so I would give it a try.
If it's a small project of yours and you don't want to worry about hosting, I would recommend signing up for a free account at something like beanstalk, to keep it safe, without any hassle.
But if it's your first ever project, it might just give you too many additional things to learn about, so you might want to put it aside for a while.
Try GIT, it's much lighter weight than svn
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gitextensions/
you can use a local repository for just checking in your own work (to keep a history, or to keep a working version before changing everything) Or you can connect to a central repository for enterprise source control.
The company where I work used to use the SVN, Tortoise, Ankh stack but we're using Git now. Plus I use it at home on my on play projects.
(quated part is no more important since you edited your post about team size)
If you are doing some small project on
your own, maybe you shouldn't use code
versioning at all because you probably
don't need it. Code versioning helps
you with central code storage,
multi-person development code merging
(several people working on the same
file and then commit changes) and code
branching to name the most important
ones.
If I were you, and I would be the only
person developing something simple, I
wouldn't use it, because it would also
be a bit of a time-overkill.
But otherwise source control doesn't address technology like .Net framework version. Code control only stores files (with history) and is able to merge text files. Written in whatever language possible.
If you are part of a team I'd suggest using Subversion + TortoiseSVN + AnkhSVN
And No, CruiseControl is not a code versioning system. It's a continuous integration system.
If you have a pure Windows environment then VisualSVN server is a Windows version of SVN server and installs easily and cleanly. You can setup security using Windows usernames and passwords, or SVN usernames and passwords.
You can then use Tortoise to provide integration in Explorer and VisualSVN to provide Visual Studio integration (there's a small cost for VisualSVN) or you could try AnkhSVN if all you want is VS integration and don't want to spend any money. Personally I prefer VisualSVN's integration.
Running a GIT server under Windows is, umm, frankly a pain in the ass, and not a route I'd recommend for beginners. VS integration is also fraught with pain.
As with everyone else I'd say avoid SourceSafe like the plague.
CruiseControl is not a source control system, it's an automated build server. It monitors source control servers looking for changes, then checks everything out, compiles it and runs it through your unit tests, so people know if they've broken the build. Once you have source control up and running it's the next big step towards a better build environment.
Before we start talking about source control, I would like you to consider your actual need for it, if this is to be your first .NET application. Is this your actual first attempt of writing some .NET 3.5 code? If so, I doubt that you need to worry about source control just yet. I would say it's not just a little bit overkill for the first learning projects.
On the other hand, if this is to be your first application that you'll actually sell to someone, it's a completely different matter.
I currently use VisualSVN, an add-in to Visual Studio that lets you do check-in, check-out etc from within the environment. Along with it, I use the free SVN repository service at XP-Dev. It works well for me =)
Your choice of a versioning system does not have to do anything with the .NET version you are using.
I'd vote for Subversion / Tortoise SVN. It's rock-solid, has lots of handy features, widely adopted and free.