[Serkan Durusoy]

Dear All,

I am totally new into organized team-development. I run a small software company who is dedicated to J2EE development, yet have managed teamwork using simple file sharing; namely, we use one development server running the application server (tomcat, resin, sybase easerver, oracle – listed by popularity among our projects) and give direct write access at the root directory of the projects to all the developers in that team.

Now that we subscribed with MyEclipse and also intend to use CVS, I have a couple of questions that none of our developers could answer.

Say we have clean installs of CVS and the application server, say tomcat. I just heard that, to be fully able to use the workspace functionality of MyEclipse, each of the developer has to have a local copy of tomcat running on his/her computer.

Is this really correct? Can’t we get to have only one development server where everybody uploads (through CVS) their code to test it?

I can understand to some extent that each developer has to have tomcat running locally, but when it comes to heavy-weight application servers like SyBase’s or Oracle’s, or for those who work on multiple projects at the same time, it seems just too ridiculous an idea to have tens of application servers lurking around over the network, consuming valuable CPU time and memory.

I’ll be a very happy person if someone can lead me into putting up a good, efficient and industry-standard team-development environment where we get rid of development hassles and risks as well as making teamwork finally happen as it really should.

Regards,
Serkan

PS:
We generally use tomcat, resin, sybase and oracle as application servers and mysql, sybase ase, oracle and ms-sql server as database. Target (production) operations systems vary among linux, solaris, freebsd, macosx (xserve) and windows servers.

PS2:
If my question was too novice/dummy to be replied here, I would still appreciate replies at my e-mail address which is serkan.durusoy@dna-tr.com

[support-michael]

The main development issue whne using centralized servers is that ME does not yet support remote deployment (SCP/FTP to a remote server). What many of our customer’s do in this case is to share/mount the file-system of their remote appserver on the local dev machine. Doing this allows the developer to configure ME to see that particular appserver as a local server.

Re: CVS use for this purpose, most teams use it for src management. Outside of ME they have a separate build and deployment process using Ant/Maven/Other.

I hope this helps. Please post follow up questions as needed.

[Serkan Durusoy]

Dear Michael,

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply. Yet please do regard me as a newbie and let me confess that your reply did not mean much to me. Let me describe you our environment:

We have a broadband connection behind proxy/firewall with a DMZ network and a LAN. They are on different IP segments and since the development server is also on the DMZ side (for project status demo purposes to our clients) file sharing is not allowed. We can only reach the development server through FTP and HTTP. Therefore we use FTP to upload our files to the server.

Let’s put CVS aside for a moment (only temporarily though – to simplify me understanding the basics – and take one step at a time) and concentrate on what we have.

We have a development server running Tomcat, listening to HTTP requests on port 81 and FTP server on the same machine listening through port 21. All the clients have clean WinXP Pro and MyEclipse installed.

What we have usually been doing was to manually create the virtual domain, connection cahce and a hello world JSP to start. Then we began to upload (through FTP) our classes, beans, JSP’s, EJB’s (if applicable), server side includes etc. Finally when we were done we packed the project into one of JAR/WAR/EAR whichever appropriate to deliver it to the production server of our client.

Now that we have MyEclipse, CVS and having said these, what kind of configuration do you recommend? I really do not favor a situation where each developer installs a copy of tomcat, sybase or whatever on his local computer.

Thanks,
Serkan

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