How do you use Coldfusion Builder 2 in a team environment using a shared development server?

Question

Our CF 9 development environment is located on a shared development server (DEVWEB). We are looking at the transition from Dreamweaver to Coldfusion Builder as our IDE, and I am concerned about how CF Builder unpacks the .settings and .project directory in the root of the project.

How do development teams deal with this? If a team member makes changes to their settings, do their changes in the project settings / settings do not change mine? Or the types of settings that are included in these packages, the types of things that MUST be distributed to team members?

We would rather NOT work on local CF installations for development.

Thanks for any help / suggestions with this!

Chris

Answer 1

Chris, when you say shared server, I assume that you mean that everyone has access to the code sharing file and makes changes. We did it this way, but we solved the problem with the following:

• source counter subversion. All code goes to the repository. GIT is also a good solution.
• Development of a local workstation. Each developer has a copy of the code and a CF / Web server running on the local Win7 or MAC. They make changes and "commit" the code in the repository.
• Hudson Continuous Integration Server. This product allows us to create a deployment script that updates our shared development server from our SVN.
• Lock Locks / Triggers. With a few scripts, our SVNs can “run” hudson to run builds on our shared server.

The result is something very similar to the whole team being developed on one server, because each source control latch causes this code to be transferred to a shared server (which we call an "intermediate" server).

since SVN or GIT have great integrated eclipse tools, the versioning part of this (which sometimes seems harder) is actually the easiest to get used to.

The most difficult part, as a rule, is that developers have to run the web server / CF server on their local workstation, which may or may not be in it - and many developers (too many :) do not know anything about based on web / cf technology so that they have a few things to learn ... for example, how to set up a data source, add something to the class path, or create a virtual directory in apache or IIS. But these lessons usually enhance the debugging skills of your staff - so this is a victory.

When you are done, you have a few things that you did not have before: source control, continuous integration, new skills, etc. All this will benefit your staff as a whole. This is my desire - do not hesitate to contact me if you want to receive more detailed information.

Answer 2

You seem to be working in an environment like the one in my biggest place. As others have said, using a central source repository is indeed the best solution, however, if your environment is similar to what I am facing, then this may not be an option to install such a thing. In fact, we still use DW and use its tools for synchronization and still have not stepped on each other. But our "team environment" really more than every member of the team has its own applications that they support. If you have or have an FTP or SFTP server installed on the development server, you should at least use the synchronization tools built into the CFB:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/462797

This means that at least it has a copy of the CF code on your local machines. This does not mean that you need to run CF on your local machines, although there are many arguments in favor of why you should. We typically run CF / IIS / Oracle / SQL Server on all of our development machines. We have a number of projects, although if this were a logical nightmare, to try and emulate the entire database locally (with real data), some applications are needed.

I worked in some places where they still could not run a dedicated SVN server, and they ran “SVN servers” on each development machine. This approach to me, apparently, could potentially lead to some messy situations, if in a real team environment.