BW 6.3.1 What is the best tool for a Team - CVS, SVN or GIT

[Matti Kaikkonen 2]

Support for CVS and Subversion are preinstalled in the BusinessStudio.

GIT plugin can be installed. I tried the EGit plugin. Here is some discussion about it http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseGit/article.html

The BW 6.3.1 installation refers to BusinessStudion version 4.0, which is based on Eclipse 4.4.1.

My question is, what is the best tool of these in practice, and has someone perhaps made a tutorial of their experience with BW6 / Eclipse and CVS,SVN or EGit.

 

Thanks,

Matti

EDIT: Have been now using Studio without the EGIT plugin. We are two guys developing and touching very much same modules. First we noticed that Studio creates empty folders (git does not track empty folders) and to overcome that we decided to create empty .gitignore files in empty folders. This seems to work without any additional settings in Studio.

[Hitesh Nembhwani]

is Maven plugin an option in your scenario

Check this out -https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/bw6-plugin-maven

[Matti Kaikkonen 2]

Maven might be actually a very welcome scenario. But I lack background info for what maven actually represents. And which problem it solves. Some kind of repository and version control is necessary.

 

Matti

[Hitesh Nembhwani]

https://maven.apache.org/what-is-maven.html - might be helpful and relevant for you. 

[Kai Waehner]

Maven is complementary to a version control system (VCS) like CVS / SVN / Git. Maven is a build tool (others are Ant and Gradle) used to automate the build step (compile, test, etc). It does many steps automatically, which you usually do manually. I highly recommend to think about a build tool, even for small projects. The initial investment is not much compared to the time you save later every day respectively with every commit and build / test.

 

Thus, Matti, you are right. You need a VCS (as repository and version control). In addition, you could leverage a build tool like Maven.

 

From my experience, most people use (still) SVN or moved to Git. CVS is "legacy" and not recommended for new projects. SVN and Git both have pros and cons, there are several comparisons on the web, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/871/why-is-git-better-than-subversion

 

From TIBCO perspective, the VCS does not matter. Choose the one you prefer / have experience with / use in other projects.

[Eric Daigneault]

Have you dealt with conflict resolution yet if so how easy/hard is it to resolve/merge conflicting versions using the egit plugin

 

 

[Nik Todorov]

I'm more curious is it even possible to use different branches in git and bw projects and how the merge works for you, especially when you modify the same project in the two branches and merge. I'm taking for normal work that on dev you added new code to the project xml file and on master you did hot fix on a different code part in the same xml. Is it possible to merge will the IDE have messed up GUIDs

[Louis Parisot]

I develop BW6 applications since 2016 and I use Git, using Git Extensions, i.e. an external tool.

I suggest to add a ".gitkeep" file to your project's empty folders, otherwise when another developers pull your project, Studio will complain about missing folders (those empty folders are referenced by the ".config" file.

By the way, the problems come when merging branches.

The source code produced by TIBCO Studio, the development environment, is not human-readable because it is a set of huge unformatted XML files.

This makes the usage of branches is extremely difficult, risky and unrealistic since merges cant be performed automatically (as it can be for programming languages) and a developer cant determine the difference between two branches by reading the source code.

Moreover, even if such a comparison would have been possible, a merge of branches would actually consist into re-implementing the changes and bug fixes introduced in one branch into another branch; which would multiply the cost of changes and bug fixes implementations by the number of branches.

As such, I consider that two developers cant work at the same time on the same BW application and a bug fix performed on a maintenance branch must be re-implemented in all other branches (e.g. branches for changes).

[James Scott 3]

@Louis Parisot : I'm just starting with Tibco BW development and we were planning on an advanced branching strategy...  After reading your comments I have some concerns.  Have you contacted Tibco on this  What did they have to say  Could you be more specific about some of the issues you ran into

 

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

 

James

[Mohamed Shahat 2]

Hi,

- CVS is old, don't go there

- Subversion is a decent centralised RCS.

- Git is what most people use at the moment.

If your team have skilled Software Engineers, you can look at using Git. If they are the average developers, I'd consider Subversion.

- Maven is a package management tool. Use Maven BW plugin to manage dependencies on other libraries and shared modules. It should helpyoubuild your code into an EAR ( Build stage as part of a Continuous Integration pipeline )

- If you're going to use Git. I'd suggest an external tool like SourceTree to clone, pull and push commits. as well as Eclipse EGit plugin to manage Commits on the level of Modules (Application or Shared modules )

 

Thanks,

[Mohamed Shahat 2]

Hi James, the fact that the code in case of a platform like BW is based on a large XML file representing several aspects of the code, makes it challenging for an auto-merge to take place.

we don't see it as an issue as much as it's a consideration that should be considered when you're planning a branching strategy as you've suggested.

The guideline that Louis suggested makes sense and is widely used. No more than one developer to work on the same module.

 

Thanks,