Multiple Developers working on Jade HTML Documents

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by Ben >> Thu, 16 Mar 2006 0:13:03 GMT

Has anyone got any advice on setting up a multi-user Jade Development environment for developing HTML Documents?

I want multiple people developing HTML documents at the same time, but it seems that the HTML documents can't be edited if the web application is running. This isn't a problem when there is only one person developing the HTML documents because they can shut down the web application, edit the HTML and then fire up the web application and check the changes. However, when multiple developers are making changes they can't just shut down the web application to make changes to the HTML because other developers testing their changes will be effected.

I don't think this is an unusual scenario, so I'm assuming other people must have been able to work around this.

Thanks in advance,
Ben

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by Torrie >> Thu, 16 Mar 2006 0:24:39 GMT

Most larger organisations I've worked in have two environments. One for developing and another for testing. This solves the problems or reorgs, locked classes etc as there is no data in the development environment. You can also add debug code into the test system that is not included in the master source. It also forces you to think about the deployment process ie how to load the code into an existing system. It is often a good idea to take a backup of the test system so you can restore it to a known state and then test deploying the changes.

You may find you need to coordinate loads into the test system if you encounter issues with locked classes while other users are testing.

Torrie

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by Ben >> Thu, 16 Mar 2006 4:24:55 GMT

Thanks Torrie,

I believe the problem I have is more specific to Jade HTML documents. The problem is that the development process requires changes to be made to the HTML. The only way to edit the HTML is via the "HTML Document Browser" which does not allow the HTML to be updated when the Jade Web Application is running. It is standard practice for developers to unit test their changes to the HTML immediately following a change. The unit test may be as simple as a visual check to make sure the change to the HTML renders as expected. If the developer has to shut down the Jade Web Application to make the change then other developers doing similar unit tests will encounter problems.
If we were using a test environment to do the unit testing, the Jade Web App on the test environment would still need to be shut down in order to load the HTML changes and thus disrupt everyone else unit testing the HTML interface.

Cheers,
Ben

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by cnwjhp1 >> Thu, 16 Mar 2006 5:02:14 GMT

I haven't tried this, but does it help to have multiple Web Apps?

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by Rob Wills >> Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:56:17 GMT

Ben,

Your point is perfectly valid. In developing a recent application we had two developers working on JadeHTML and we had to co-operate about when the application was up and when it was down to load in HTML. With more than two I can imagine this would become difficult.

The only help that I can suggest is that just purely in terms of making sure the fixed code renders you can always use a tool such as Dreamweaver. However, in most cases the changes you're making with JADE_TAG are so extensive this doesn't help too much.

I would like Jade to move on this - you really do need to be trying out HTML as you are developing it much more than normal Jade code, so enhanced functionality in this area would be valuable.