Team Development using Run Rev

[Dave]

On 29 Feb 2008, at 08:01, Malte Brill wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> >Who is using RunRev in a group development environment? (reply if  
> you are)
>
> Me :)
>
> >How many developers are on the team?
>
> Up to 5
>
> >Are the developers in the same office or are the team members  
> spread over
> >different regions or countries?
>
> Most of the time same office, somtimes spread across regions
>
> >How are you handling "master" stack updates to the server?
>
> Very carefully. ;-)
>
> >How do you handle "code" (.rev files) check-out and check-in?
>
> SVN
>
> >Bottom line, is RunRev a good tool to use in a production team  
> environment?
>
> The file format is not really team friendly given its binary  
> nature. It boils down to that every team member is working on one  
> module (stack) at the time, which get loaded by a splash screen  
> master stack in the deployed version. If cards need to be in the  
> same stack, but different people are working on them, we either  
> copy over the cards, or ping ourselfs in an IM system. "Do you have  
> xyz.rev in use at the moment? Please check it in to SVN that I can  
> do my bits" And in a few cases this goes wrong. Given the binary  
> nature of stacks, SVN can not merge them, which is a pity. I wrote  
> an XML exporter for stacks, that can export a stack to XML and  
> recreate the stack afterwards. However, this has some difficulties,  
> as there are some properties, that can not be set by script (ID  
> being one). So one needs to design the stacks carefully (do not  
> refer to controls by ID) and I gave up on that approach.
>

I found the best way to handle this was to export all the script as  
text files and them to a compare/merge of the source code and import  
the text files back into a "master" stack that is used to build the  
standalone application. For example:

Fred, George and Sally all work on "StackA" at the same time. They  
then want to merge their changes into one masterstack. There is a  
template stack (Template_StackA)  that only contains the GUI  
elements, no script code. They export the scripts from their stacks  
and do a merge/compare on the text files. The template file is copied  
into a new folder and the new text files are imported back into the  
corresponding objects in the stack.

Hope this helps
All the Best
Dave