How to best develop half of a web application?
Posted on 26 Aug 2005 by Marcus Ahnve
At work, the task at hand is extending an existing J2EE based product. This means that half of the .war that is to be deployed is hands-off, and the other half is written by us.
The problem I am having is how to get a productive environment. Unfortunately the products file organization is a mess, so there is no way to have a version checked into the version control system as it never would survive an upgrade. Also the deployed app needs to be initialized with a lot of data that is – surprise – saved both in a database and on the filesystem, meaning no easy test db setup.
The developers who have been in the project for a while have used an army of symbolic links to connect the dots, probably inspired by the products overgenerous use of such. But I am not content with what I’ve seen, but I cant really point my finger at what to do. Anyone who has done anything similar?
