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Viewtier Devenv - Development Environment setter and validator
Devenv is a simple yet powerful command-line utility that allows software development teams and software developers set and validate their common development environment.
Common development environment is a set of directories, files, and shell variables that must exist and must be valid for every member of engineering team. Having established common development environment allows reproducible builds, which is a key to successful delivery of a software project.
Devenv helps to solve the most annoying and time-consuming problems of the day to day software engineering process:
'It works on my computer' problem
'It works on my computer'. You have heard it many times, and, may be, said it yourself once. While easy to say, it signals one of the most critical problems in day to day software engineering process - inability to reproduce results delivered by a member of a team, or, even worse, by the whole team. Consequences of the problem are wide and range from hours spent by a developer fighting with local copy of the code that does not want to build to the team stuck with a broken source line.
Problem of diversity in development tools
It's a well known and accepted fact that a software engineer is most efficient when using development tools, like editors and IDEs, of his or her choice. Some engineers would use Emacs or vi; others would use an IDE like JBuilder or Eclipse e.t.c.
In addition, development infrastructure tools such as compilers or shells, though they are installed at different locations on developer's desktops, still have to be available when building a software product.
Somehow, this diversity in tools and their locations should be applied to the same product.
Problem of diversity in target platforms
In addition to variety of development tools, it is a normal situation when a product is developed under different hardware and operation systems, that add complexities to reproducible product builds. Windows, Linux, Sun OS, HPUX, CYGWIN, bash and Korn shell is just a small list of such possibilities.
Problem of new team members
When a new member joins even a small team, too often he or she should fight issues with software development infrastructure (or, better said, lack of it). Freshly checked out source line does not build because build process can't find a compiler, required libraries or database clients are missing, paths aren't set or set wrong, and on and on. All this results in counterproductive time losses and frustration both from the new member of the team and from the team itself.
The solution
In order to be efficient, a software engineering team should answer the questions:
How do we make sure that changes we make available for everyone in the team?
How do we use different tools while maintaining consistency of the project?
How do we develop under different hardware and software platforms without integration hassles?
How do we incorporate new members of the team quickly and painlessly?
The answer is simple - you need the least common denominator, or, in other words, a simple and easy way to validate and set development environment that is common and is the same for every member of the team and that allows process of building, testing and deploying the project without regard to used tools, plaftorms and locations.
Viewtier Development environment setter, Devenv - is a simple, efficient and multi-platform tool that helps to solve the problems described above.
It will report environment problems if any. If environment is valid, it will set required shell variables, paths and build parameters to valid values required by your build and test scripts.
Devenv is easy to use
Devenv is very easy to use - a developer just goes to a source line tree root directory and types
. setenv.sh
or
setenv.bat
- and the development environment will be automatically validated and set in accordance with a definition stored in an easy to read and modify xml file. Please check documentation page to find out how.
Devenv is multi-platform
Devenv is written in Java and is shipped with setenv shell scripts for Unix and Windows.
Devenv is shareware
You can use Devenv for about two months after download to decide if you want to register it. Though Devenv remains fully operational when evaluation period ends, you are required to register Devenv in order to continue using it. If Devenv is used unregisterd after expiration of the evalution period, thirty seconds reminder message will show up at Devenv startup. This message does not affect Devenv functionality. |
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