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Ben Spead · Sep 18, 2017

Ian - I completely understand why moving to Private Dev is challenging.  It is very much the nature of applications built on top of InterSystems technology, and it is certainly a challenge.  

You are absolutely correct in your thinking that you will see a lot of issues in trying to use Client-Side source hooks (especially for a distributed source control system like Git) against a Shared Dev instance.  I actually presented at Global Summit last week about the interplay between Client vs Serverside hooks and Private vs Shared Dev instances, and I recommended that people avoid the Client-Side / Shared Dev combination.  I would recommend that you download the slides and watch the recording of my session - you will probably find it to be very helpful:

Global Summit 2017: Shared Development for the 21st Century

As you are tied to Shared Dev workflow, I would strongly suggest that you consider using Server-side hooks to enable your dev workflow, and that you use a centralized Version Control System (VCS) like Perforce, Deltanji or Subversion rather than a distributed VCS like Git.  Serverside hooks will enforce the behavior of both Studio and Atelier, so you can still move to Atelier and still use this (just make sure that you are on 2017.2.0, 2017.1.2 or 2016.2.3 as those are the first versions that contain a fix to a hole that was recently found in serverside protections with Atelier).  

In terms of your code promotion question, please keep in mind that Atelier is a development tool and not a deployment tool.  As others have said, TEST and PROD should never have code pushed to it from Atelier but rather the code needs to come directly from your VCS.  I run internal app dev at InterSystems and our process looks like this:

  • Shared BASE, TEST and LIVE environments
  • Private BASEs for some apps
  • BASE, TEST and LIVE branches
  • VCS is Perforce
  • Serverside hooks on Shared BASE control concurrency and locking of items as they are being edited on Shared BASE
  • All check-ins include a logic identifier for the project (a Job in Perforce) 
  • When project is ready to move from BASE to TEST, we have a script that integrates all changelists with that Job from the BASE branch to the TEST branch
  • Changed items are pulled from TEST branch into TEST environment and compiled
  • Same process for moving things from TEST to LIVE

This process works very well for us and scales well on a variety of sized development teams (larger teams use more private BASE environments to prevent check-out collisions on Shared-BASE).  We've been working in this mode for about 7 years and it's really stabilized our environments and branches (compared to how things were before) and we're well positioned to move forward with Atelier in use side by side with Studio.

Hope this helps.  Please watch my Global Summit session and let me know if you have any questions (I plan to write a new article based on my session so feel free to jump in to the discussion there).

Ben Spead · Sep 15, 2017

Ian,

If I were you, I would approach this as follows:

1) Baseline the code on all three of your servers using the "Caché UDL" project on GitHub

2) Use the PROD baseline to make your PROD branch/repot

3) Fork/Branch to make your TEST repo, and then check in your changes from TEST baseline on top of the changes integrated there from PROD

4) Do the same thing to make DEV - Fork/Branch from TEST and then check in your DEV Baseline on top of it

Now you should be positioned to integrate changes from DEV to TEST and deploy out of source control, and then the same from TEST to PROD.  This allows you to handle your merges within source control and not rely on merging from your IDE as part of a code push.

Side note - I expect you'll run into some frustrations trying to use client-side hooks against a shared DEV instance if you are not careful (I just did a presentation at Global Summit this past week which highlighted the challenges of that approach).  I would recommend that you move towards Private DEV instances as soon as you can, or if you intend to stay using a Shared DEV, then you might want to consider Server-side hooks instead (that being said - Git doesn't work very well in a shared dev type environment with serverside hooks, so this again points to the importance of moving towards private DEV instances as soon as you are able).  There will be several recordings from Global Summit which should be interesting to you on this topic - we'll be posting articles in the near future with the content so stay tuned!

Ben Spead · Aug 23, 2017

There is a huge benefit from two perspectives:

- If you need to refresh data in your Dev or Test environment, you can just grab the globals DB from Live and drop it in and not worry about overwriting any code in Dev or Test

- If you choose to deploy your code via a DB drop, you can drop in a new DB to replace the existing routines DB

NOTE - for either of these to work, you may need to map configuration into the routines DB (so you don't bring back Live config into Dev for instance)

HTH!

Ben

Ben Spead · Aug 8, 2017

FYI ... we will have several sessions covering this topic at the Global Summit - attend if you can, otherwise check out the material afterwards!

For internal application development within InterSystems we use a variety of approaches, but the most common is as follows:

1) We use an internally developed issue tracking system, but we plan to eventually migrate to JIRA

2) We use Perforce for all of our source control 

3) We have BASE, TEST and LIVE environments for every application, typically BASE and TEST being cloned from VM snapshots of LIVE.  In addition to the Shared BASE VM, for those applications which are undergoing the highest rate of change, developers will create a local copy of the application to do their development work.  Some apps have all changes being developed on Shared BASE and the changes are progressed (via our Change Control tool) to TEST and the LIVE.  For applications where developers use Private BASEs, they commit there and then push the changes to Shared BASE and then to TEST and LIVE.

Feel free to ask questions (here or at Global Summit)!

Thanks for asking.