I'm not in this for a flamewar, just seeking to clarify my position here... And
we're probably getting off topic.
Quoting Dave Watts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I'm not exactly sure how the comparative length of our experience enters
> into this. That said, it may be counterproductive to have developers learn
> about web server management in this age of specialization. And, of course,
> constructive laziness is a valuable trait for a developer. And finally, it
> is very difficult to accurately emulate a production environment on a laptop
> of any sort, unless your production environment is very simple. Where do you
> draw the line?
The comparison was to indicate that I felt I was coming from a position of
relatively decent experience.
I don't necessarily agree that developers shouldn't know about how web servers
work. Where I am, the web applications team are responsible for the
configuration of the web servers at every point above the base OS install (and
often that, too), so it makes sense for them to know what's going on. At other
locations YMMV, as I'm guessing is the case at Fig Leaf.
Yes, you are 100 per cent correct that full prod environment emulation from a
notebook or developer workstation is challenging. Noting our configuration
below, you'll see that we try to come pretty close.
> Again, I think that if you aren't going to manage the web server, and you're
> not using any functionality that's specific to your web server, there's no
> reason not to use the JRun web server for development on your own
> workstation. If you're going to set up a shared development environment, it
> would make more sense to more closely mirror your expected production
> environment.
All our development is shared - in part. At the first level it's individual
workstations running separate checkouts of the full codebase with a shared dev
database.
> You are, of course, free to do what you like. However, unless Jennifer is on
> your dev team, that may not be especially relevant. Jennifer asked one
> question, and you answered another completely different question, which
> isn't always an appropriate response.
No, I didn't answer Jennifer's question. And that was my mistake. I should
have (and probably could have). I offered some advice without thinking about
context and what she might really have been after. My bad.
> > Where I am, we tend to develop on what we inaccurately term
> > "developer workstations" - workstation-grade hardware running
> > Win2K or 2K3 (occasionally SuSE) and the ACME stack. So,
> > they're not really workstations in that sense. But they *do*
> > closely match our deployment platform. My ACME Guide suggests
> > WinXP as most people are more likely to be comfortable running
> > it as a day-to-day OS.
>
> This seems quite inconsistent. People don't generally deploy server
> applications on a day-to-day OS. You do realize there are significant
> differences between IIS 5 (Windows 2000 Server), IIS 5.1 (Windows XP
> Professional) and IIS 6 (Windows Server 2003), right? Typically, server
> filesystem ACLs and system accounts are configured quite differently from
> personal computers and workstations - do you also recommend that for your
> Windows XP users?
No, I don't think so. A developer "workstation" here is Win2K/2K3 Server (I
didn't say that before, my bad again), Apache or IIS, CFMX7 and Eclipse talking
to a shared Oracle dev DB instance. It's running on desktop grade hardware, but
it's pretty close to our prod environment otherwise.
Yes, I understand the difference between the various IIS versions. Not a fan of
any of them and avoid them if I can help it; which is not always possible as we
have some sites which run on IIS.
The *only* reason I use WinXP as the OS for The ACME Guide is that my guess was
that there wouldn't be too many users out there with access to Win2k/2K3
Server, or that if they did, they'd be reluctant to use it as the core OS on
their daily workstation.
We could quite easily get into a religious war about appropriate setups for
developers. I don't think it's worthwhile, as it's totally a decision on a
business-by-business basis. I offer one point of view, which I think is a good
one. Others may disagree and that's cool by me.
What this boils down to is that I gave the wrong answer to the right question
(there are no dumb questions only dumb answers, and mine was) without thinking
about what Jennifer was really after. For that, I've already apologised on
list. I didn't do it to be a smartarse or tout myself, nor to start a "my
environment is better than yours" war.
Shall we call it a day?
Steve
--
Steve Collins
E [EMAIL PROTECTED]
W www.stephencollins.org
ICQ 1014940 | MSN [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Yahoo trib
Google Talk [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Skype trib22
The ACME Guide - Best practice development using
Apache - ColdFusion MX - MySQL - Eclipse/CFEclipse
www.stephencollins.org/acme/
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