On 25 Jun 2008, at 19:19, Daniel Leffel wrote:
We're using Continuum to do continuous builds. Gave the designer access to that too and when he wants to see his changes, he commits and kicks off a manual build. Pretty cool.
Very cool. A key aspect of any framework is the extent to which it facilitates collaboration between team members with disparate skillsets. In fact, I think that in practice, these things often hugely outweigh any more technical considerations that might make a programmer's life easier in the short-term.
However, I think Tapestry could be even better in this regard. Requiring a continuous build system would set the bar very high. Howard described his picture of a more informal "pair programming" type setup. Again, this is a pretty cool way of working, but it doesn't cover the entire space of the way people work. Teams are sometimes geographically separated, contributing at different times of the day and (shudder) individual team members often have to work offline for periods.
Earlier versions of Tapestry had a real ace in the hole in this regard, namely fully previewable templates. Obviously there were trade-offs involved in maintaining previewability past the first iteration, and for some project teams, it wasn't worth the effort. But for others, it was pure gold. I worked on a T4 project where the designer could revise the current templates offline and then check the revised templates into version control, confident that he hadn't stepped on any programmatic aspects of the system. It's not that easy with T5. I'm not sure whether there are technical reasons for that or if it's just a natural consequence of Howard's imagining of the collaboration as pair programming. (A scenario in which previewability is naturally less important.) Some of it you can work around with your own components, but nothing beats having it all there in the core framework.
I should probably start a separate thread to discuss this as it's not directly related to www.ingamenow.com.
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