Best Practices for Channel Development Al Wold Arizona State University

Strategy Overview Revision Control: CVS Build Process: ant Deployment: CAR files Development Environment: Eclipse

Eclipse Initially developed by IBM, now community- developed Free and open source GUI is native to the OS, providing higher performance than pure Java IDEs Integration with open source standard tools (ant, CVS, JUnit)

CVS The de facto standard for open source projects Focus on multiple developers Concurrent checkout and development

CVS: The Repository Projects are represented as modules The entire source tree of a module is checked out Working copy can be updated with latest changes in repository When you are finished with a change, the file is committed to the repository

CVS: Tags Tags can be used to “flag” a specific set of files This can be used to identify development/QA/production code Branches are a form of tag which allow you to work on a separate line of changes

CVS Documentation is available at The subversion project will be the successor to CVS, but is currently not as well adopted Subversion information is available at

CAR Files Allow for deployment of a channel as a single easily-migrated unit Can contain all of your code, stylesheets, images, and other resources

CAR File Development Laying out your source tree for CAR support Coding your channel to support CAR files for external resources

Sample CAR File layout test.car: edu/asu/portal/channels/test/CTest.class edu/asu/portal/channels/test/CTest.ssl edu/asu/portal/channels/test/CTest.xsl edu/asu/portal/channels/test/images/test.gif

Coding for CAR files Pass the base media URL to the XSLT process: xslt.setStylesheetParam(“mediaPath”, runtimeData.getBaseMediaURL(this)); Reference the base media URL in the XSL:

ant Open source build tool developed by the Apache foundation Currently the most widely adopted standard build tool for Java Used by the uPortal project Ant manual:

Using ant to build a channel Prepare the build directories Compile code Package the car file Deploy the car file Reload the application

Development Considerations How to implement development environment – Multiple build environments, one runtime environment – Runtime environment for each user Commit policy – Commit files as frequently as possible to minimize conflicts, but make sure they are in a stable state Non-eclipse users – Using ant and CVS allows for theoretical use of any IDE, or no IDE