Programmers' Canvas Toolkit

Free Development Environment Build-it-Yourself Kit

05 Nov 2001 20:18

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Programmers' Canvas Design Pattern

Development environments require years of scripting and tinkering to perfect.

With the Programmers' Canvas Toolkit you can have an extensible, feature-rich development environment up and running in a matter of days.  Click here to get started

DevGuy has made available, under the GPL, scripts and a how-to guide for building a development environment that manages source code and performs automated builds.  The development environment has many evolved features such as:

  • Source code repository provided by CVS
  • Source code repository operations including checkins and edits are posted to a newsgroup so developers can stay in sync
  • Command-line helper scripts make CVS usage simpler
  • Configured via XML documents
  • Copies files from CVS to another location e.g., to update web servers
  • Builds multiple projects and keeps track of errors
  • Manages an incrementing build number
  • Builds Java projects via a convenient makefile infrastructure.  Works with any JDK and produces ZIP, class, and JAR files for any Java platform.
  • Builds Microsoft Visual C++ projects.  Builds DSW and DSP files directly via automation objects.
  • Builds Microsoft VS.NET projects.  Builds SLN and VCPROJ files.
  • DLLs' and EXEs' version resources are automatically altered to include the build number, company name, and copyright.
  • Notifies a list of users when builds start and end via network notifications
  • Posts build start and end to NNTP newsgroup
  • Tags all files that are part of a build using a unique timestamp
  • Posts build status, artifacts, and check-in comments to a website
  • Builds are archived until you choose to delete them
  • Build scripts can retrieve files by tag/label and can also tag files after a successful build
  • Build scripts can run Javadoc and any other sort of command-line program

More Information:

  • This is a do-it-yourself kit.  A mailing list is available for support needs.  There are no guarantees of responsiveness, but DevGuy will do their best to assist you.
  • Bug tracking software not included.  DevGuy recommends Soffront Track, TeamTrack, and the open-source Bugzilla.
  • Includes detailed instructions for setting up CVS in client-server mode (pserver).  pserver is recommended because it significantly decreases the possibility of file corruption and dangling file locks, compared to file sharing.
  • Tools written in Perl for portability and customizability
  • Only runs on Win32 but, because it's mostly written in Perl, can be converted to UNIX by someone who is willing to roll up their sleeves.
  • Requires Microsoft Internet Server (IIS)

Here's some sample web pages that the kit outputs.  The web server builds HTML on the fly from XML.  It's ASP code so it's easy to customize.  Click on the images to zoom in.

If you click on a build, a build detail page appears:


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