Tip of the Iceberg

Category Show-n-Tell Thursday
Some of you may have seen my SearchDomino tip years ago about using DXL to create a version control / design distribution tool. But as I was considering what to post for the first Show-n-Tell Thursday, it occurred to me that I've never posted the actual template based on this technique that I've been using to manage all my code at home ever since. So here it is, with all its bells, whistles, and bugs:

DesignCatalog.zip

You may notice a bit of overlap between this template and the TeamStudio product suite. This is intentional... not because I ever had any intention of competing with them (I may be an egomaniac, but even I occasionally realize my own limitations), but because I wanted a free tool to use until I could afford to buy my own copy of their tools. If you have the cash, I recommend, nay, I urge you to buy TeamStudio's tools, because there's nothing else on the market that can do what they do, and they pay for themselves almost instantly by saving you time, stress, and sometimes even tears. The quality of your code will also be improved, and rumor has it some clients and managers like that almost as much as timeliness. Finally, their support is fantastic, whereas any fix/enhancement requests I receive for Design Catalog would be handled on a "yeah, when I get around to it" basis... although its open-sourceness would also allow you to make any tweaks you deem necessary yourself.

That said, for those of you whose budget is stretched too thin, the functions that DesignCatalog supports which overlap some of TeamStudio's functionality are as follows:

• Version control: DesignCatalog allows you to archive auto-numbered versions of individual design elements and roll back to them as needed, which is a portion of what TeamStudio's CIAO! component does; CIAO! also supports design locking (and did long before that was implemented in the Designer client) and build distribution by promotion path (i.e. development to test to production).
  
• Drag-and-drop distribution of elements from one or more source databases to a single target database - this is just a tiny piece of what TeamStudio's Design Manager (the artist formerly known as "Librarian") can do. It's also the component that ties the rest together, although each can operate independently of the others, whether or not Design Manager is available.
• Automatic capture and purging (based on age, count, or total size) of snapshots of design elements as they are saved - this feature, which is accomplished via integration with Trigger Happy, is more or less equivalent to TeamStudio's Snapper component. It also happens to contain the only bug I know of: if design locking is enabled, multiple snapshots are captured for each edit; in fact, a snapshot is captured upon opening an element that has not yet been locked, because Designer automatically locks it, which is still considered a design modification by Trigger Happy. Other than that, it works pretty well: if you've had a design element open for hours, hitting Ctrl+S every few minutes, then suddenly the touchpad goes monkey on you and wipes out a whole block of code just as you're saving again, you can roll back to the last snapshot instead of having to restore from backup and lose a whole day's work.
  

So there ya have it. Earlier tonight, the download link pointed to a file resource in my blog database, but I've moved it to OpenNTF, in case there is enough demand for improvements to warrant an ongoing project.

technorati tag: Show-n-tell thursday