Re: Using Eclipse and Subclipse

You make an interesting point, and I would be interested to hear of any iSeries 
specific solutions that would provide the same sort of version control that CVS 
and Subversion can offer - at the same price (i.e. zero - except for project 
support and sponsorship). We have years of experience using tools like Thenon 
and Turnover for iSeries development and have very good reasons from moving 
away from those types of tools - not least of which is the licence and S&M fee.

I can't agree that the Subversion/Subclipse solution won't scale. We use 
subversion for VB.Net applications that have extremely large numbers of files 
in the repository.  The number of files really makes little difference to 
scalability since 99% of them are untouched.  You can also split huge projects 
into tags or branches for "feature" work and check these out to small ISeries 
Projects if that’s what you want to do. 

I would, however, be interested to know if the Eclipse part (of the 
Subversion/Subclipse/Eclipse) trilogy will have performance or scalability 
issues with projects with a large source base?

-----Original Message-----
From: wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Mark Phippard
Sent: 06 February 2006 22:05
To: Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Using Eclpise and Subclipse

wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 02/06/2006 04:46:06 PM:

> Yes your assumption of the scenario is correct and yes, you are probably 
right
> as to why it is happening.  The question is - should this be happening? 
It 
> seems a bit odd that 5 team members all update their project in the 
morning 
> and then all simultaneously start pushing identical source down to the 
> iSeries. It is also quite irritating if you have pulled, say, 20 changes 
into 
> your project and then just want to make a small change and compile of 
one 
> source member.  Seems like a bug to me - bit I don't know if this is a 
> Subclipse issue or an Eclipse issue. 

I do not think there is a bug in anything.  Eclipse plays no role in this, 
other than as a host for all of these plugins.  Subclipse sounds like it 
is behaving correctly.  It is the iSeries Projects code from IBM that 
decides what to push and when to push it.  You could call this a bug, but 
I suspect they would call it a design limitation.

Personally, I do not think the idea of using the iSeries Projects feature 
and then storing the source in a PC-style version control system really 
works for iSeries development.  You get the basic functionality you are 
looking for but I do not think that all of the tooling is in place to make 
this work well.  I also do not think as a general solution it would scale 
really well.  Imagine the problem you are facing in a more realistic 
iSeries application with over a thousand source members.  I also do not 
think iSeries Projects themselves were really meant to be used on that 
large of a scale.

In my opinion, iSeries Projects was meant to more solve the problem that 
"I am working on FeatureX" that involves these 10-20 source members.  I 
can group them and work on them in a project.  I suppose I could form a 
small adhoc team and temporarily coordinate our work in a PC-style 
repository like Subversion.  But when the "project/feaure" was complete 
you would throw it away and repeat for the next project.

In order to use the feature on a long term basis, your iSeries Project 
would need to contain all of your source code for your application and 
that is not what it was intended to do.

I think you will get better results from an iSeries-specific solution.

Mark





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