In fact after your post, I read the “quote” again, and to my amazement, it clearly says that source control will be available in developer 6.5; All other features listed in the release announcement is in present tense except of course this one.
And I dont understand the need to include or highlight this in an email to all the customers. If its not ready, its not!!
I guess, I should start to read the announcements more microscopically from webMethods.
Hope that this feature is supported before the IW 2005!! Its long overdue.
This “error-in-intent” is second one from webMethods marketing/product development team within a month!!
what the heck, is this new directive, new mantra to approach customers!!
Well, in this case I just think it was tougher to get right than someone thought. That’s the thing about putting it off this long, now we still have to wait while the kinks get ironed out.
Just to put this in perspective, here’s one of my posts on this topic from almost 18 months ago to the day. Back then we were hearing “support for source control will be in the October release”.
I hear that it will be released in the next Integration Server Service Pack, perhaps sometime in Summer 2006. Then again, it could slip again to Summer 2007, you just never know with this one. I’ll believe it when I see it.
RE: Version Control and Configuration Management with webMethods 6.0.1
by: subhashr.7180 on: 15-Dec-2005 9:35 AM Folks, I wanted to provide an update on the WmVCS package. We have had to work thru some schedule difficulties which has caused this release to slip to mid 2006. We plan to first release support for Microsoft Visual Source Safe and this is expected to be available in May 2006. This will be followed by support for Perforce. We are also considering support for Clear Case and CVS but these plans have not yet been finalized.
We ask for your patience while we work on providing support for multiple source control systems. This process has been complex and quite involved since these systems do not always behave the same and their interfaces are all very different. Couple that with the different node types that exist within Developer (Flow, java, document, XSLT, triggers, etc.) and this has lead to a very challenging implementation for us.
Thank you for your continued support.
Regards,
webMethods Product Management
PS. This package will only work with IS/Developer 6.5
Do any of you know any details on how this version control support/capability is actually going to work? What all does the solution take care of and how does it accomplish it?
For example, are they adding GUI features to the Developer to lock, check-in, check-out, etc? Behind the scenes, will the IS be checking in/out flow.xml and node.ndf files, will it be dealing with zipped packages, or neither?
I’m currently working on a deployment and version control strategy for our system and I’m a little torn between pursuing version control at the package level (ie. zip files) or at the component level (ie. flow.xml, etc)? Both have pros and cons, so if I knew more about how webMethods is implementing this new feature, maybe that would make my decision a little easier.
Once upon a time, I had an opportunity to review a draft version of the user’s guide for what was then called the WmVCS package. However, I think that version was a non-starter and they had to go back to the drawing board (at least, that’s what I gather from the extended delays with this capability).
That said, I do believe there would be node-level check-in / check-out from within Developer. A node in this case is anything you could create from the dialog box that appears with CTRL-N.
BTW, IS / Developer Service Pack 2 added a new document “VCSIntegrationDevGuide.pdf” into the \Developer\doc\guides folder titled “webMethods Version Control System Integration Developer’s Guide”.