We in the product division are interested to know if people are using the Deployment Wizard in Developer Studio. This feature is used to deploy a local project to the web as a self-service application. It is also used to move files to Reporting Servers and the web tier. In doing this, it also modifies HTML files to have the context roots of the destination environment.

We appreciate your taking the time to respond to this.

Thank you.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

We don't use Projects because we use MRE and as far as I know the Deployment Wizard does not work with MRE...

All of our web reports are self-service. Been using Web-FOCUS since 4.x. Have never used the deployment wizard. Never develop anything on the localhost either.

I do use deploy - at least since the horrendous experience with 7703 HF5 in Dev Studio / WF Client. (WF couldn't find a file in the same directory as the working directory, no way to create frames in the HTML editor, etc.). Big improvement after applying HF6 to Dev Studio - not applied to Client yet - so I use deploy to carefully move files from PC to server in a single-tier environment.

We develop everything in projects now and use deploy all the time to move into production. Please don't get rid of it.

What would you think if we replaced the Deploy Facility with an intelligent Copy/Paste whereby the user would select files to copy and then paste them to another location and behind the scenes all references to external files would be modified for the new location. For example, copying from Data Servers to Repository would update all references to be Repository paths.

David

Would that be able to differentiate between separate Client/Server Architecture?

If so, I think it would would make deployment easier.

I asked our Admin for her opinion;

"That would also be great, however, the part I like about the Deploy feature is the fact that it won't update files that are the same 'age' or newer on the 'copy to' location and everything that 'belongs' in a project is there."


As a developer, I like the Deploy feature. I don't have to mess with copy and pasting into folders. I like the deploy scenario, it is easy and everything I need is one place. I say if it isn't broke don't fix it.

Just my two cents.

Am I correct in saying that none of the behaviour described here works for MRE?

We use deploy frequently, but ONLY for files that were created with Dev Studio. We have other files (mostly javascript and some of our HTML files) that deploy would break because the path rewriting logic is rewriting correct code into incorrect code.

Furthermore, we find that deploy is frequently rather stupid about which files to deploy as it only seems to look at file modification dates. We've had cases where deploy didn't completely copy a file over, and it wouldn't send the file again as it considered it unchanged. We had to hand-copy such files over to get a working project in production again. Ouch.

Another issue is that it always deploys ALL changes in the files in its list. Often such changes include unrelated changes for other features and those sometimes break our projects in production. There is no control over which files deploy will release and the only way of checking what it will do is to pray and deploy blindly - eeps!

Personally I'd much rather see integration with a decent source control management tool (Hg!). That would allow us to "deploy" changesets (or patches). As a bonus, such tools are a lot smarter about whether a file was changed or not.
Easy for us to say as we don't need our URL's rewritten (and would rather see that "feature" removed as it more often works against us than for us).

Will Deploy handle things like managing versions for Change Management?

An example of this would be that when a change-set is deployed to production and found to be causing issues, can the change-set be demoted on production to get back to the original code?

I know that Deploy is supposed to integrate with SCM tools, but there is little documentation on working with the open source tools like SVN and Hg! Also, we have several users who don't use the full install of DevStudio which renders Deploy inoperable. It would be even better to have SCM integration outside of Deploy or maybe even replacing some of the Deploy functionality.

I am looking forward to the Change Management lab at Summit to explain some of this.

The Intelligent Copy would just update references to external files to be valid for the target folder. If you copied to the Reporting Server, it would make the references for that area, and if you copied to Repository, it would update the references for that area.

Hope that clarifies.