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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Mon, 18 Jul 2005

Develop in a sandbox

First, the term sandbox isn't referring to a cat's litterbox! It's a small contained play area on your own machine. Your sandbox is your own playpen. Of course, it's possible your sandbox does double duty, but that's another topic... ;)

Developing in a sandbox has several implications. You can build, run, and test the product locally.

James Duncan Davidson talks about how he builds in a sandbox. I like his motivation for automation as well as the descriptions of how they automate. The description of how easy it was replace a workstation when it died was nice. :) That's a real test of your automation practices!

Here's the conclusion:

Just because it looks wild and wooly out here in Rails land doesn't mean that you can't exert an iron hand when it comes to development, packaging, and deployment. And if you think those properties are unique to J2EE applications, here's a little secret: When the people at Sun sat down to embed those terms into the specifications and books, they didn't invent them or the concepts they stand for. They simply codified them in a way which puts them in front of everyone's face. But, regardless of whether they are codified or not, to get to a true level of managing the develop-test-deploy cycle using any framework takes a bit of human effort in set up and maintenance. And it takes some script-fu. But it's worth it. Every little bit.

posted at: 07:39 | path: | permanent link to this entry