[xmlWiki-developers] A running system is needed...

[Jim K. <ka...@ie...>]

    As food for thought before we begin our Thursday meeting, I like to
offer a suggestion that we quickly get a minimally functional system running
within Tomcat as soon as possible.  We are suffering from being
geographically separated, and as a result there is virtually no integration
to speak of.  Without a running system, it's harder for people to see just
how their work fits in at a functional level.  Furthermore, our customer
cannot see the fruits of our efforts and help direct us.  From my own
experience, I'm reassured that my test cases work, but I'd really like a
real server to run them on as well.
    In order to get a real server up and running, we do need some basic
means of accepting connections and providing a response.  I'm talking about
complexity along the lines of Deb's and my spike a few weeks back (~50
lines).  This would initially let us put the create and save stories online.
As other stories wrap up, they can be tied into a real system.  I'd view
this effort as sort of a 'pre-browse' story that just supports early
development and will be thrown away once the true Browse supplants it.  If
we don't do something we face a real integration problem coming up on our
first release.  Not only will it be completely counter to XP to delay
integration for so long, it will be hard to do period.
    I'd therefore like to offer to release a couple of classes into CVS,
along with a 'deploy' target that will install the built tree under Tomcat
and allow us to really test within the context we'll eventually be running.
BTW, getting all of this stuff under Linux is not a priority since you can
all install and use Tomcat yourselves.  For everyone else's part, we need to
dig in and get CVS going across the board.  That goes for all of the other
tools as well.  I don't think there have been any check-ins from other
groups, even from those who have CVS up and running.  Don't be bashful about
checking something in that's not perfect.  It's the only way for everyone to
learn what all the groups are doing.

See you all in 8 minutes.

Regards,
Jim