Chapter 13: Development Environment Best Practices

Overview

Congratulations! Your boss just gave you the go-ahead to build a new J2EE application using WebLogic Server. Months of meetings and proposals are behind you, and it s time to get started on the actual development. It s going to be a fairly large application, requiring a development team of 10 to 15 people. You have a reasonable budget for development hardware and software and the full confidence of management and the other team members . Now what?

It s not enough to know the technology inside and out. You must structure your development effort in a way that improves productivity and reduces the risk of failure. This chapter continues the discussion of development- related best practices with recommendations in the following key areas:

• Defining required development-environment hardware and software

• Installing WebLogic Server in the development environment

• Configuring the working directory structure

• Establishing a build process

• Choosing development tools

• Creating a unit-testing infrastructure

Obviously, there is a lot more to J2EE development than these six items. You need to choose a development methodology and team structure, create realistic plans with measurable deliverables, create useful design artifacts and specifications, and embrace all of the other development-phase best practices known in the industry. This book is not intended to cover best practices in these general areas, however. Good references for information on these topics include Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell (Microsoft Press, 1996) and the classic text, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck (Addison-Wesley, 1999).