Tag: SCM

Rational Team Concert Shell integration for Windows Explorer

PhilippeLeave a comment

So many times in my Jazz Jumpstart team member life I got this question from our customers:

“Do you provide an integration of your Source Control Manager with Windows Explorer like Subversion does with TortoiseSVN?”

Each time, I had to reply: “No, for now. Please subscribe to the Story 43272: Windows Explorer client for simple SCM operations (like ClearCase, Tortoise, etc.) for non-eclipse users…”

Today we can say that RTC 4.0 will (certainly) provide a shell integration for Windows Explorer!

I checked the story: it has been created in February 2008 (yes, great feature might take some time, sometimes!) by one of my first customers (and friend!) Roman Smirak and it has so far 103 subscribers…

Please check-out the great article from Sreerupa Sen: Introducing the Rational Team Concert Shell integration for Windows Explorer and you will learn what you can expect from this great feature.

Roman! They built it!!! 😉

How to manage JARs in Rational Team Concert

PhilippeLeave a comment

One of the key aspects of a Source Control Manager (SCM) system is to give the possibility to retrieve and restore a previous state of our application. For example, we must be able to rebuild our application to reproduce, understand and fix an issue met by a customer using 2 year old version of the application.

Unfortunately, having access to our 2 years old source code might not be enough to rebuild the application. Actually, today most applications reference frameworks coming from a tiered organization like Open Source projects or subcontractors. These frameworks are generally organized in a set of libraries, for example JAR files, containing the binary code and, sometimes, the source code or the API documentation.

Of course, each of these frameworks has its own life cycle. So, if we don’t recall at some point which version of the framework we were using when we built our application 2 years ago, it might be hard to rebuild the application 2 years later.

Manage framework versions

To fix such issue we have 2 main options:

  • Store the framework version number in our own code with the hope that each time we will have to rebuild the application, all framework versions we used to build our application will be available and accessible either on the Internet or the Intranet.
  • Store and baseline the framework library files with our source code into the SCM to be sure to retrieve those resources when it will be required.Read More »