SOA Suite 12c: Best practices for project structure and deployment by Maarten Smeets

Efficient usage of version control has specific requirements to allow identification of versions and synchronous development on different branches. Design time you will want to have your Service Bus projects in a single application in order to allow usage of shared objects. At deploy-time or when creating a release, you want to group SCA composites together with Service Bus projects. How do you combine these different requirements?

In this article I’ll describe several practices and considerations which can help you structuring your version control and artifact repository. The main challenge is finding a workable balance between the amount/complexity your deployment scripts and developer productivity / focus on business value. A lot of scripts (large investment) can make it easy for developers on the short term, however those scripts can easily become a burden.

If you are just looking for some good practices to structure your version control and artifact repository, look at the list below. If however you want to know why I think certain things are good and bad practice, read on.

Development

Use a per technology structure

SCA composites can use customizable MDS directories (you can update the path in adf-config.xml and even use variables. See here for example). In order to use shared objects in your Service Bus project however, they should be part of the same application (in order to avoid compilation errors in JDeveloper). The application poms for the Service Bus and SCA composites use the Maven module structure to refer to their projects. This means the application should be able to find the projects. When creating a new application with a new project for SCA composites and Service Bus, the application has the projects as sub-directories. SCA composites and Service Bus projects require separate applications. Thus there are several reasons why you would want to group projects per technology. This makes development more easy, avoids the dirty fixes needed for a custom directory structure and is more in line with the default structure provides when creating a new project.

Version control structure

A version control system (VCS) should allow you to identify different versions. The versions of the software also live in the artifact repository. If you want to create a fix on a specific version of the software, it is usual to create a tag from that version, branch the tag and fix it there since the trunk might have evolved further and sometimes contains changes you do not want yet. Read the complete article here.

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