Viewtier Devenv

Viewtier Devenv is a simple yet powerful command-line utility that allows software development teams and software developers validate and set their common shell and build development environment. Devenv complements our flagship product, an automated software build server Parabuild.

Common Development Environment is a set of directories, files, and shell variables that each member of an engineering team must have access to. Established common development environment allows reproducible builds, which are key to the successful delivery of a software project.

Key Devenv Features

Download Viewtier Devenv now or read on problems that Devenv helps to solve.

Devenv Helps To Solve Development Environment Problems

Viewtier Devenv helps to solve the most irritating and time-consuming problems of the day-to-day software engineering process:

"It Works On My Computer" Problem

"It works on my computer." You have heard it many times, and, maybe, have said it yourself once. Even though it's easy to say, it signals one of the most critical problems in day-to-day software engineering process - the inability to reproduce results delivered by a member of a team, or, even worse, by the whole team. Consequences of the problem are wide and range from hours spent by a developer fighting with local copy of the code that does not want to build to the team being stuck with a broken source line.

Problem of Variety of Development Tools

It's well known and accepted that a software engineer is most productive while using various development tools, like editors and IDEs, of his or her choice. Some engineers use Emacs or vi; others an IDE-like JBuilder or Eclipse, etc.

In addition, even though development infrastructure tools such as compilers or shells are installed at different locations on developers' desktops, they still have to be available when building a software product.

There's got to be a way for this variety of tools and their locations to be applied to the same product.

Problem of Variety of Target Platforms

In addition to a variety of development tools, it is common when a product is developed under different hardware and operation systems that add complexities to reproducible product builds. A small list of such possibilities would include Windows, Linux, Sun OS, HPUX, CYGWIN, bash and Korn shell.

Problem of the Newly Incorporated Team Members

When a new member joins any team, even a fairly small one, too often he or she has to encounter issues with the software development infrastructure (or, better said, lack of it). A freshly checked out source line might not build if the building process cannot find a compiler, or if required libraries or database clients are missing, or if paths are set wrong or aren't set at all, and so on. All this results in counterproductive loss of time and frustration both from the newly incorporated member of the team and from the team itself.

The Solution

In order to become efficient and productive, a software engineering team must answer the following questions:

The answer is right in front of you - you need a simple and easy way to set and manage the development environment that would be common and equivalent for each member of the team, one that would also allow the process of building, testing and deploying the project disregard used tools, platforms, and locations.

Viewtier Devenv, is a simple, efficient, and multi-platform command-line tool that helps solve the afore-mentioned problems.

Devenv will report the environment problems by itself, if there are any present. If the environment is valid, it will set the required shell variables, paths, and building parameters to valid values required by your building and testing scripts.

Devenv Is Easy to Use

Devenv is very easy to use - a developer just goes to a source line tree root directory and types in:

          
    . setenv.sh

    or

    setenv.bat

The development environment will be automatically validated and set in accordance with a definition stored in the easily readable and modifiable xml file. Please check the documentation page for further information.

Devenv is Multi-platform

Viewtier Devenv is written in Java and is shipped with setenv shell scripts for Unix and Windows.

Devenv is Free

Viewtier Systems, Inc. offers Devenv free of charge.

Download Viewtier Devenv now.