ColdFusion in an Enterprise Environment - Part 4 - Putting SVN/ColdBox/Unit testing together

Now the real reason I choose these 3 products, is how they work together! They provide a great code development management process. Ever since I started ColdFusion development over 10 years ago, I've been wanting a way to get better management into my development lifecycle.

I've done many things over the years to make my development lifecylce better, but not perfect…. There has always been that unit separation in my websites. For example, developing a shopping cart I've always needed the rest of the website wrapped with it to code at all. Which usually required a lot of extra code to just code a shopping cart.

How the 3 come together.

1.) Not only does SVN provide source control, SVN also provides a way to manage your unit structure and website structure without copying and pasting the files. The use of externals give the ability to separate your code into "projects", and then use tags and externals to keep your "instances", or environments (dev,test,production), organized.

2.) ColdBox provides an application framework that can be organized in many ways based on the "conventions" / configurations. Therefore, providing local project environments organized in one way, and the instances of your application (many projects) be combined in one organization.

3.) MXUnit provides a way to unit test your code before you start integrating it into your web site. It gives a great framework for developing test cases and testing your model. It also has been integrated into coldbox to allow test cases to be developed against the handlers in coldbox. Some amazing work!

Please Note: This post is conjuction with a series of blog posts about my findings in setting up an enterprise development environment. Please view the rest of the posts at Coldfusion in an Enterprise Overview