Source Control and CBE

You should use source-control tools to manage your configuration settings, any custom configuration objects, any custom code, any test plans, and any automated tests. Any source-control tool, such as CVS or Subversion, should allow you to track changes to any number of individual, text, or binary files and to reproduce a particular version of the Waveset application. This document refers to these tools generically as source control.

Some of these source-controlled files must be tailored for each environment. In particular, configuration objects contain values that often change for each environment. A particular Waveset resource object might point to one host machine in your Development environment, to another host machine in your Test environment, and to a third host machine in your Production environment.

Many customers use the Sun Identity Manager plug-ins for NetBeans and Eclipse to generate a tailored version of the Waveset application for each environment. The Identity Manager IDE plug-ins include a Configuration Build Environment (CBE). Some customers use older versions of the CBE that predate the Identity Manager IDE plug-in. A few customers use other tools and approaches, including proprietary or home-grown mechanisms. This document refers to these tools generically, and to the Role Manager IDE specifically, as CBE.

The Identity Manager IDE plug-in and older CBE versions parameterize configuration objects (and can parameterize code) by replacing environment-specific values with placeholder values. To generate an image of the Waveset application that is appropriate to each environment, these tools replace the placeholder values with configured values that are appropriate to each environment. If you manage the parameterized objects in source control, you can “build out” the same version of the Waveset application for each target environment using a process that is predictable and repeatable.