I work in a small shop where we have a LOT of legacy Cobol code and where a methology has been adopted to allow us to minimize forking and branching as much as possible.
For a given release we have three levels:
- CORE - bottom layer, this code is common to all releases
- GROUP - optional code common to several customers.
- CUSTOMER - optional code specific for a single customer.
When a program is needed, it is first searched for in CUSTOMER, then in GROUP and finally in CORE. A given application for us invokes many programs which all are looked for in this sequence (think exe files and PATH under Windows).
We also have Java programs interacting with this legacy code, and as the core-group-customer lookup mehchanism does not lend it self easily to Java it has tended to grow in a CVS branch for each customer, requiring much too much maintainance. The Java part and the backend part tend to be developed in parallel.
I have been assigned to figure out a way to make the two worlds meet.
Essentially we want a Java enviornment which allows us to have a single code base with sources for each release, where we easily can select a group and a customer and work with the application as it goes for that customer, and then easily switch to another codeset and THAT customer.
I was thinking of perhaps a scenario with an Eclipse project for each core, customer, and group and then use Project Sets to select those we need for a given scenario. The problem I cannot get my head about, is how we would create robust code in the CORE projects which will work regardless of which group and customer is selected. A Factory class which knows which sub class of a passed Class object to invoke instead of each and every new?
Others must have had similar code base management problems. Anybody with experiences to share?
EDIT: The conclusion to this problem above has been that CVS needs