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Image provisioning tool

Mentor: Geoffroy Couprie
Second mentor:
Level: Intermediate
Invited students: Nahuel Garbezza
Students interested: Nahuel Garbezza

Description

A lot of developers keep multiple images around for development, and a good practice is to start from a fresh image for each new project. Oddly, this process is not yet included in the common developer tools, so we rely on custom scripts (in the best case) or lots of drags and drops (in the worst case) to manage our development environment. We need a tool to simplify the image management and keep track of all our projects.

The goal of this project is to build a tool to could automatically create new projects from fresh images(ex: Core, Development) and load needed tools and classes (ex: Seaside), and manage those projects (list, delete, etc). This tool could also be used to deploy development code to testing and staging images, and build the production image.

Technical Details

The image provisioning tool would need a simple interface to manage the different projects, and be able to launch a new environment and load code in it. We already have Metacello, a configuration and dependency tracking tool, which can be used to get all the needed packets to create a new image.

Benefits to the Student

The student would learn a lot about package management and software configuration management, and may be able to build a complete development workflow.

Benefits to the Community

The Smalltalk community will gain a useful tool to streamline their development process and gain time in research and development.




Updated: 18.3.2012