Back to rumors of a SCM tool in 9.2x

Well I’m now back from basking in the sun (mid 40’s Centigrade) and snorkeling over the Red Sea reefs in warm to hot water – fun. For those of you that are divers, Sharm El Sheik has some wonderful diving spots and those a little less adventurous; snorkeling with hundreds of fish over the inner reef is just amazing.

Anyway, annual vacation over and it’s back to work and back to some more OpenInsight development rumors. The first of which is very exciting as OpenInsight Source Code Management (SCM) tools were requested at the recent EMEA RUG in London and I hear that the guys at Revelation have been working on that request over the last couple of weeks.

My spies tell me that the SCM is invoked by simply setting an environment setting. The editor apparently saves a version of the code every time a program is saved or compiled, but only saved if it is different than the prior version. The versions of the source code are stored in a new table, with an associated ‘control’ table. Groups of code can be associated with version numbers, and an entire version can be rolled out for deployment, or rolled back and made the live version of the software. There’s also seems to be a comparison tool that lets a developer examine differences between different versions of code.

This new OpenInsight feature continues in development, but it is looking very exciting and I hope that many of you will find it hugely useful. It is certainly something that I have constantly been asked for over the last few years and it is great to, yet again, see that Revelation are listening to their developer community and delivering tools that are beneficial, rather than just fun to create.

Watch out for more on the SCM and more rumors about the next OpenInsight release as and when I learn about them.