[opencms-dev] Development environment setup

[Fabian Panthen]

Hello together,

this topic seems to pop up a lot, but so far i have not found a 
satisfactory answer in the archives so here is my attempt at tyring to 
find some true best practice.

We are currently developing several OpenCms projects and while very 
impressed with most of its features the question of how to set up a 
development environment hat works well for several developers working 
concurrently on the same project keeps bugging us despite several attempts.

WebDav via eclipse plugin or mounted drives has been fairly good but 
only when there was no more than one developer.
Writing files to VFS via WebDav mounted drives has been equally as buggy.
So currently we are looking at each of us having a local installation 
where they can deploy and test in any way they like and sharing that via 
svn.

The idea is to then have something like ant or maven do

   1) check out the current sources on the build server
   2) build modules including manifests
   3) import the newly built modules via CmsShell

We are using versions 7.0.x to 7.5

Any input on what has been working best for you so far, which paths are 
not worth pursuing due to bugs, etc or maybe even ideas we havent even 
thought of yet would be very much appreciated.
Is there something like a community bets practice? It seems as if 
alkacon is leaning towards maven. Again i would just love to get some 
feedback on what has been working for you guys here as there seem to be 
numerous ways to do this but none of them seems dead safe. Some involve 
using deprecated software, etc.

cheers

Fabian