Repository/Build Management Question

[Eric Adamson]

I'm trying to incorporate Ant and Subversion into a project I'm working on, and have run into an issue regarding source code organization. It is not a J2EE project, but it does have components spread across three tiers. Each tier has some exclusive components, but some -- a data transfer object, and a few utility classes -- will be used in all tiers.

Could anyone suggest an effective way to organize my repository, and how to manage my builds? My thought is to have the repository be a composite whose artifacts/structure support all three tiers. Each tier would have it's own working set and build area, and its own build.xml to checkout the appropriate files and build them.

As a bonus for those who would like a more challenging question, the client & midtier components are to be built with JDK5 -- the server component is to be built using JDK1.4. Any recommendations, caveats, horror-stories? (I'm using XStream to serialize and pass the data transfer object between tiers.)

TIA,

Eric Adamson
Lansing, Michigan

[hanofee]

Probably I'm wrong, but I don't see why you can't organize your repository because it's not J2EE ? SVN allow to organize anything you like. After, the challenge is more on configuring Ant to adapt the repository structure, but it's a one-off job.
Anyway, try to google CI tool. CruiseControl or Bamboo (never use it, but people said it's better, though unlike CC it's not free). It will help to take all the code from repository (thanks to SVN), build (thanks to Ant) deploy, run the test, generate reports etc. It's not easy for the first time user, but it greatly helps and saves a valuable time.
About different JDK, I never tried it, but I guess you can configure your project (Ant) to use different JAR (I did it with 2 different version of framework like Axis, but never have a requirement to use different JDK).