SNESCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Time: Monday, March 31st, 2014.

Place: Lund Institute of Technology, Building E, room E:4130 aka LUCAS-room

Title: Variant handling for web applications

Hosts: Henrik Gyllensvärd, LTH

Native web applications are on the rise along with new mobile platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch and Tizen. The applications are based on the HTML5 standard and thus the code base should be very similar between the platforms. We are investigating the possibility of making developing easier; by combining this to one code base with small deviations for each platform, instead of having one separate code base per platform.

One approach we discussed most for the developers is to “pretend” that there is one code base and keep each application updated in the background. So all the changes done in for example the Firefox OS application will be reflected in both in the Ubuntu Touch and Tizen application.

The following questions will guide the discussions:

• There is a need to enable the developer to write code for a specific platforms application without editing the others. How can the relations and dependencies between applications be managed?
• This approach does in principle work with duplicated information. What measure can and should be taken to keep the information between the platforms up to date at all times?
• Is it feasible for a project to store each platforms application in separate repositories?
• Does it really make any difference that it is variants for different platforms/environments and not for different customers?