How to Manage project in this scenario

Question

Hi All,

I am working on a web application which has got good amount of static or pre-login pages. These pages can have some simple forms as well where we would like to capture the visitor's details. Post login, I have got my main application.

I am confused about the development and deployment architecture of my application. Post login part of my application has a release cycle of 1-2 months while pre-login pages are to be updated on a weekly basis. It is difficult to make a release of pre-login pages as the overall war also contains post-login application & which sometimes is not release ready.

Currently, I have got both these parts bundled in the single war project.

Please help me by letting me know the best practices whereby I can achieve following:

1. Manage the releases of these two parts independently.
2. I am using Maven. So is there a way I can share the resources, such as CSS, images etc between these two parts.
3. Header and footer of my application is going to be same on pre-login & post-login pages.

I was thinking of deploying these apps as two war files in my tomcat container. But then how will I manage the common resources like Css, images etc.

Rgds Vijay

Answer 1

I think that you should look into some kind of branching strategy in your source control system. If you create a separate branch for your post-login pages you can then deploy the pre-login pages together with the latest stable release of the post-login pages. This also lets you do bugfixing to the post-login pages based on the latest stable release, even though you have continued developing the post-login pages with new functionality which is yet unstable.

Wikipedia has an introduction to branching as well as to source control in general.