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LOOKING AHEAD TO NOTES 8
An SOA approach to implement standard source code control systems with a Lotus Notes development environment
By Craig Schumann
The demands of IT governance require your development teams to track changes to all of your applications regardless of what platform they run on. As organizations move towards portal-based applications developed across multiple environments, they face the challenge of gathering data from different change histories in a timely manner.
Regulatory pressures from legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), as well as industry and corporate compliance rules, require accountability and an audit trail of all application modifications. These challenges call for a unified change history solution.
Source code control: Lotus Notes and source control systems
The nature of the Lotus Notes development environment makes it a poor fit with traditional source control systems because you can only work at the database level, leaving the details of changes to individual elements untraceable.
To maintain an audit trail, you would have to check-in a database every time you change an element. Obviously, this is an impractical solution, and most developers forced to work in such an environment use these source control systems to check-in milestone versions of their applications.
With the release of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8, a new type of application will be available: composite applications. Composite Applications are defined as a collection of elements and several stand-alone applications. These applications may even be written in different languages across many platforms.
To be able to take advantage of composite applications, they too must comply with your organization's best practices policies, and they must also adhere to any regulatory frameworks imposed upon your industry. This means that none of the components of the composite application can ignore the rigor of compliance that the other components of the application fall under.
The source control systems that keep a change history for the various platforms thus need to be integrated, otherwise the work involved to produce change reports for a composite application probably won't justify the cost of the application itself.
Looking at it from an SOA perspective
So, if creating a unified change history for all applications regardless of platform, language, or source control system is necessary for most organizations, how can it be achieved? There are several ways to make this happen. Some possibilities are:
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