Using ANT to source control the code in cloud (NetSuite)

Question

For our ERP platform (NetSuite) customization code rests in the Cloud. We (different entities) can directly make changes to it but there is no source control available to us in cloud.

It is possible to fetch the code files through a SOAP API.

I was wondering if it is possible to get the files through API using Apache ANT and shove into TFS/SVN?

I am not familiar with Apache ANT so I do not know the capabilities of ANT that if it can fetch any info through API?

(you can also suggest any better approach to source control the code in cloud)

Answer 1

Ant has several third party task plugins for version control tasks. Plus, you can always use the <exec/> task to build an equivalent command line checkout. However, I do not recommend people use Ant to fetch versions from your version control system. This ends up being a chicken v. egg issue.

Your build script is in version control. You need to fetch it in order to run Ant against it. If you're fetching your build script, why not the rest of your project?

Once you checked out your project in a working directory, and want to do an update, why not let Ant do the update? Because your build script is also version controlled. Doing an update and build at the same time could have you running the wrong version of your build script against your build.

Maybe you're going to check in the files that were modified by the build system. Not a good idea. You should rarely, if ever, check in files you built. If you need them, rebuild them. Built files are usually binary in nature, and can vary greatly from one version to another. In most cases, your version control system will be checking in completely new versions of the built object instead of using diff format. That takes up a lot of room in your version control system.

Even worse, you can't diff the built objects, so you can't really verify their content or trace their history. And, built objects tend to age very quickly. Something built last month is already obsolete. With in a year, the vast majority of the information in your version control system will be nothing but obsolete binary, and very little stored is useful code.

Besides, your version control system has nothing to do with building your files. Imagine between Release 2.1 and Release 2.2, you change version control systems from Subversion to Git. Now, a bug in Release 2.1 needs to be fixed, and you need to create Release 2.1.1. Your checkout code in your build scripts will no longer work.

If you're using NetSuite IDE, you're using Eclipse, and Eclipse is great at handling version control. Eclipse can handle both SVN and TFS (although I don't know why anyone would use TFS). Eclipse tracks file changes quite nicely. In fact, Eclipse gets confused when you change files behind its back (like you do an update outside of Eclipse).

Let Eclipse handle your version control issues. It presents a common interface to almost all version control systems. This way, your build system can handle the builds.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what other requirements you might have, but if you use the NetSuite IDE (Eclipse + bundled plugin), you can use it to pull and push files to NetSuite. And then you can use any source control system you like (we use SVN, for instance).