Software Development Standards & Tools
The IRT Development group provides tools, development infrastructure, and technical expertise to help the Medical School maintain its technological edge in the development of software for research, education, and patient care. We focus on open standards, formalized development processes and best practices to ensure quality and reliability for innovative software applications.
Developers within the Medical School are encouraged to work with the IRT Development group and leverage its skills and infrastructure.
Development Infrastructure
- Majordomo mailing list (irt-dev@med.stanford.edu) to discuss common development problems and solutions with IRT colleagues
- SVN source code repositories for development projects
- Web based defect/issue tracking
- Java/Tomcat based staging environment for testing and integration
- Development instance of an Oracle database
How do you use IRT Development Support tools?
Setting up a project under source control
Email a list of
SuNet IDs, the project name and description, sponsoring group or division
within the school, and project lead to
.
SVN access is granted by request.
To
learn more about SVN and source control management visit http://subversion.tigris.org/.
Setting up a bug/issue tracking system
Projects are
encouraged to take advanage of our bug/isssue tracking system which
allows developers and project managers to maintain a central repository
for project issues. To set up a project in the bug tracking system,
first make sure each memeber of the team has an account in the system.
New accounts can be created by visiting http://irt-dev-bugs.stanford.edu/bugzilla/createaccount.cgi.
Then request the creation of a project by sending an email to
.
In the email include the project name, description, and the name, description
and owner (the email address) of each component of the project. To access
the bug database go to: http://irt-dev-bugs.stanford.edu/bugzilla/.
For more information about the defect tracking system, visit http://www.bugzilla.org/.
Hosting Java Web Applications
IRT can help you host a Java
web-application application for testing and integration. The hosting
environment provides support for WebAuth authentication, automated building
from the SVN repository and access to the IRT Oracle development database
server. Email
to find out more about
how to deploy your applications. Database schemas hosted in the IRT
development database connect using the connection URL: jdbc:oracle:thin:@irt-dev-db.stanford.edu:1521:dev.
The driver name is oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver. Oracle's
JDBC driver is available at Oracle's web site or in the sample project
in the IRT SVN repository. IRT Applications must use JNDI to configure
their access to the database. Read more about how
to configure Tomcat with JNDI DataSources.
Code libraries and software components
IRT Development is
actively identifying and developing reusable software components to
accelerate the development process. Links to source code libraries and
documentation will be available at this site.
Tools Recommended by IRT for Java Development
IRT has standardized on a Java/J2EE platform. While this platform defines a basic level of services for web development, security, database access and transactions, and dynamic page generation, there is plenty of room for developers to select specialized frameworks. We use the following tools for web application development:
-
Eclipse - A universal tool platform for Java software development. Eclipse provides support for Java development, revision control integration, automated testing, database inspection, XML and JSP authoring, and build management. (download)
-
Ant - A Java based build tool. Ant provides a sophisticated tool for packaging web applications for deployment into a Servlet container. Ant is quickly becoming the industry standard for Java build management. By using Ant, the IRT infrastructure may be able to automate the deployment of your software into the staging environment.
-
Tomcat - A Java Servlet Container supporting JSP, Taglibs, Servlets and JNDI. Tomcat is Sun's reference implementation of a Java Servlet container providing a wide range of management and configuration options while adhering to the specification.
Leveraging the IRT Data Center
The IRT Development group works with IRT Operations to define standards and establish best practices for deploying Java based applications into the IRT managed server environment. Java Web Applications running under Java 1.4.x and Tomcat 5.0.27 Servlet engine using Oracle 9i will be supported both in the staging and hosted environment.
Wikis hosted by IRT