Practical Perforce

Chapter 11. Staging Streams and Web Content

In Chapter 9 you saw how Perforce is used to keep track of software that is released two or three times a year. Web-hosted software—what we’re calling web content —demands that we manage codelines in an entirely different way. For one thing, we don’t have to support multiple versions. The version on our web sites is the version our customers use; we don’t have to keep old versions around for patches and point-releases. But unlike shrinkwrapped software, which may be released several times a year, web content may have to be released several times a week. Given the complexity of the software that goes into a web site, we certainly don’t want to be saddled with creating and managing a release codeline for each new version.

In this chapter we’ll look at using staging streams to manage frequent releases. (Stream is another word for codeline. See Chapter 7) Using web content as the context, we’ll see how change moves from stage to stage, how development enters the staging pipeline, and how bug fixes are treated.

Staging Web Content

Purveyors of large and rapidly evolving web sites have learned they can reduce complexity by deploying content in stages. Each stage traps problems before subsequent stages are affected. For example, the first stage might be to test whether everything can be compiled together and started up, if nothing else. The second stage might be to evaluate appearance, and the third might be to validate behavior ...