Version Control Systems (VCS) are the cornerstone of any good change management strategy and most organizations require that a VCS be used on all software projects. Traditional VCS (such as ClearCase, CVS, SubVersion, and Visual Source Safe) are good at supporting file-based, centralized application development. However, these systems have not kept up with today’s technology. All of them provide almost no support for more sophisticated distributed application platforms like webMethods.

Software AG’s webMethods Suite is a powerful toolset providing a framework for developing complex, distributed, scalable solutions in a short period of time. The webMethods Suite can do this because it is actually multiple independent solutions that are tightly integrated together…and because each of those independent solutions provides some form of “configurable” program logic.
For example, webMethods processing of a Purchase Order might start in Integration Server which passes processing to Trading Networks. Trading Networks may pass control to a Process Model, which in turn invokes multiple Integration Servers via the Broker Server. The end-to-end solution could also be monitored and analyzed by Optimize. Most of the program logic for this type of complex solution is often “configured” in webMethods without writing a single line of source code.

Using traditional VCS on webMethods is a major challenge because traditional VCS were not designed to deal with distributed logic stored across relational databases, API-accessible proprietary repositories, and inter-related file repositories. Each application within the webMethods product suite was developed independently with different data access requirements. As a result, they also each leverage one or more strategies for storing and updating program logic. In order to effectively track changes in webMethods program logic, VCS systems need to be able to track changes where the program logic is updated and, when necessary, understand how one change relates to changes elsewhere in the program logic. Traditional systems like ClearCase, CVS, SubVersion, and VSS simply cannot access and track changes in most of that program logic. This gap in your processes is currently lowering the quality of your webMethods solutions while costing your webMethods projects time, money, and effort.

(Note:  TEAM Server can store it’s assets in SubVersion, ClearCase, CVS, VSS, and more.  As a result, it is likely already compliant with your organization’s approved version control solution.)