Tech Blog

Today we changed our branching style of the Floorplanner code base. I had it in my head for a long time, but I actually changed it until I read this post.

In the old setup we used the style that is called Branch per Release.

Branch per Release
Every release is a new branch; common changes are merged between the releases. Branches are killed off only when the releases are no longer supported.

In the beginning we had a lot of custom projects running on one Floorplanner code base. We wanted to improve the Floorplanner itself but changes in the source could cripple the custom projects. That’s why we created a branch for every custom project. This way we had a stable codebase for every custom project and for the Floorplanner itself. When we fixed a global bug we merged the fix to all the branches.

Nowadays we don’t have any custom projects running on the same code base anymore. We do have one branch (not the trunk) in which we were working on the latest release. So today I decided that this had to change. We merged the branch to the trunk and new features (tasks) will be developed in a branch of their own. When the feature is done it will be merged back to the trunk.

This is called the Branch per Task.

Branch per Task
Every development task is a new, independent branch. Tasks are merged into the permanent main branch as they are completed.

If you want to know more about branching, read Jeff’s post Software Branching and Parallel Universes.

Today I discovered that it’s very easy to raise a value by one (or any other number) when you’re using a MySQL database. This is all:

UPDATE tablename SET value = value + 1 WHERE ...

For the project V-Factor we integrated a couple of Floorplanner widgets into their site. We used iframes to embed the widgets into the pages. You can click on the link next to the widget to get a better view of the floor plan. A new window with a full screen Floorplanner is opened.

On Firefox and Safari everything runned like a charm, but when we tested it on Internet Explorer it sometimes crashed. And it crashed hard, IE shuts down completly (after it alerts that Flash9d.ocx is to blame). Stange that the Flash Player can crash IE…

Anyway, we still havn’t figured out the exact cause. We have two theories. The first is that IE doesn’t like embeded Flash content via an iframe in multiple windows. The other theory is that IE doesn’t like different ways of embedding Flash content in multiple windows. The page contains more Flash content then our widgets. It has a banner and some animated buttons. We use SWFObject but the banner and the buttons are using the old skool object-tag.

Phew… we kind of solved the problem by opening the full screen floor plan in the same window as the widgets. That way we don’t have multiple windows open with flash content. But it’s not a real solution of course.

To be continued…