A practical experience in workspace separation for developing multiple storefronts on customized commerce engines

In this paper, we describe our experience in separating workspaces, using the IBM VisualAge for Java development tool, for multiple web storefronts development for several major IBM public and private commerce sites. There was a need to create multiple workspaces since different storefronts may be developed at the same time. In addition, we wanted to keep the completed software packages for compatibility checking. Instead of tuning the current program setting to a desired mixed-version environment for each project, we generate a dedicated workspace by applying dependency analysis. New icons are created to conveniently invoke the development tool under different software packages and workspaces. We also present a systematic approach to facilitate the generation of a plan with instruction steps to produce new workspaces for their dedicated and required resources. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.