We have to maintain few applications (on Cold Fusion / Sun Solaris (or NT) & Informix) which are at the remote site. From our office, we have the network connectivity to the client's place. We wish that we are able to access the development environment at the remote site itself for maintaing this application so that we do not maintain source code at 2 locations. And, at our end here in our office, we just want to load the Cold Fusion clients on the machine.
My question is: a. Is this possible?
b. What all should be loaded here at the client's machine (in our office) and what all servers / other system software should be loaded at the remote site?
c. Is there something special that we need to take care of while accessing the development environment at remote site?
d. Is there any special Configuration Management tool? Or can we use Visual Source safe as the Configuration Management tool?
e. What all types of files exist as the source code in Cold Fusion? like in Microsoft Visual Basic we have Forms, Modules, Class Modules and so on... Please help
You should not need to do anything if you have direct network connectivity to the remote server. You can just open the files over a mapped network drive as you would any other remote file. However, as with any production environment, it is a bad idea to edit live files on a live server.
In other words, you WANT two copies of the code. Or rather, you should be using some sort of source code control (yes you can use SourceSafe or any other CVS system). You can install a single-user copy of CF server on your local development workstations, develop and test there, and when you are ready you push the tested code to the production server.
ColdFusion files all end in the extension .cfm (except with the new CFC's in CFMX, which end with .cfc). These are the files you will edit and deploy. You do not compile CF code like you do Visual Basic code.