News

LogicLibrary, Merant in deal -- SCM meets component management

• By Rich Seeley
• September 15, 2003

LogicLibrary Inc., a Pittsburgh-based asset management tools vendor, this week announced a technology partnership with Merant Inc., a Hillsboro, Ore.-based SCM vendor A new Logidex AnySource Asset Adapter will allow developers working with both companies' tools to integrate software development assets (SDAs) from Merant's PVCS Version Manager into Logidex.

Asked to explain how the two tools will work together, Brent Carlson, co-founder and vice president of technology at LogicLibrary, said, "If you think about what a version control library like PVCS provides, it provides a place for you to store multiple versions of individual source files. That's what organizations typically use, and that allows them to build configuration activities around those versions.

"We'll be able to more easily extract information -- meta data about those elements of the assets, source code elements, executable elements of the asset -- compose them and feed them up into Logidex so that they become searchable and trackable," continued Carlson. "That then allows us to merge information from document management tools that may be used for requirements tracking, or from custom tools where I may have automated test suites that are related to these particular components that have been built and are being persisted in a PVCS repository. It ties them all together and makes them easily discoverable with Logidex."

Carlson used a Web services example to show how the tools will work together to help a Web services developer provide the necessary information to others who may want to use the Web service.

"Let's say I'm building out a new Web service and I'm storing all the source code, XML schemas and the WSDL file in my PVCS repository," he explained. "I'm going to go through the typical development cycle. I'm going to use whatever my development tool of choice is and, eventually, I'm going to go through unit testing and get to the point where I'm ready for promotion and want other people to see this particular component.

"Typically, you're going to use your repository's capabilities to establish a label over all the files that make up this Web service," he added. "That label can then be used by our automation integration module that works with PVCS to feed the information about the asset along with other information into Logidex and make it discoverable by people that may want to use that Web service."