Simultaneous Document Development and Production

One major flaw I've found with many documentation packages is the fact that you cannot work on your source documents while you are building your documents. Let's take Web Works Publisher 2003 (WWP2003) for example. It's one of the better Help Application Tools (HATs) out there, and due to the early teething problems exhibited by its replacement (ePublisher 9.x), I'm still not ready to migrate from WWP2003 to its more recent replacement. For those of you that don't know, WWP2003 integrates with FrameMaker or (*gasp*) Microsoft Word. To use it, you define your output format (WebHelp, CHM, JavaHelp, etc...) and map all your source FrameMaker styles to your WWP2003 output styles.

When it's time to build your project, you simply press the build button in WWP2003, and it churns away for an inexorably long period of time while building your project. Unfortunately, while it is churning away, you can't continue to work in FrameMaker. That means lots of down-time while you are waiting for projects to build. If you have a number of projects to build, it can easily mean that you are stuck for possibly several days just building your projects. What's worse is because Quadralay wants to sell you additional applications, you can't tell WWP2003 to build several of your projects. You have to let it build one project, wait, then open another project and click Build, wait, then open another project and click Build, etc... This is an intolerable problem with many (most?) HATs out there. I draw attention to WWP2003 not because it is unique in this respect, but because it is the HAT I am currently using.

The problem with this approach is twofold: First, since it essentially locks FrameMaker, you can't continue your development work while it is building. This means that even if WWP2003 is building Project 1, you can't even work on Project 2 until it finishes building. Ack. Secondly, if you need to build multiple projects, you have to actively monitor the build process so that when it finishes building Project 1, you can manually open and start building Project 2. This sucks...but there is a way around it.

Virtualize your Build Environments

You can virtualize your build environment and free yourself from the tedium of waiting for your projects to build. If you haven't yet worked with virtualization, it sounds much more complex than it really is. Virtualization essentially allows you to run a "virtual" operating system in a window on your host operating system. This host operating system can be your development computer, or it can be hosted on another server or computer in your environment. Though the virtual operating system runs in a window on another operating system, it is for all intents and purposes another computer...only a virtual one, since it shares the hardware of an already existing computer. OK, it still sounds pretty complex if you haven't done it before...but trust me, it is pretty easy and your learning curve is likely to be more than a few minutes once you see how it all works.

When virtualizing your build environments, you'll need to make sure you do a few things right off the bat:

1) Mirror your directory structures
What is important here is that you mirror your documentation directory structures on your Virtual Machine. By this I mean that if you keep all your files for your projects in D:\Projects\Layouts and D:\Projects\Artwork...you'll want to create duplicate folders (even if empty) on your Virtual Machine.

2) Install your HAT software
Install your HAT software on the virtual machine. If you are using WWP2003, you'll need to install WebWorks Publisher Pro 2003 and FrameMaker. Depending on the licenses of your HAT software, you may have to shell out some money for this. If you need to justify the expense of this to management (who doesn't?), just figure out how much time it takes you to build each project and figure out how much time you'll be able to recapture per week, month, year, etc... by being able to work and build your output simultaneously. The RoI should be pretty low and easy to calculate.

3) Install Microsoft SyncToy
Microsoft SyncToy is an "intelligent" file copy tool. What's more, it is free. There are only a few options to it, and even fewer that you'll need to use. I've set mine up to copy the root directory of my development folder structure (D:\Projects\) using "Echo" copy. What this will do is mirror all the files and folders on the D:\Projects directory of my development machine to the D:\Projects directory of my Virtual Machine. If I delete a file on my development machine, it gets deleted on my virtual machine the next time I run SyncToy. If I create a new file on my development machine, it gets copied over to my Virtual Machine the next time I run SyncToy. What's more important, SyncToy is smart enough to only copy the files from my development machine that are no longer identical to those found on my virtual machine. Since my development folder contains about 12Gigs of FrameMaker files and source (.eps) graphic files, its a relief not to have to copy ALL of them over when I need to make some new builds.

4) Keep it lean
You are going to be using the VM only to build your projects. You don't need to install your favorite media player, or your favorite image editing software. Only install those components that you need to actually build (not develop) your projects. Use Add/Remove Programs to remove any crapwhere that gets installed by default.

Once you've set up your Virtual Machine, you are pretty much good to go. When you want to build a bunch of projects, just launch your VM, use SyncToy to sync your development files to the VM, and start building your projects. You can continue working on your development machine because your HAT on your build machine is working from a duplicate set of files.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to this approach. The first is cost. Due to licensing restrictions, you may have to pay for extra licenses for Windows and your HAT software. For me this was a non-issue because we have access to licenses for Windows through our development group (of which I am a part) and we had some older licenses for our HATT software that were not being used. Your mileage may vary though. The second potential problem with this setup is resource consumption. If you are hosting your Virtual Machine on your development box, you'll want to make sure you have lots of RAM and some extra CPU cycles to spare. I've done this in the past and while I've found my development machine to be somewhat slowed down, it was still perfectly usable so long as I didn't open Photoshop and decide that I wanted to edit a bunch of .eps files. If possible, consider hosting your VM on a spare computer somewhere. Your engineering group may even have some servers dedicated to hosting virtual machines somewhere. Depending on their hardware, you may even find building your projects on the VM is faster than building them on your production machine!

Some of you might be asking the obvious right about now, "If I have an extra computer laying around, why should I much around creating a Virtual Machine?" Well, the answer to that will depend on a few things I suppose. First off, there's no reason why you can't just use your spare hardware as duplicate build machine and use sync toy to keep them both in sync. In 99% of the cases, using dedicated hardware will improve your build times. However, with a Virtual Machine you will have increased portability. As you retire and aquire new computers, you won't have to consistenly recreate a duplicate build machine. All you'll have to do is copy your VM over to the new computer and launch it. Going to be on the road for a while, just copy your VM to a laptop and take your projects and HAT with you. For me, the portability issue outweighs the speed issue. Once I offload my builds to my Virtual Machine, I don't really care that it takes 25% more time to build since I can continue working while things are building. If I have something that needs to be built ASAP, there's no reason why I can't build it directly on my production machine...and sometimes I have to this.

One last thing I'd like to mention in regards to "Why Virtualize?" This may be a huge deal to some, and not at all interesting to others...but the last reason to consider virtualizing a build machine is Operating System Independence. When you have a VM, you can run your Windows build machine on any OS that can run a virtual machine. (...providing that you stick within the same virtualization player vendor. For example, I wouldn't expect to be able to run a Parallels Virtual Machine on VMWare Player.) . At home, my OS is Ubuntu...but I can still work/build my projects on Linux using VMWare server to launch my virtual build machine. As of today, VMWare provides virtual machine players for a host of operating systems including Mac OS X, Linux (many flavors), Windows, Sun, etc... Chances are that if you use it, there's a VM player for it.

The one downside not addressed thus far by using a Virtual Machine is the fact that you still have to manually monitor your VM if you are building multiple projects. This is somewhat alleviated by the fact that you can still work on your development machine while building projects on your virtual machine...but is still somewhat of a pain. Fortunately, there is help in this regard.

Automate your Build Processes
You can "easily" automate building multiple projects using some pretty simple scripting tools. I kind of fell in to using AutoIT to automate my builds, but there are other tools out there to accomplish the same thing. I'm working on an article right now that explores using AutoIt for build automation. I'm not done with it yet, but if interested, keep your eyes on the blog.

Resources Mentioned in this Article

• AutoIT (free)
• Microsoft SyncToy (free)
• VMWare Player (free)
• WebWorks Publisher Pro 2003 ($$$ - no longer available/supported)
• ePublisher ($$$)