METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR RESTORING A DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR AN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION

摘要

The invention relates to a method and a management server (DS_S) for providing a development environment (ES) for an industrial application (AW), the development environment (ES) consisting of a number of development tools (COMP), the application (AW) using the development environment (ES) is created or programmed, with the development environment (ES) being restored at a later point in time, in particular for editing or changing or maintaining the application (AW). Assigned to the application (AW), information about development tools (COMP) used in the creation or programming and their version information are registered, with the development tools (COMP) in the respectively registered version being used to restore the development environment (ES) using the information and the version information are obtained from at least one data source and the development environment (ES) is thus created in an execution environment. The method described above ensures that all parts of a development environment that are being restored fit together. The method can be used to install the components, in particular development tools or "artifacts", of a development system or a development environment. Such a development environment can then be versioned and available in binary form and can be used immediately after recovery. Advantageously, the system can only save differences between individual versions of a complete development environment through so-called "delta comparisons", so that even with many saved versions, the memory consumption remains optimal and the administration uses fewer resources.