The preferred way for developing or maintaining Natural applications is working in local mode. This means that all of your Natural sources have been offloaded from the Natural server to the Eclipse workspace, and that - in the ideal case - your sources have been added to the repository of a version control system. This section briefly summarizes the required steps for this scenario.

1. The following steps should be done by a single person, and only once:

   1. Offload your application sources from the Natural server (for example, from a mainframe) and add them to one or more projects in your Eclipse workspace. See also Downloading an Existing Library or Object from a Natural Server in Using NaturalONE.

   2. Commit the projects with the downloaded sources to the repository of your preferred version control system. See also Using a Version Control System in the Introduction.

      For information on additional files and folders that you also need to keep in your version control repository, see Committing the Objects to the Repository of the Version Control System in Using NaturalONE.

   3. Inform all involved developers that the application sources have been moved to the version control repository. From now on, these sources should no longer be changed directly on the Natural server.

2. All involved developers check out the required sources from the version control repository into their own Eclipse workspaces.

3. All developers define private mode for the projects which have been checked out of the version control repository. See also the description of the Steplibs property page in Changing the Project Properties, which is part of Using NaturalONE.

4. All developers change the sources as required in their own Eclipse workspaces. See also Using the Natural Editors in Using NaturalONE.

5. To execute or to debug a program, a compiled (also called "cataloged") object is required on the Natural server. Therefore, it is required to "build" the Natural project. All new and modified sources are then uploaded to the associated Natural server and are stowed there. In private mode, the cataloged objects are stored in private-mode user libraries on the Natural server. These libraries belong only to one user. See also the following topics in Using NaturalONE:

   • Modifying Objects in the Natural Environment or in the Repository

   • Executing Objects

   • Using the Debugger

6. When the source changes have successfully been tested, each developer commits the changed sources from the Eclipse workspace to the version control repository.

7. When the most current sources have been committed to the version control repository, each developer can delete the contents of the used private-mode libraries. This is done using the consolidate functionality. See also Consolidating Objects in Private-Mode Libraries in Using NaturalONE.

8. When all developers have committed their final source changes to the version control repository and all development on a Natural application is thus complete, the Natural application is ready to be deployed. It can be deployed directly from the repository of the version control system to the Natural server on which it is to be made available. During the deployment, the objects are put into the "real" application libraries, not into the private-mode libraries. See also Deploying Applications in Using NaturalONE.