A sandbox is a

testing environment In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system or set of systems in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same m ...

that isolates untested

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communicati ...

changes and outright experimentation from the

production environment In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system or set of systems in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same m ...

or repository in the context of

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

, including

web development Web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web applications, ...

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...

revision control Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code ...

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a management process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. ...

(see also

change management Change management (CM) is a discipline that focuses on managing changes within an organization. Change management involves implementing approaches to prepare and support individuals, teams, and leaders in making organizational change. Change mana ...

), and patch management. Sandboxing protects "live" servers and their data, vetted source code distributions, and other collections of code, data and/or content, proprietary or public, from changes that could be damaging to a mission-critical system or which could simply be difficult to revert, regardless of the intent of the author of those changes. Sandboxes replicate at least the minimal functionality needed to accurately test the programs or other code under development (e.g. usage of the same

environment variable An environment variable is a user-definable value that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer. Environment variables are part of the environment in which a process runs. For example, a running process can query the va ...

s as, or access to an identical database to that used by, the stable prior implementation intended to be modified; there are many other possibilities, as the specific functionality needs vary widely with the nature of the code and the application[s] for which it is intended). The concept of sandboxing is built into revision control software such as

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

, CVS and Subversion (SVN), in which developers "check out" a ''copy'' of the source code tree, or a branch thereof, to examine and work on. After the developer has fully tested the code changes in their own sandbox, the changes would be checked back into and merged with the repository and thereby made available to other developers or end users of the software.Vivek Venugopalan,
Developer Sandbox
chapter 4, ''CVS Best Practices'', The Linux Documentation Project, 2005. By further analogy, the term "sandbox" can also be applied in computing and networking to other temporary or indefinite isolation areas, such as security sandboxes and search engine sandboxes (both of which have highly specific meanings), that prevent incoming data from affecting a "live" system (or aspects thereof) unless/until defined requirements or criteria have been met. Sandboxing (see also ' soft launching') is often considered a best practice when making any changes to a system, regardless of whether that change is considered 'development', a modification of configuration state, or updating the system.

In web services

The term sandbox is commonly used for the development of

web services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

to refer to a mirrored production environment for use by external developers. Typically, a third-party developer will develop and create an application that will use a web service from the sandbox, which is used to allow a third-party team to validate their code before migrating it to the production environment.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alter ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

, and

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

, among others, provide such services.

In wikis

Wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

s also typically employ a shared sandbox model of testing, though it is intended principally for learning and outright experimentation with features rather than for testing of alterations to existing content (the wiki analog of source code). An edit preview mode is usually used instead to test specific changes made to the texts or layout of wiki pages.

References

{{Reflist Virtualization Sdp

In web services

In wikis

See also

References