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## Retrieving modules

When XF is used in a developer group, writing on different parts of the same program, shared access and version control get important. XF tries to support the distributed development process.

The ShapeTools concept of distributed development is based upon the sharing of one global source archive. All pieces of code that are intended to be publically available are checked-in into this database.

XF supports this public access. When the application is started and loads a code module, XF tries to locate the module by scanning through the path names listed in the environment variable XF_LOAD_PATH. This variable contains a list of path names separated by ``:'' where modules for this application can be found. If the code module is not found, XF retrieves the last checked-in version of the module from the ShapeTools archive.