For a long time I haven’t really used a code version control repository.  For those that don’t know this is used for storing documents usually in the form of programming code that allows for multiple users to work on a project without stepping on each others toes.

There are a lot of different ways to do this and it really depends on what you are doing.  It seems to me that the majority of developers have switched to using gitHub.  I looked at github and it has all of the usual versioning stuff like branches/forks, tags and multi-user capability.  It seems to be a bit more flexible in how it handles things. One thing that it doesn’t do is plug into dreamweaver.  I’m not sure if Dreamweaver will ever include github but since they have support for subversion I can only imagine that they will have to build in git at some point.

Other versioning technlogy exists as well such as CVS and Team Foundation Server (TFS).  I have used both and I can say things have come a long way since the olden days.  TFS is a very mature Microsoft product best suited for .NET development.  I think the closest thing to TFS in the open source world is git.  I have to say TFS seems to be better suited to the task as it was very reliable whenever I had to use it.

 

After some investigation I found myself setting up subversion for the project I am working on as the other developers are using Dreamweaver and prefer to not change.  This left me trying to figure out the architecture of the repository which has many other factors to consider such as the number of files and where the programmers are located (same site/remote).  I also had to figure out the access methods that we are going to use.  DW supports http/https/svn+ssh and svn protocol directly.  For ease of use and security the only logical choice was https as the other programmers are remote and we require security.  The other secure option seems like a real pain to configure in windows.  So that all decided I was kind of locked into using apache as the web server as that method, when used with Dreamweaver, requires webdav which sort of dictates that we use mod_dav_svn on apache.

So it seems the IDE decided my fate for me.  Since we use dreamweaver and are located at remote sites we had to use subversion on apache hosted remotely.  We have selected a host, have our SSL certificate and are ready to build.  I have also opted to install Jenkins to do the automatic package builds.

Now all I need to do is set it up.

~JCF