SVN Goodness

Just a note to encourage anyone considering moving to SVN to go for it. I just had an issue today where a drop down menu got all whacked out, though nobody had touched the page. I was able to use SVN to roll back a few revisions to where the menu was good, and then go forward one revision at a time until I found the culprit (an overwritten jquery.dimensions.js file).

There are many great tutorials by CFers and others on how to get it all set up. Just Google it.

Now using Subversion on Windows

My main project these days is a legacy app rewrite. I am doing it with OOP principles (to the best of my knowledge), with help from Mach-II and ColdSpring. Along with the new programming techniques, I also picked up Unit Testing a la CFCUnit. Since I'm using all this new-fangled (at least new to me) stuff and because we are starting bring a new part-time developer on board, I decided some sort of version control management software would be in order. I have to thank the ColdFusion Weekly podcast for the final push to do this. In their discussion of IDE's, they went on about how well Eclipse worked with Subversion.

I downloaded the most recent version of Subversion from http://subversion.tigris.org. I unzipped the file and was lost. There was no install or setup.exe. Some directions on how to build an install were in there, but there had to be an easier way. Through various blog links, I found the easier way called SVN 1-Click Setup. So I downloaded this and ran it. It installed Subversion, created a repository, added a windows service for the svn server, and even installed the Tortoise SVN client. Real cool. But then I sat there saying, "Now What?"

The answer was, "Read the Manual." I read enough of the Subversion book to figure out I could Import my current files into the repository I created. This was done via the DOS command window, but was relatively painless (I'm old enough to have used DOS as my primary OS). The next issue was to figure out how the developers would access the files and do their edits and testing. I found my way to an entry on Ryan Guill's blog who describes his setup.

What I ended up with is using the Subclipse plugin for Eclipse to do a one time checkout of the project. Each developer will run the CF server and the project on their workstation. Edits can be done in any IDE or even notepad, but Eclipse will again be used to 'commit' files back to the repository and to 'update' files from the repository to their workstation.

It took most of the day (along with other interruptions) to get this set up on two workstations and to do some testing, but I believe it will be worth it in the long run. Since I only have one project at the moment, using Subversion with IIS is not a big issue. However, more projects are possible, just not with the ideal setup you get with Apache.