[thelist] Collaborative Environment Suggestions

[Christopher Joseph]

Burhan Khalid wrote:
> Hello All :
>
> 	Came across a unique situation, and as always, I would like to consult the list for opinions.  I have been retained as a developer/system admin for a design house, however, they don't have any sort of version control/collaborative development envrionment in place.  It is getting to be a problem since almost all of the developers are telecommuting, and we are having problems with people updating files, and then not being up with the most recent version of a file.
>
> 	So, I am looking for some sort of version control system.  The platform is RH 7.2 shared server, and I do have root access via SSH (if that's a factor).  Any suggestions? Places where I should look? The files that we will be editing will be web based (HTML & PHP mainly).
>
> 	What I am trying to avoid are situations where the HTML and PHP files (mostly HTML) are choked full with comment tags. Besides the bloat, it doesn't look very nice when someone does a view source.  I would like a system that allows people to check out files, and have a separate file/place to have a log for the changes. If a file is checked out -- then it should be locked so that other people may not modify it.
>

Agree with the former posters that CVS [ http://www.CVShome.org ] is a
good solution and easily installable on RH as an RPM. If your
telecommuters have a diverse range of client patforms you might consider
   Eclipse [ http://www.eclipse.org ] as a suitable CVS client candidate.

I am not sure whether the list has mentioned Eclipse in the past - if I
am writing about old news then skip to the next email in this very busy
list - because I am about to do some evangelising.

Eclipse is a kind of framework IDE - AND IT IS FREE OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE. Here is an abstract from the white paper (found here [
http://www.eclipse.org/whitepapers/eclipse-overview.pdf ] describing its
function:

<abstract> The Eclipse Platform is designed for building integrated
development environments (IDEs) that can be used to create applications
as diverse as web sites, embedded JavaTM programs, C++ programs, and
Enterprise JavaBeansTM. This paper is a general technical introduction
to the Eclipse Platform. Part I presents a technical overview of its
architecture. Part II is a case study of how the Eclipse Platform was
used to build a full-featured Java development environment.</abstract>

The benefit of this platform is that you can develop in all of your
favourite languages and many other technologies (provded there are
plugins for them - if not you'll have to build one :p). Now I know that
many of your are probably going to scream EMACS or similar at me but
this really is different. Can you model UML in emacs and have it
generate your code for you? You might also mumble that Java based apps
are a little cumbersome - Eclipse has skipped around this by ditching
swing and using native (to each ported platform) widgets.

Currently there are many plugins avaliable in various stages of
completion (as always). You can find some of these here: [
http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/ ] or here [
http://www.eclipse.org/community/plugins.html ]. There is even a
promising PHP IDE plugin for it at [ http://www.xored.com/download.php ]
although I haven't yet figured out how to pipe the stdout to a browser
which means that debugging is currently done with raw XHTML etc. My
favourite plugin to date has to be the RUBY plugin found here [
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse ]. This has made learning
RUBY [ http://www.ruby-lang.org ] much easier (although the language is
inherently programmer friendly).

Eclipse is sponsored by a number of large conglomerates like IBM,
Hitachi and Fujitsu and the original code base was built upon 40 Million
dollars of IBM donated development. Indeed, IBM has taken the Eclipse
framework and now uses it as its proprietary websphere development
studio / toolkit.

--
Christopher Joseph

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