As we continue to spelunk into the vast realm of software engineering and explore its extensive catalog of developer tools, we came across a real gem this past week, something quite invaluable to any application developer. The tool is called SVN and is a configuration management program that allows other developers to download your source code and make contributions to it. In conjunction with this tool is a Google powered hosting site called Google projects hosting which allows the developers to “broadcast” their code to a targeted community. With Google projects hosting one can even attract and build a community of their own that is centered on a custom project that they have posted.
Though this tool is an extremely powerful and useful tool for developers, it is strictly that, a tool for developers. Initially, it was not very clear to me what this was for or what we were trying to accomplish, but soon after it became blatantly clear. The initial experience of getting everything synced up was a bit convoluted (which is why it is an application for developers), but after the setup, it was quite simple to commit changes to the project. It was only a matter of minutes after the setup that I was able to upload and see the changes that I'd made to the system on the hosting site. One of the more interesting aspects though which really amazed me was the speed at which people could post their updates. Whenever someone would change something in a file for instance, it was an instantaneous update that appeared on the hosting site; and after re-syncing the SVN application with your system the new additions would appear in your system. The ability for developers to have instantaneous feedback and contributions from other developers is what I think has probably allowed technology these days to progress so quickly, and the exposure to this tool has been somewhat of an epiphany for me of the potential that it holds.
The other half of this assignment was to create our own project hosting site. After navigating through the process of locating all the necessary things for an upload on the other hosting site, this was quite simple to do on my own. However, the only thing that was a bit of a hassle was uploading the files to the correct directory. I assume that there is a more efficient way of doing this but to get this done, I had to individually upload each file from my system into the trunk directory of the hosting site. I guess there is probably some way to configure svn to do this, but from the administrator stand point this would be much easier to if there were a mass file uploading feature in Google hosting.
Hosting Site:
http://code.google.com/p/robocode-eje-bumblebee/
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