A two pronged approach to vesion control

We had a little IT retreat earlier this week to discuss how we can more effectively work as a team, already this has spawned the knowledge base which we are diligently filling with guff, but another thing which became apparent is that we need tighter version control on the source code for the applications we are developing. The aim being to make it easier for several people to work on the applications together without constantly tripping over each other trying to edit the same files.

In a previous project myself and compadre Rob created a sports club management tool as a team and it very noticeably benefited from the contrasting styles and knowledge which was brought to bear on the task. We used subversion for source control on this project running on windows and although it was very useful it never quite delivered on all sides.

The reasons for this were mainly due to the focus of SVN being for text based source code and the merge principle of team work. For example, if two people work on the same text file simultaneously svn can very cleverly merge together the separate changes and 9 times out of 10 they will not conflict. Where the SVN system begins to come unstuck is when using non text based source files like Flash FLA files, as these use a proprietary format you cannot merge files if 2 people have simultaneously changed them, you immediately end up in conflict. So in this scenario you need to lock a file on the server when you are editing so that no one else can open it, the problem is that SVN is not very good at this, unless as can happen, I have missed something.

Given that our new systems are being developed in Flash with support from PHP files and a little MySQL thrown in I decided to look more closely at the version control on offer in Flash and Dreamweaver. It turns out that although the current system is very good at locking files using their 'Check In' 'Check Out' philosophy it is not quite so good at keeping an entire repository synchronised unless Dreamweaver is your weapon of choice. As each of us in the team prefer different HTML editors this will work very well for the Flash files but not for the project as a whole. According to the Adobe site the new version of CS3 has been greatly improved in this respect.

So the solution which seems to present itself here is in fact to use both systems in tandem with Flash taking care of its proprietary source files and subversion via tortoise in my case taking care of the text based files and having overall responsibility for the repository. Touch wood this seems to be working nicely but we have yet to get the whole team working on the project simultaneously.

If anyone else fancies having a go at this, installing subversion on a new virtual server is very straight forward and there are lots of good tutorials on the subject click here for the definitive guide for CentOS.

The Adobe site or the online help for Dreamweaver or Flash is the best place for information on how to use the current simple Macromedia version control.

And finally there is a short article here about fine tuning the setup when using both of these systems concurrently.