Version-Control

The build script from the last post turns your source code into something runnable. But it does not tell you which version of the source code you are building. That is where version control comes in. I am going to use Subversion for this post because that is what most of the projects I have worked on have used, and it is still the most common version control system in enterprise Java development. Git is fine for other kinds of projects, but the concepts here apply regardless of which system you choose. ...

I put together a presentation on Subversion for a class this semester. The slides cover the basics of revision control and why you should be using it for any project with more than one developer. The problem is simple: how do you coordinate code between multiple people without everything falling apart? You could work on the same machine and take turns. You could email files back and forth. You could dump everything on a shared drive. None of these approaches scale past two people, and even then they’re fragile. ...