Configuration Management and Google Project Hosting

    In order to streaming a software development process among a software team it is extremely valuable to utilize a  configuration management system, a way to control the development process when multiple software developers are writing/editing possibly interdependent code.  Without a configuration management system problems may arise during development such as inconsistant code among developers, no clear indication of when the system started or stopped working properly and what code was responsible, the problem of simultaneous updates which cause "clobbering"  aka only one persons code being uploaded and the shared data problem which arises when two developers need to work on the same file/data.

    Version control is a type of configuration management whose main goal is to maintain multiple versions of the system. Google Project Hosting is a version control system that uses Subversion, which is one of many different version control systems.  Subversion uses a central repository, or a complete and always up to date version of the software project that can be checked out, modified (on an individual basis) and committed(update change/s to repository) by developers.  Each commit made by developers is tracked by Subversion so that there is always a reference to each update in the system, which makes it easy to locate when and where an error occurred.  Subversion also prevents clobbering, by maintaing each developers version of the repository through updates,  and allows each developer to have a complete version of the system, which eliminates the shared data problem.


 

     Getting a project started with Google project hosing is relatively simple, you just have to give it a name, upload files to the repository, and provide supporting documentation for users and developers.  After that you are ready to start adding developers to the project.  Here is an example of  my first project through Google Project Hosting:

robocode-kmi-GreenMachine

      The above is the front page of my hosted project, as you can see we have a description in the text field of the project, there are multiple tabs at the top including downloads, wiki( aka documentation), issues and source.  If you wanted to check out this project you would do so from the source tab, if you wanted a distribution of the system you could find a .jar file under downloads. please feel free to explore this project to get comfortable navigating a Google hosted project.

  This is a project which contains my competitive Robocode robot.  Please see previous posts if you are curious to what that is:

Java fueled robots
and
GreenMachine

  Setting up a project in Google Project Hosting is straight forward, things that I found can tie you up a little would be the documentation, and making sure that the files in your repository are in the correct place.  A few of the small things can be a little confusing but everything you need to know for setting up an new project can be found here if you get stuck:

Getting Started

This is a free and powerful tool for team software development, and as a side note in order to properly use a Subversion system you need to have a Subversion client on your machine, this is the one I am using for Mac.

SmartSVN

How to use a Subversion client is a whole different topic.  You can use the documentation on the above website to get started.