JedFonner.com

I’m finally getting around to making some upgrades to this site. But I didn’t want to do it in a haphazard fashion. I wanted to use some of the common development practices I use every day at work. The first and most important, of course, it to put everything into version control. I chose Subversion because it’s what I’m most familiar with.

Setting up Subversion on Dreamhost is a piece of cake. Importing the current code for this site was also very straightforward.

The only big problem I had was finding a good Subversion client for my iMac. At work I use TortoiseSVN by the good people at Tigris. TortoiseSVN has its pros and cons but it’s not an option for me here because it’s Windows only.

Tigris has a SVN client for Mac which called SCPlugin which looks like a clone of TortoiseSVN. It is supposed to plug into the Finder and provide much of the same functionality as TortoiseSVN. If you Google it, you’ll find as many people praising it as lambasting it. I gave it a shot but I found SCPlugin to be very flaky (it was constantly having problems with my repositories) and I wasn’t thrilled about having it integrated into my Finder.

So I went looking for other SVN clients for the Mac. Here’s what I found:

• MacSVN: interesting, but it hasn’t been updated in over a year
• Syncro SVN Client: looks great, has some powerful features, but it costs $60 and I’m used to free developer tools
• svnX: has potential, but hasn’t been updated for Leopard and requires you to install the subversion libraries

In the end, I was only able to find two usable clients.

The first was RapidSVN. Installing is a super simple process and I was up and running in under a minute. It allows you to do all the normal SVN actions. It does show the spinning beachball a little more than I like, but overall it’s a very capable client.

As nice as RapidSVN is, I’ve decided to go with a tool that I also use at work when I’m in the Windows world: Subclipse. It’s a plugin for Eclipse and isn’t OS specific. It works at home just like it does at work. Since I needed an IDE for editing code anyway, this was a perfect fit.

If you are familiar with Eclipse and are planning to use it as your IDE, I highly recommend Subclipse. Otherwise, go with RapidSVN unless you need the powerful features of Syncro SVN.

If you're new here and like what you've read so far, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!