Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Recreate prior work with source code control
Recreating work from six months ago without some source code control can be quite difficult. Source code control, which should be part of any professional programming shop, provides several important functions: concurrent updates, history, source code archives, history, and versioning.
Concurrent updates mean that more than one programmer can work on a code module at a time. When all of the changes are made, the source code control tool can combine the changes into the original code.
Source code archiving means that you won't lose your code. All of your code for all of your applications is stored in a central location. If you back up this central location, then your source code is safe--or at least safer if it's distributed ad hoc amongst all of your developers' workstations.
History refers to the ability of your source code control to take you back in time in your code. You'll be able to see which changes were made by whom and when. This is extremely helpful if you deploy changes that you need to take out for some reason.
Versioning, which is another form of the history function, allows you to capture a snapshot in time of all the code for a specific application or module and give it a name. You would normally do this when the application is in a working state, so that you could easily extract a working version of the application without knowing what changes have been made since then.
There are plenty of source code control programs, though CVS is probably the most well known. You can also find free versions for Windows and *nix systems. Subversion is an up and coming open source version control system. There are even commercial options like BitKeeper.
David Petersheim is the Director of Application Development with Genscape, Inc. He designs and develops server-side applications to acquire and process real-time energy data.
Concurrent updates mean that more than one programmer can work on a code module at a time. When all of the changes are made, the source code control tool can combine the changes into the original code.
Source code archiving means that you won't lose your code. All of your code for all of your applications is stored in a central location. If you back up this central location, then your source code is safe--or at least safer if it's distributed ad hoc amongst all of your developers' workstations.
History refers to the ability of your source code control to take you back in time in your code. You'll be able to see which changes were made by whom and when. This is extremely helpful if you deploy changes that you need to take out for some reason.
Versioning, which is another form of the history function, allows you to capture a snapshot in time of all the code for a specific application or module and give it a name. You would normally do this when the application is in a working state, so that you could easily extract a working version of the application without knowing what changes have been made since then.
There are plenty of source code control programs, though CVS is probably the most well known. You can also find free versions for Windows and *nix systems. Subversion is an up and coming open source version control system. There are even commercial options like BitKeeper.
David Petersheim is the Director of Application Development with Genscape, Inc. He designs and develops server-side applications to acquire and process real-time energy data.
# posted by MiDBA @ 12/21/2004 02:59:00 PM 
