Changes Made Simple. Now Commit!

       With Robocode somewhat aside, let's move away from coding and look at projects as a whole. When working on a project alone, it's simple to keep the project up to date. When sharing And distributing projects, we ran into the problem of getting the project to work on other user systems. That's where we were introduced to Build Systems such as Apache Ant to help distribute, compile, test and debug projects. So now, how can we take projects further? Well, first step was to work on projects alone, second was to share them with others, so I guess the third logical step is to work on projects together. Many of you may think that it's just like group work where everyone splits up and do their share then come back together to piece it up. Sounds simple right? In theory it does, but there are some issues we do have to address in this situation. Having the same project on different systems causes every copy of the project being slightly different from one another after the changes that are committed. The problem with this is that how do all the developers of the project merge all there files together without overwriting everyone's changes? This is where I introduce to you Configuration Management, *Applause*. What is it? Magic? A life saver? Something that will bore you if I explain in too deep? I guess all is true. Let's summarize and say that configuration management allows users to work on a project and they could update the project that is hosted online with what they locally on their systems. When users update (Commit) the project, only the. Hanged in the project are changed, for example, one line of code rewrittenI set as Users or a renamed file. Configuration Management makes multi user projects easier to handle. 
       After being introduced to Configuration Management myself, I decided to try it out  using my Robocode project. For this experiment I used Google Project Hosting as my hosting site for my project and Smart VN as the Configuration Managment. After some speed bumps trying to get my project to upload into the server, I finally got it to work. While playing around with the system, I made some updates to my projects such as formatting and better javadoc. These changes causes the revision number to change and I can use this to see what changes were made since the original upload. With Google Project Hosting, it was simple to create some wiki pages that I set as user and developer guides. The SVN client SmartSVN was also simple to use to upload and commit changes to the project. The only initial problem was setting it up, but most of what I needed to know was listed in the Google Project Hosting site. Overall with my experience, I thought it was a simple process. I can see why this is another handy tool for many developers.

Link:
Robocode-cel-wayfarer Project: http://code.google.com/p/robocode-cel-wayfarer/