Hi there, This may not be a game-related question, but I am wondering someone knows the answer: for web service / website programming with Java, what source code control tools do you guys use for your projects? Thanks in advance, Robert

I use Subversion for everything I do personally. Almost everywhere I've worked uses Perforce.

Perforce costs dollars if you want more than 2 users (one of whom is the admin so the free version is only good for solo dev)

-me

I've been using mercurial with pretty good results.

^+1 for Mercurial.

I can't think of a reason why the language or technologies you're using would impact your choice of version control software. What matters is the size of your project, the number of developers, the functionality you're looking for, and whether you're willing to pay for it.

ftr, I'm not backing Mercurial purely from a Java perspective. Distributed version control in general is preferable because it's more flexible, discarding convoluted notions of individual file versioning and the like, and focusing on flexible branching and merging of entire repositories.
Specific to the OP's problem domain, web dev practically screams out for flexibility.

Quote:Original post by AverageJoeSSU
Mercurial blows compared to perforce. And perforce (the free version) can have 2 "users" and up to 5 clients which means if the client puts his or her name in a comment, they are practically a user.

Never used Perforce - but does it come from the legacy CVS/SVN school of version control, or the modern distributed approach espoused by Linus Torvalds*, et al? A versioning system born of the former probably won't be capable of a graceful transition into the latter.

Quote:Original post by AverageJoeSSU
Correct me if im wrong, but mercurial has no merge tool and is all done on the command line.

Mercurial leaves the decision of merge tools open (though most releases will come bundled with at least one tool by default), but merging is an absolutely vital use case in distributed version control, as all collaborative work involves branching of entire repositories.

Command-line Mercurial is exceedingly easy to handle, but for GUI, see TortoiseHG. Also, it's documentation.
There are other options, including IDE integration, available, too.


Anyway, for someone who claims Mercurial "blows", you don't seem to have much knowledge of the system. It is exceedingly quick to pick up - see Understanding Mercurial and the Tutorial from the wiki.

*Linus wrote Git (another DVCS worth looking into, though this is probably the closest thing to a stable Windows version), and his thoughts on centralized version control are well known. Needless to say, I wear my bias on my sleeve on this one - and I'm not even a Linux buff. ;)

How about JavaGit?
http://javagit.sourceforge.net/

which provides API for Git:
http://git-scm.com/

Does programming language matter in choosing a version control software? I am using Java.

Thanks,
Robert