Raible Designs

Subversion - CVS Replacement?

I heard of Subversion this morning from Erik Hatcher's publisher. It looks to be a CVS replacement, but as I'm happy with CVS (and satisfied that I've learned it), I don't think I'll be using it any time soon. It comes from the folks at Tigris.org, who have also provided us with Scarab. I am using Scarab, or I've at least installed it at work and intend to use it on our project. Scarab is a bug tracking application that is cheaper than JIRA and supposedly better than Bugzilla. I wish I could use JIRA b/c I really like the product, but as with most things - clients just want you to do something with free tools, rather than shelling out some extra cash to get things like IDEA and JIRA.

BTW, I'm sure you've heard that IDEA is on sale now. Will I buy it? Nope, I'm in love with Eclipse. Would I buy it if I'd used it for more than 2 days? Probably, but everything is working as I like it in Eclipse, and I'm such an IDE-minimalist, it just makes no sense.

You might be wondering why I was speaking with Erik Hatcher's publisher this morning? Heck if I know?! He sent me an e-mail saying that Erik had recommended me as a source for the newest and coolest Java Tools. Thanks Erik - but I don't know that I'm much of a source. I told him I thought that Maven, XDoclet and Hibernate would probably get a lot of attention in the coming months. He was interested in seeing if they deserved books. I don't think XDoclet does, as it's got so many different modules, it would be difficult to cover them all. It would be VERY cool to see a book written that develops an application using these tools.

This is why Erik's book is popular - people can take stuff from it and learn. Sure, they learn initially by copy/paste, but it's still learning. Hibernate probably deserves a book as I can't seem to grok it - although I did delete approx. 100 lines of code today after I learned some good tricks. I don't know if Erik's publisher was serious, but he did ask me if I'd be interested in writing a book. I told him "thanks, but no thanks" - Julie has asked that I never write a book again. I can't blame her, it's too much stress and computer time in my opinion. Especially considering that I killed my weekly Virus Scan (Friday nights) for the 10th time since I'm working (again) on a Friday night. It hasn't run in over two months!

I'd definitely like to speak about this stuff, maybe at conferences or such. Of course, I'd have to learn a helluva lot more before I could make that happen.