Source Control for Web Projects
Chris Lott
use with a distributed web development team. The team is all in the
same building, but includes Windows XP and Mac OSX users. We have
Windows and Linux servers available.
Until now we've been using the Dreamweaver file locking
(check-in/check-out) but I'm not convinced that file-locking is the
way to go and it is a crude workaround for those who have to invoke
Dreamweaver just to check files in/out but who use other tools (for
example, I use Homesite, emacs, vim, and PHPEd) for their primary
work. Not to mention that there is no version control!
The source/version control tool doesn't have to integrate directly
with our authoring tools, but that wouldn't be a problem...
Primarily, then, I have two questions:
1) is a non-locking system such as CVS, Subversion, etc. really good
for a web development environment working with XHTML/CSS/Cold
Fusion/PHP? The thought of trying to deal with multiple people working
on the same literal page scares me more than it does the thought of
doing the same thing with Perl or C code alone.
2) what systems have you used and would recommend for this task?
tia
Bruce Lewis
> 1) is a non-locking system such as CVS, Subversion, etc. really good
> for a web development environment working with XHTML/CSS/Cold
> Fusion/PHP? The thought of trying to deal with multiple people working
> on the same literal page scares me more than it does the thought of
> doing the same thing with Perl or C code alone.
Try out CVS, Subversion, etc. and check in conflicting updates. If
you're comfortable with a text editor, resolving the conflicts is not as
messy as you might think.
However, I expect that you wouldn't get conflicts often anyway.
James A. Donald
editor, view the result in Firefox, syntax check it and
examine the DOM using various firefox addons.
Now for straightforward text entry, rather than careful
layout, I would much prefer to just type in a WSIWYG
editor, but I have found that such editors massacre the
clean plain text layout of my html files, making my
files unreadable in the plain vanilla text editor,
inserting confusing format garbage, and creating vast
amounts of meaningless spam changes in my source
control.
I have yet to find an edit system that is as nice as the
system that wordpress uses. I would like a WSIWYG
editor where saving the file does not murder a layout
designed to be viewed and edited in a plain vanilla
programmer's text editor, and does not generate a pile
of spurious changes that spams source control diff.
In blogs and wikis, a cool method is to have a special
format designed to for plaintext editing, for example
double carriage returns represent </p><p>, leading tab
to represent blockquote, and then when you switch to
WSIWYG view, the format is translated to true html, and
most wonderfully of all, translation back and forth
between html and the format optimized for plaintext
readability does not entirely obliterate your plain text
layout.
I would really love a command line tool that translated
files in this manner, translated *.html files to
*.plainascii files and back again, translated between html
and an html equivalent optimized for viewing in a
plaintext editor, without obliterating the plain text
layout - that does what many blog editors and wiki
editors do, with the line numbers in the *.plain files
matching the line numbers in the equivalent html file -
does the equivalent of what so many wiki and blog
editors do.
If no such translation tool exists, and I were to write
one, would other people want to use it, or is it a strange
idea to solve a problem that other people do not find to be
a problem?
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
Mark Hobley
> If no such translation tool exists, and I were to write
> one, would other people want to use it, or is it a strange
> idea to solve a problem that other people do not find to be
> a problem?
It sounds quite useful to me. I currently use mozilla-composer. It is very
simple to use, but it does mess up sometimes. However it is the most simple
web page editor that I have tested, and over the years I have tested almost
everything that I could get my hands on, and each time I decided that
mozilla-composer was best.
Mark.
--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/
Chris F.A. Johnson
...
> I would really love a command line tool that translated
> files in this manner, translated *.html files to
> *.plainascii files and back again, translated between html
> and an html equivalent optimized for viewing in a
> plaintext editor, without obliterating the plain text
> layout - that does what many blog editors and wiki
> editors do, with the line numbers in the *.plain files
> matching the line numbers in the equivalent html file -
> does the equivalent of what so many wiki and blog
> editors do.
>
> If no such translation tool exists, and I were to write
> one, would other people want to use it, or is it a strange
> idea to solve a problem that other people do not find to be
> a problem?
A simple shell script can do what you want.
--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
===================================================================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
James A. Donald
> > I would really love a command line tool that translated
> > files in this manner, translated *.html files to
> > *.plainascii files and back again, translated between html
> > and an html equivalent optimized for viewing in a
> > plaintext editor, without obliterating the plain text
> > layout - that does what many blog editors and wiki
> > editors do, with the line numbers in the *.plain files
> > matching the line numbers in the equivalent html file -
> > does the equivalent of what so many wiki and blog
> > editors do.
> >
> > If no such translation tool exists, and I were to write
> > one, would other people want to use it, or is it a strange
> > idea to solve a problem that other people do not find to be
> > a problem?
"Chris F.A. Johnson"
> A simple shell script can do what you want.
I doubt it could be all that simple. When translating from plaintext,
has to recognize when a double carriage return implies a </p></p> in
the html, and when it does not, which requires that the script have
some understanding of html syntax. To translate in either direction,
would have to parse.