When it comes to collaborating with teammates by sharing software projects, believe me, I would love to say gone are the days where emailing each other is a requirement. Alas, it is not something that is completely true, however, the task has become easier thanks in part to Google Project hosting and configuration management software clients such as Subversion and Git. Subversion, or SVN for short, is a software versioning and a revision control system distributed that developers use in order to provide current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation.
With the combination of Google's project hosting service and Subversion's configuration management capabilities, project developers are able to create a centralized repository where pertinent documentation, for example, the project's user & developers guide, summaries and also the project itself, can be found and downloaded. Moreover, with the subversion capabilities teammates are able(granted, they must have commit privileges) once downloaded to commit any changes they have made to the project. It really makes sharing projects widespread and simple.
Thanks to that, sharing my Robocode project, DaRumble, was as easy as one, two, three. The only difficulty that I encountered was in creating the pages with the specific documentation (the user & developer guides)due in part to the wiki markup syntax (it took me about five minutes to get the page to display an underscore!), but aside from that, giving a partner commit-access to the project and creating a trunk folder where that partner can commit changes did not take much time to do. In fact,when I was setting the trunk folder up for access, I cleared up the misconception that I had earlier when I thought that any user must download the project first and then re-upload any changes made. I learned,however, that if the user has any configuration management system client, they are able to visit the repository of the project and commit any changes even without downloading the project.
All in all, I think from working with this configuration system, I have gained another useful tool in working with software systems and, to a larger extent another perspective that will being me closer to understanding to what being a great software engineer is.
If at all curious, please feel free to visit my project's page at:
http://code.google.com/p/robocode-wch-darumble/
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