Benefits of Subversion


Posted: 9th September 2010

When you begin working a professional environment where you are part of a larger development team. You’ll need some sort of control to ensure that no-one is overwriting anyone elses work. Enter Subversion…

I started to use subversion a few days ago after finally giving in to peer pressure and curiosity. After a few problems with getting Dreamweaver, Subversion (via Wandisco) and TortoiseSVN to cooperate. (With alot of help from this article on the Adobe Devnet (Using Subversion with Dreamweaver CS5, if you’re are using Devnet then feel free to look me up! my DevNet profile), subversion is now running in all it’s glory.

There may be some raised eyebrows asking why you would use subversion when you are the only developer but SVN has some great features that make it well worth the “You’re collaborating with yourself” jokes that may get thrown your way.

Revisions

Revisions are the core of why Subversion is a great utility. Many wonder why bother with SVN, but as a new convert (Thanks mainly to @peter_dimo) I can’t sing it’s praises enough. being able to traverse the development of a project from Production back to version 0.1a and being able to see the evolution of the project, of the code and being able to develop accordingly will give you as a developer a greater freedom to be creative and try new blocks of code withour worrying about the consequences if it fails (I highly suggest using a development or staging server rather than a production site) but if you want to live on the edge then go for it (You’ll always be able to revert back to the working version if it all goes awry).

This is by far the greatest benefit of using SVN. If you’re wondering why you’re latest version of a website or application is no longer working correctly, you can revert back to a previous working edition and you can compare the two revisions to find the problem. (A good tool for this is WinMerge (found here) If you’re using OSX then you can use Meld.

If you’re not using Subversion I suggest you at least give it a try. I’m confident that when you begin using it you’ll never look back!