Ok, here in part 2 we are going to detail the installation process for Subversion on windows. If you follow these directions, it should go pretty smooth, and when you are done, you will have a working subversion server connected to your eclipse for remote development.

Step 1: Download the software you need:

Download Subversion binary installer

I used Setup-Subversion-1.5.1.en-us.msi at the time of writing this. I recommend you get the newest STABLE release.

Download Tortoise SVN installer

I used version 1.5.3 at the time of writing this. I recommend you get the newest STABLE release.

Optional: If you don't have eclipse yet, I highly recommend you get it here (if you don't know which version to get, get the java developers version), along with Aptana tools and either subclipse or subversive. Installation and config of eclipse won't be covered here, but there is plenty of documentation online that a google search will reveal.

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There are a lot of Subversion/windows tutorials out there, but many of them are also outdated. Subversion is quite mature now, and there are several ways to use it for software development lifecycle.

The two most common questions I get about subversion are:

• Can I have subversion manage source on a remote server if I develop over FTP? and

• Do I have to run subversion on my local machine if I want to develop locally.

The short answers to these questions are: Yes, you can have subversion manage code that lives remotely, you just have to know how to do it. And No, you do not need to install and run the subversion software on your local machine if you don't want to.

The ideal setup is that your server runs Subversion to manage code on your remote server, and you simply use a client to connect to your repository for remote development. If you are connecting remotely and actually doing your development on a remote machine, thats where it gets a bit tricky. You will need access to the server and do critical commits, updates, etc. on the server. Other than that, you can remotely develop via FTP.

In Part 2, I will detail the installation process on Windows 2003 (using modern versions of subversion and tortoise SVN), step by step, so that you can get a Subversion server up and running, and connect to it remotely using Eclipse.

Subsequent parts to this will be examples of how to setup projects that are server-side development code versus client-side development code along with pros and cons of each.

If you have specific configuration requests, please post comments so I know what you want to see.

I am truly impressed with what this group has brought to the development community.  Long ago I loved a code editor called "HomeSite+" which existed in several interesting flavors, ColdFusion Studio (i think?), and JRun Studio were two other flavors I remember. 

Then came the Dreamweaver shift...  I never really got on that bandwagon.  I resisted for a LONG time, then I tried it out, and just never really was thrilled with it.  I am a coder at heart.

Then came Eclipse.  Great concept, just not for the masses.  Then came Eclipse 3, and then CFEclipse... then came Flex Builder and the RDS plugins, all good still, but not thrilling.

HomeSite was great at letting you develop remotely.  Thats a big no-no in the software world now, but for web developers it is a big deal.  You don't always have _everything_ you need running on your laptop!

Anyway, I got off track.  After all these tools, finally comes an attempt to bring it all together: Aptana Studio.  In its development stage as Aptana IDE, I fell in love with it (well, with MOST of it anyway...).  It all runs on Eclipse, and gives the basic developer everything he or she needs to code html, php, javascript, xml, css, etc.  All the things that were either missing, or painfully buggy or incomplete in Eclipse.  Not to mention an FTP (and secure FTP) system that actually works!  And you can create new empty files on remote ftp servers too (a lot of us have been waiting for this feature for a while).

I can now safely say that I have found my HomeSite+ replacement :)

Download it, you know you want to: http://www.aptana.com/ (its free)

FYI, Aptana  was founded by Paul Colton, formerly of Allair.  If you can remember back that far, Allair was the company that originally built ColdFusion, before it was bought by Macromedia (and subsequently by Adobe).