Collaborative Code Editing

Question

Hi all.

I work for a small web development company (6 people) and we've been in the market for a new code editor/development environment for quite some time.

Currently, we're using Dreamweaver's (CS3) coding side for our site development. Each site's files is hosted on a Dreamhost ftp server. All 6 of us work on the same set of live files on the remote ftp server. Dreamweaver has a handy file locking functionality that prevents us from overwriting each others changes by keeping us out of the same files.

Now, we've found that this form of development allows for very rapid development and love how easy it is to get things done. However there are many things we don't like. One of which is Dreamweaver's code editor. We also don't like our lack of code history for each site.

Does anyone know of a good alternative to Dreamweaver that has similar file locking/ftp functionality?

If not, could you explain to me the best configuration of a source control system for our team? We're willing to look at GIT, Mercurial, and Subversion. The new system would ideally:

1). Support multiple different code editors on different operating systems. (Windows 1st choice.)

2). Be almost as easy and quick to push out code as currently.

3). Allow for working on the files outside of the office network.

4). Be inexpensive.

I'm probably just showing my ignorance of how to use a version control system, but it doesn't seem logical for each of us to have a testing server on our computers with every single site setup with our own test database... That's very time consuming

What's your solution to our problem? I think we'll either have to upgrade to the latest version of Dreamweaver and stick with it forever, or we'll have to find some sort of ftp collaborative editor, or we'll have to implement version control.

Do the benefits of version control outweigh the extra amount of time it entails to push out code?

Answer 1

it doesn't seem logical for each of us to have a testing server on our computers with every single site setup with our own test database... That's very time consuming

That's generally the way to do it. Most modern frameworks will let you set up your development server in minutes, if not seconds -- using an embedded http server and database, for example. If you are stuck on an ancient platform, there are solutions like wamp that are only a little more difficult. Remember, that it's time that you spend once, but it lets you be faster. If the project is going to take any longer than a few hours, it should be beneficial. You don't waste time on debugging things your fellow developer just changed, or recovering production data from that silly database manipulation mistake you just made.

(Oh, and if your websites are just HTML+JavaScript, then you don't need any server locally, obviously.)

As for version control systems, the ones you mentioned are fine, with SVN requiring a little more setup and network access to the central server for commits. Git and Mercurial let you work and commit offline, and then push your changes to the central server or even just exchange them between developers. I think Mercurial works better on Windows at the moment.