wow... a lot of people who visit this blog are looking for SourceSafe integration into JDeveloper. I'm working on it ;) but I'm doing it when I've got a spare 5 minutes. I have literally zero time scheduled for this at the moment, sadly. If you really want SourceSafe support, yell about it some more. Post to the OTN forum, post comments on this blog, log tars, etc... Maybe some time to finish this will materialize if everyone yells a bit more about it :)
Mihail asks for a comparison of Visual SourceSafe and Oracle SCM. One of these days, someone ought to do this topic justice. They're very different beasties. I've tinkered about a lot with both, but never really used one or the other in anger (if you've read my recent UKOUG presentation, you'll know that the JDev team doesn't use Oracle SCM yet. It's gonna be interesting...)
The main differences between VSS and Oracle SCM are probably:
- Oracle SCM versions folders, VSS doesn't. Versioning folders is kind of important if you're doing Java. Java code moves around a lot (c.f. refactoring). If you lose the history every time you do this, it sucks.
- Oracle SCM is built on the Oracle database. You can query stuff with SQL. You can replicate stuff at the database level. It's scalable. You can write web front ends for it. Because it's just a database, you can kind of program against it as much as you want. VSS is proprietary. It's a database of sorts, but it's a database about which only Microsoft knows the implementation details. If you want to web-alize it you're probably gonna have to pay some third party software vendor for the privilege. OK, we don't provide a direct product to do this with Oracle SCM. But at least you can write something yourself without paying a nasty licence fee.
- Oracle SCM works on platforms other than Windows. Out of the box. 'Nuff said.
- VSS takes 5 minutes to install. Oracle SCM's installation usually involves a day or so of hair pulling frustration. ("it's worth it in the end").
- VSS is FAST. G'darn. About the time I was implementing the VSS extension in JDev, I was playing with Oracle SCM performance. We've boosted Oracle SCM performance in JDeveloper 10g so much that it's almost ten times faster than it was in 9.0.4. But it's still an order of magnitude slower than VSS. VSS rockets along. To be fair, it's probably because of all the negative things above (remember.... Proprietary!). But wow. To see JDeveloper's check in progress dialog move that fast is a Nice Thing.
OK, there's a lot more to it than that... but those are the basics. I dunno. I'm of the opinion that version control shouldn't get in the way of development. Don't get me wrong: I think version control is essential. Particularly if you work in a team (basically, two or more people). But your main task is developing software. If the version control stuff can happen in the background, ideally automatically, so much the better. The particular choice of version control system probably isn't all that relevant. Or more accurately, it should fit around the needs of your development team. The main job is to develop software. Choose a version control system that fits into that and doesn't get in the way of doing your main job.
11:42:09 PM 
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