Are there any browser-based version control clients? - version-control

On a network I use I'm not able to install any third-party applications. There's just MS Office plus a web-browser.
But, I want to introduce some version control of the Excel spreadsheets I'm developing.
As I said, I can't install any other apps, so an SVN/Git client is out of the question.
Does anybody know of a VCS for which the client runs in a web-browser? I need to add files, submit new versions, compare deltas, etc.
I'm not just looking for web-based read-only browsing of a repo - I need full functionality via the browser.
I welcome your thoughts.

Google Docs/Drive has versioning, comments, sharing, etc. and may be able to do everything you need.

Related

Crossrider Extensions - are they safe

I have started writing an extension using Crossrider, and really like it. But I have read some negative stuff about them being a browser hijacker - in particular search.crossrider.com
I am unsure if search.crossrider.com is a malicious extension built using Crossrider, or Crossrider itself. Among other places, this is a link which recommends you delete this.
http://forums.anvisoft.com/viewtopic-45-1190-0.html
Before I continue developing in this, I thought I would ask the experts.
Any comments, gratefully received.
Thanks
Crossrider is very safe to use!
We had some incidents in the past where developers had tried to write malicious extensions using our framework, but with our security co-operations with Google and Facebook we managed to mitigate them. (and the fact that we are a cloud-based solution allows us to remotely disable any malicious use that is against our T&C.)
Besides being very safe Crossrider is also a free and a must-have tool for any extension developers. (There are more than 20,000 developers the Crossrider community)
Crossrider not only provides the technical solution of building the API to support all major browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, but also gives the developer further tools and features to solve and simplify all the heavy lifting tasks when it comes to developing and publishing browser extensions:
Full statistical dashboards with information on numbers of Installations, Active Users, Uninstalls which can be broken down to per-country and per-browser usage.
Crossrider provides an online IDE that developers can actually start coding extension online in matters of seconds. The developer doesn't need to download any development packages to their computer (unless they really want to), and as you develop, you see your code changes take affect in real-time on your browser.
Another feature is Crossrider's auto code update mechanism, where any code change (including new releases or bug fixes) is getting published to all existing users (and new obviously) in matter of hours. Regardless if you have several users or millions.
Crossrider also provides advances publishing tools such as embeddable installation widget for your website, direct download links and more.
One of those publishing tools is the Advanced Window Installer that can install your extension on all browsers automatically. This installer can be easily configured to the developers needs and we even supply with an automated Code Signing Service where developers can sign their installers in real-time.
24/7 Support - We are really keen about our support. We always strive to keep our response time to the minimum and we treat the smaller developer(s) as it was our most important client. We even try to help developers when it's not 100% Crossrider related questions as we also believe in good karma :)
Hope this helps your decision of working with Crossrider.
p.s Not sure 100% about the search.crossrider.com thread you have mentioned but as we do not have any affiliation with this subdomain (in fact, it does not even exists on our DNS records) you can rest assure this has nothing to do with Crossrider as a framework.
(Disclosure: I work for Crossrider)

Is the Subversion client for Windows available with no registration required?

Basically, I want to get an update of the standard command-line subversion client for Windows. I used to be able to get downloads of this quite easily, but it seems like registration is required these days.
I object to registration, but equally, I prefer not to use workarounds that e.g. involve registering with details that won't stay valid.
I already have TortoiseSVN - this isn't about clients in general, but specifically about the standard command-line client. I also don't need the server stuff - just the client.
It looks like I can download the source, but building from that probably involves the usual dependency-finding issues and so on. As this is likely to be a recurring issue, I'd prefer to avoid it if possible.
I'll be more than happy with a torrent link. Googling for that specifically, though, just leads to a lot of what look like pirate versions of commercial clients.
Any ideas? Or is there some good reason for collecting these registration details that might override my objections?
EDIT
Applogies to everyone I "sigh"ed at or whatever over SlikSVN suggestions. Clearly, I need to do better at avoiding making bad assumptions.
Which site are you downloading from? Just taking a look at the download links from the SVN project home (http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html), I see four options for Windows, several of which do not have registration, at least. The SlikSVN link is free and has command line utilities.
You could also install Cygwin, which is definitely free and comes with other useful utilities.
You can get a free one here:
http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download
As you said, you can certainly download and build the source code; it's free software under the Apache License 2.0. But if you want to download an executable without Collab's registration, try SlikSvn.
Binary distributions of the subversion client are available from the official subversion site.
http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html

How to develop against a web-based product with built-in server (not ASP.NET project)?

We have an application at work which is web-based and comes with a bundled web server (Apache tomcat), and is for network monitoring/patch management. It allows for personalisation, all sorts of rules, custom UI design using proprietary components and definition language, and even custom code to fire on events (based on Java).
I am in a team of several developers, each of who will be customising this app to meet various requirements. As it's a server app, not a codebase, what's the best way to setup a dev environment for >1 user?
If there is one single shared VM with this app, I don't know how good source control like TFS would work with this sort of system? I think also, developers working on various parts of the project may even need the same file at the same time (though TFS does do multiple check-outs).
What is the best way to develop against this sort of product? Bare in mind, even with personal VMs and an instance of the app, changes have to be merged to one central instance. Something keeps making me think about how app-virtualisation could help with this?
Thanks
If it is just an instance of Tomcat (even though it was bundled) couldn't you put the whole Tomcat directory and all of its subdirectories under source control? You just need to check in the non-binary parts, so exclude all the .jar, .exe, .tar.gz and .dll files when you check in. That's what I would do, unless I misunderstood your question.
I'm not familiar with the source control software that you mentioned. I have been using SVN (which is free) and TortoiseSVN as a client (also free). Just an option if your software can't support what I've suggested.

Versioned File System like web interface

I'm trying to find a free software that would provide a web interface to a file system (so you can add / remove files / directories, possibly edit them). If possible, it should handle versioning (only simple things needed : back to previous versions), and user management.
Can you point me to anything like that ? thanks
Update1 : I'm looking for a solution that would work on unix (e.g. linux).
Update2 : something like a subversion web interface on an Apache server would do the trick, alas I couldn't find any user friendly subversion web interface, Do you ? Plus it shold allow users to create new content.
You want something that supports something called Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (look up WebDAV). Apple's MobileMe does this, as does Subversion over httpd, as does MS Sharepoint.
In fact, if you just want WebDAV functionality for free, try out Subversion and Apache.
Have you looked at DropBox? It's a hosted solution (2GB for free). It has a web interface that allows you to do rollbacks/etc.

Configuration Management with Subversion and SharePoint help

Ok, when hired on to my current company a year ago, I was tasked with migrating our development teams from VSS. They already had it in their minds that they wanted Subversion, and since I had experience using and setting up subversion, I was a good candidate. I first tried to sell TFS because it woul dhave solved the problem I am in right now, but since money is tight, and Subversion is free... well you get it. Anyway, I have finalized the propsal and the only thing standing in the way is the following.
I proposed that we store only our source code in SVN, and all documentation, release builds, and other project artifracts be stored in our SharePoint portal, so we don't have to give non developer stakeholders access to SVN. When I presented the proposal, all was excepted but the question arose about how to manage the syncronization between the artifacts (Ex: How to is document x version 3.1.2 associated with release 4.5.2). My initial reaction is to create a section in the SharePoint porject page for each new release that will hold the artificats (and keep track of changes too). Is there a better way of doing this? Does anyone know of anyone doing this? Or any integration packages to sync SVN with SharePoint?
Here is some info on the companies development environment. All of our software is for internal use, we sell none of it, so our customers are all in-house. We have 2 types of developers: 1. those who take care of maintainance and customization of third party software, and 2. those who write proprieatry software (which is where I fall). Our software we write is mostly .NET, but the 3rd party software is all over the board (COBAL, C, FORTRAN, Other crap that no ones cares about anymore).
Please advise, as I need to get this submitted soon. I HATE VSS!!!!!!!!!! and I need relief!
What we do internally is putting all docs under our version control system, I think it's much easier. Then, of course, you have to give access to not-developers.
In your case, using SVN, why don't you put everything inside and then use the webinterface to give access to the stakeholders? It's easy enough for them :-P
I would use SVN for both documents and source code.
Advantages:
You can synchronize versions of
documents with versions of source
code.
You have everything in one place, so
no two repositories to administrate.
Disadvantages:
You'd probably need to manage the
access rights for some stakeholders
to some parts of the folder
structures.
SVN is not the most appropriate tool
for document management
In order to solve the possible concurrent changes to the same document, you can use SVN property svn:needs-lock for these items, to make them editable by one person, who locks the item.
As pablo said, you can access the documents (at least for reading them) through the web interface.
You could expose the svn repo via the web interface and link to that in sharepoint. That way people who need to edit the documents would need access to subversion but anyone could easily access the documents "read only".
In our organization, we have docs/artifacts, code everything in SVN and have given access to non-technical stakeholders as well who use tortoise client.
however you can look at the following option
Option 1 : create a ASP.Net interface for non-technical users
You can build a simple web interface in ASP.net, configure that with a single user so you would not have to create separate users for all the nontechnical stakeholders and they would get access to the docs with proper version control, etc. you could look at sharpsvn for the implementation aspect. the disadvantage of this approach would be that you might have to invest some time in developing this app
Option 2 : ofcourse, create separate users for each non-developer stakeholder
This answer is probably too late for you implementation, but the simplest integration path may be to store the docs in SVN and then publish to Sharepoint with an svn-hook.
Build artifacts could be programatically published the same way from you build scripts.
You can upload docs to SharePoint using a simple POST
i.e.
http://blogs.msdn.com/rohitpuri/archive/2007/04/10/upload-download-file-to-from-wss-document-library-using-dav.aspx
Probably a little late, too, but I would avoid putting the documents in SVN if you have a SharePoint system setup. Though SVN does a fantastic job for source code, for document management it doesn't provide the ease-of-use of SharePoint. If you have it already setup and you are a primarily MS based network, SharePoint makes a lot of sense and can handle revision control for the MS based documentation much better than SVN.
Yes, you can manage access to SVN documents with a needs-lock, but chances are at some point you'll have a non-developer needing to access the documents. Explaining SVN to a non-developer, non-techie is not an easy thing.