Hey, xxx is crap, why don't you use yyy?

From Arianne
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You have probably been pointed here because you tried to start an discussion again on a topic that has been discussed a lot in the past. You may find it helpful, however, to look at the following arguments which have been discussed multiple times in the past first. This page is specially tailored to our requirements and is not intended to be a general comparison on different software. Using a different software requires usually some kind of data migration and a lot of reteaching of people. So any suggested change has to bring real benefits that outweighs those trouble.

Having said that, we are very open to new ideas. And if something is outdated on this page we like to know it.


Version Control System

The version control system keeps track of all modifications to all files. This includes the code for both the program and the website, configuration files, images, sounds.

Our Requirements

  • Very simple to use because the VCS should be used by non-coders, too.
  • Works out of the box in Eclipse without installing additional plugins
  • Works on both MS Windows and Ubuntu Linux (and preferable all other common Linux distribution)
  • Provides a comfortable diff view/editor to merge client and server side changes.
  • Does not require several GB of ram for mid size projects
  • Allows to commit files before doing a complete update
  • Does not require an server admin to run a database rebuild of the repository on a server after crash
  • Provides a scriptable command line interface that does work on both Linux and Windows without installing a unix environment .

Note: All those requirements are based on the Eclipse plugin unless otherwise stated.

Possible Products

CVS
Old, stable, easy to use, good eclipse integration, included in eclipse out of the box
Subversion
requires eclipse plugin, requires an repository admin to manually run a dbrecovery program after crash (is this still the case?); does not show a warning dialog on failed commits of outdated files
Git
requires eclipse plugin, newer versions of the plugin are getting a lot better
Hg
requires eclipse plugin, no diff view, no diff editor, requires complete update before commit

Database

TODO: See #arianne log for old discussions

Java Code Guidelines

TODO: See #arianne log for old discussions

Programming Language

From Java or not Java posted by arianne_rpg on Mar 30 2006 2:12 AM

  1. Java does the work for us. So we are happy with the language.
  2. Java solves the portability issue for such a small developers team as our. So we are also happy with Java.
  3. To compile it you just need Log4J and Marauroa. So it is easy and we are even more happy with Java.
  4. Java is easy to develop with and it is fast ( IMHO ), so I can spend time adding features and not fixing bugs with gdb.

Also from the same resource: Java gives the developers a rich set of libraries as a standard part of the core distribution that they can use to get the game working "right now" rather than having to spend a lot of time picking and choosing libraries for some other language.