Eclipse Cookbook

Chapter 6. Using Eclipse in Teams

Introduction

Professional developers frequently work in teams, and Eclipse is up to the task. Eclipse supports the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) for this purpose. If you’re working in a team, you have to coordinate your development work with others to avoid conflicts. You’re all sharing the same code, which means your work of genius might be destroyed unintentionally by someone else’s thoughtless efforts.

Source control precludes those kinds of problems because it controls access to shared code in a well-defined way. Besides controlling access to code, source control maintains a history of changes so that you can restore the code from earlier versions. Because it maintains a history of your code, not only can you restore code against earlier versions, but you can also compare the current code to earlier versions to see the differences at a glance.

Like much else in the Java world, CVS is an open source project. CVS first appeared in 1986, when it was a set of Unix shell scripts; it wasn’t until 1989 that dedicated CVS software first appeared. Today, CVS is available on many operating systems across the board, from Unix and Linux to Windows.

Tip

For details on CVS, take a look at http://www.cvshome.org.

The CVS repository is where developers store code files to be shared. To retrieve a file from the repository, you check that file out of the repository. When you want to store your newly changed version of the file, you commit it to the repository. ...