Adam Howitt's Blog

Aug 29
2006

Perforce Source Control for Web Development Projects

At : 3:25 PM | Link | Perforce | Comments (4) | Send | 1178 Views |

I have just wrapped up a document on how to implement Perforce for our web development projects where we have development, stage and production environments to manage.  This is a big step forward for us from the old way we used source control to manage 3 codelines from one source control project.

Since I spent a considerable amount of time writing it I thought it was worth sharing with you good people.  Thanks to Cameron Childress for helping me with the null root revelation and to the O'Reilly Book on Practical Perforce with a mystical chapter 11 which drove most of my learning.

Download the PDF Guide (41k) 

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  1. Really great post Adam. Just wondering why you didnt go with subversion? I have never even heard of perforce, is it just something you have been using for awhile?

    Posted By dan : Posted At 8/29/06 2:20 PM
  2. Good question Dan, thanks. We looked at subversion but as i understand it from our former SysAdmin it's an open source product with no official tech support and it is a young product (although a great idea). Perforce keeps your directories clean of source control files (like .scc for VSS) and as a commercial product has an official support mechanism. I understand subversion and CVS both have massive user bases but we find that it's easier to get someone we paid for a product to commit to resolving a problem than telling a client that we are having source control problems.

    I would really love to hear if other people have looked at both but gone the with subversion and why.

    Posted By Adam Howitt : Posted At 8/29/06 2:29 PM
  3. Until recently, I hadn't heard of Perforce either. The company I work for just switched from CVS to Perforce, and it seems to work pretty well--at least on the server side. Most of the developers, including me, don't like the interface. We've had to completely change our workflow to work around Perforce's system. With CVS or Subversion, source control is almost invisible, but Perforce requires a lot of tedious file management that really shouldn't be needed.

    As a side note, I believe that the (formerly) Macromedia teams use Perforce for their projects, like Flash.

    Posted By Josh : Posted At 8/29/06 11:18 PM
  4. Adam,

    great article - exactly what I've been looking for. Seems like the book itself might be a good investment.

    Thanks

    Posted By Pete : Posted At 9/6/06 2:01 PM
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