21. RoboHosting

We started a new unit on project hosting and configuration management in class this week. While most of our assignments in previous classes have been individual, there have been a few instances where we've had to work on teams, and this has usually involved meeting at a person's house and sometimes even bringing over multiple desktop computers so that team members could switch off and work on the same files.

In my data networks class, we're actually just starting a project and I've set up a Google project hosting site for all of us to collaborate on. Although we'll still be meeting in-person to iron out things, the discussion board and Subversion repository should help us manage the configuration of the project.

• Here's a link to the ics451-p2p-oreos project

The only downside is that we'll be using C for the project so we'll be without the use of ant. So for now, we'll probably have to deal with just the capabilities of make.

We were asked to accomplish the following tasks, and I was able to complete all of them without difficulty.

1. Install an SVN client. Since I'm using a Mac, I chose SmartSVN. The interface is clean and easy to use, and I installed SmartSVN and checked out a project from Google's Subversion repository without any problems.
2. Checkout, modify, and commit an existing project at Google Projects. This also went along without a hitch. I actually submitted twice since I forgot to run verify for the first commit. I had included a tab, which caused Checkstyle to fail. I can definitely see the importance of running some sort of verification check prior to committing a change.
3. Create a new system hosted at Google Projects. This includes a Google Group discussion board, User and Developer Guides, as well as uploading all Ant and Source files for my Robocode robot.

• Here's a link to the ics451-kgl-leonganisa project I created for this assignment

Now that my code is out there in the public, there's even more pressure for me to improve the performance of my robot. It's a lot like art. You can doodle and keep all your horrible art away from the public eye, but once you put it up in a gallery for the world to see, the stakes go way way up.

Hopefully I'll have some time to tweak my code in the near future.

For now, I can definitely see the value of version and configuration management.