tech.ablegray.com

If you’ve ever looked for a way to use Subversion from within Dreamweaver, you know that there are only 2 or 3 products that do this, and they are all closed source, and they are all pretty much inadequate for actual work. How come there are no good products? Well, I have a few guesses.

First of all, it’s probably rather difficult to make something like this. Dreamweaver is closed source and I suspect that acquiring the necessary information to create a plugin requires jumping through a few hoops. Maybe it even requires money. The plugins I did see all seemed to use SCCI which is Microsoft’s API for integrating source control software into an IDE. And I do know that there are hoops to jump through for documentation on this API.

Secondly, Subversion is difficult to use with web projects. I haven’t been able to find any Best Practices literature on this topic, which is partly why I’m writing this article. Anyways, the fact that it’s hard to use with web projects probably deters most Dreamweaver users, who, I assume (you know what happens when you assume, right?):

• don’t have much experience using Subversion for other things
• don’t have much experience setting up a Subversion repository on a webserver, much less have the necessary priveledges to do so

All this probably makes the market for a Dreamweaver-Subversion plugin pretty small.

Thirdly, another reason for the lack of DW-SVN integration is that TortoiseSVN works pretty well, assuming you access you project locally, or at least can make Tortoise think you do (which is what we do here at work).

And lastly, but not leastly, I think that those who are “in the know” about good development practices don’t use Dreamweaver. They use Eclipse, or jEdit, or vi, emacs, etc. Not that these all have Subversion integration, but my point is that if everybody who used Subversion for web projects also used Dreamweaver, then the demand for a plugin like this would be pretty high.

Those are, I think, the reasons that there are no adequate DW-SVN plugins.

I would like to not for the record that I myself don’t use Dreamweaver, and I haven’t for years. But for work recently, I’ve begun integrating Subversion into the web development process, and here, people do use Subversion. If you’d like to know, the solution that we chose is to use TortoiseSVN with Dreamweaver.