An SVN Client gives you the ability to communicate with SVN Repositories, so you can store, retrieve and update your sourcecode in the SVN repository.
Two of the most used SVN Clients for Eclipse are:
- - Subclipse (http://subclipse.tigris.org/)
- Subversive (http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/)
Our experience is that most people end up using Subclipse, for unknown reasons. We started using Subclipse ourselves, but recently, we decided to switch over to Subversive for a couple of reasons.
- - We noticed that Subclipse has problems handling large numbers of small file. A Servoy solution in Eclipse consists of many small files, quickly exceeding 10.000 files for the average solution. When trying to share and commit a solution into SVN using Subclipse (existing solution we exported from Servoy 3.5 and imported into our local workspace through the Servoy Admin Pages), we experienced an endless running Subclipse Progress bar. When we tried to do the same using Subversive, we experienced no issues
- Subversive has more intelligent SVN Repository browsing: Subversive recognizes the "standards by convention" structure of trunk, tags and branches in the repository, whereas to Subclipse, those are just directories like any other
- The overall progress reporting on actions with Subversive is more accurate
- Subversive automatically suggests to commit after sharing your solution into SVN, whereas in Subclipse this is a manual action
- Subversive allows you to share multiple solutions (projects) in one go, whereas in Subclipse you have to share each solution individually
- Subversive does a better job suggestion a location in the SVN Repository when sharing a solution
- Subversive seems noticeably faster for a lot of operations
All in all we find Subversive nicer and easier to work with, but most important, we haven't experienced any problems with it.
Paul