Build vs buy (free!) decision — I was looking for an application that searches SVN repository with out checking out files on to the local disk, wrote about what I found earlier. But recently heard about Sventon, a nice repository browser that has search capabilities, although the search is limited to file/directory name search, and logs. That’s good enough for my needs but if you really need search with in the files than go for SupoSE or write your own (using something like Lucene).
Sventon can do lot more than searching, it is a good alternative to ViewSVN. In my opinion, some what better interface and searching capabilities (no search in ViewSVN). FishEye is my favorite, great interface and lot more features including some cool reporting. FishEye is reasonably priced but you can’t beat free, and most importantly the features in Sventon are good enough for me to get started.
What I liked so far
- Web application and so WAR installation is a breeze.
- Easy configuration.
- Support for multiple repositories.
- Files/directories can be downloaded as compressed archives (zip).
- Diff is good, three modes — inline, side-by-side and unified diff.
- If you are using Hudson for build management Sventon is supported.
- If you are using Jira and using Subversion plugin, relatively easy configuration.
I will report back after extensive use, meanwhile if you are using Sventon feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section.
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#1 by Antonio on March 27th, 2009
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I liked sventon for its features and above all its free. I also tried polarion, it has better look and feel than sventon but I did not like some of its limitations like single user login and remote commit. I am looking out for better look and feel for sventon
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#2 by Vishwajeet Singh on August 12th, 2009
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who told you fisheye is reasonably priced.
the biggest limitation with fisheye is you can not change its application server.
+1 for sventon its really cool I should say.
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Surya Suravarapu Reply:
August 12th, 2009 at 6:23 am
I like Sventon, but FishEye is feature-rich. Sventon has limited set of features, and in no way close to to the features provided by FishEye; FishEye also has an appealing look & feel.
Sventon is free, so obviously it is difficult to beat free. However, if you have to choose a commercial option, FishEye is reasonably priced.
As far as deployment, FishEye is packaged as a standalone application and not as a WAR to deploy into a servlet container like Tomcat. For something that’s used as an internal development tool, I don’t know if it is a biggest limitation as such.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Sventon that works for me for what I’m doing.
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#3 by Vishwajeet Singh on August 12th, 2009
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I will give you an example where standalone fisheye is a problem I am running JIRA in a tomcat container and couple of other web applications and now if I want to run fisheye I need one more application server running unnecessarily on my server.
The option of packaged application is good but IMHO when you want to extend and add it existing setup its a big pain.
Those are my 2 cents I may be wrong; thanks for your response.
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#4 by Surya Suravarapu on August 12th, 2009
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FishEye embeds a web server, and is packaged as a standalone application. Just to be clear — there is no need for installing or maintaining a separate application server for running FishEye.
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