Review: Ecommerce, subversion & git @ SuperMondays

Tuesday night provided an interesting evening, and for more than just the somewhat non-geeky location at the Side Cinema. As usual I’ve been beaten to the punch for a review of the event; the offical review, and videos of the presentations can be found at supermondays.org.
David Coxon provided the opening presentation, discussing his project to create an ecommerce shop for the Baltic gallery. As I’d expected of David the talk was interesting, and given the time and budget available the outcome of the project is impressive. The full presentation can be seen here and slides here. David can provide a better insight into the project than I can, so I’ll just say nice work.
The second aspect of the night was a (surprisingly) lively debate on source control systems. Paul Callaghan started by outlining the problem with the ‘traditional’ method of version control with naming schemes for files and folders, before introducing a better system with the use of Git, a distributed version control system. Alex Kavanagh added an alternative solution, in the more commonplace Suberversion/SVN.
From what I could take from the discussions Subversion is more commonly favoured in the business world as it provides a centralised repository, allowing for better management (access control, backups etc.) but Git provides some (arguably) better features and is ‘cooler’ (apparently).
If you work on any project that creates a significant volume of code or documentation you should definitely consider a revision control system of some description. In my case I’m looking at Git for my next project, from Paul’s demo it seems like an easy learning curve into a new working paradigm.
Finally David Livingstone from the University of Northumbria’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences introduced the Raquel Database System. Raquel is being built as an alternative to existing database technologies, the developers are currently looking for additional testers and project members, if you have any interest in the project contact David at the university.
The night ended, as usual, at the bar. Again as usual this provided many interesting discussions with other group members, if you haven’t already been, or have been to a previous event but not recently, get yourself down to the next SuperMondays event.
Andrew Waite

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