Internet Application Dev Lectures <- IAD Lectures <- Sean Forman <- You Are Here

Sean Forman
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
Saint Joseph's University
Philadelphia, PA
Topic: First Deliverable and CVS
Props needed:
Note: this lecture contains freely-available, copyrighted material from Internet Application workbook by Philip Greenspun, Eve Andersson, and Andrew Grumet.

CVS: Concurrent Versioning System

Any decent software development system allows you to track changes made in the code.
CVS allows you to archive and retrieve old code. It allows you to track who is doing what to the code.
The basic model is that of a library.
You check out your code and then return the copy.
Multiple copies can be checked out at once. If changes are made to other copies, you can then copy those changes into your copy.
If you've each changed the same thing then you will merge the code by hand, otherwise updates happen automatically.

The Repository

The data is stored in a special format within my directory.
I will be able to track changes and look at your code whenever you might need help.
Each person will run the website through their browser.
Go to my scott webpage /g0/.
Demonstrate a checkout into my directory for group g0. Website is now there.
cvs -d /home/sforman/IADCVS checkout g0

Making changes

The power of CVS is to easily track your changes and annotate your changes.
Edit the index.html file.
cvs commit index.html
If no file is listed, it searches through all files for changes.
Log into another account.
cvs -d /home/sforman/IADCVS checkout g0
Now this account has their own version of the codebase.
They can make changes.
Make a change and commit the change.

Updating changes made by others

Presumably you may be working at the same time as others in your group.
You may need to update your files to show their changes.
We've made changes to g0 in temp5. I want to get these changes.
cvs update
Notice the change now appears on the new page.

Adding files

We can add any number of the files to the repository.
Create the new file and edit as necessary.
cvs add filename
This file is now in the repository and available to all the group members.

Deleting files

To delete a file from the repository, we delete the file first.
cvs remove filename
To make this permanent you then need to commit the changes.
CVS tells us if we try to commit changes to a deleted file.
If CVS can't fix the problem it requires hand editing to fix the issue.

Tagging Files

It is often useful to group a set of files into a single release.
For instance, when you complete your first deliverable. You can tag all of those files and then continue working on the next deliverable.
When you demonstrate your project to me, you can then tell me to check out the set of tagged files and not the current set of files.
It may make sense to tag the files every week or so in case you need to backtrack to a previous version.
cvs tag tag-name files
The files list is optional. The default is all files in the directory.
To check this particular tag out you still use checkout.
cvs checkout -r tag gN

Displaying Changes

The log command will show who made changes to the files and will print out the annotations that were made.
cvs log file
You can also use the diff command to see differences between revisions.
cvs diff -r 1.2 file
Just doing cvs diff will show changes between the last commit and your current files. Could show files ready to be committed.
There are many options for this.
cvs -H diff

Environment variables

Default editor is vi.
You can set environment variables in your .bashrc file to reset the default editor and also the location of the repository.
```
CVSEDITOR=/usr/local/bin/emacs
export CVSEDITOR

CVSROOT=/home/sforman/IADCVS
export CVSROOT
```
This way when you use cvs it will know where to look for the files and which editor to use when entering log entries.

References

CVS Manual
CVS Commands
There is a basic howto within your default CVS information.
Do the CVS assignment that I hand out.

Deliverable #1

Due before Spring Break.
I will have signup times for demonstration on Thursday March 4th and Friday morning March 5th.
You are to implement a user registration system.
Here are the parts that you should implement.
1. Page for a new user to register.
2. A means for an existing user to login. When this occurs your script should set a cookie to your browser that tells me what group this login was for. Create a log in name and password for me.
3. A means for a logged in user to logout.
4. A means for a user to edit their information.
5. A means for a user to retrieve their password if they can't remember it. (You may only be able to send e-mails to sju addresses. This is fine and you won't be downgraded for this.)
6. A simple front page. This page should recognize if a user is logged in and change what it says depending on whether the user is signed in or not.
7. An administration area. (you may want to look at creating an .htaccess file using the /opt/web/apache/bin/htpasswd command)
8. The admin area should have a means for listing all users, editing users, deleting users, and other appropriate actions. A non-admin member should not be able to get to it (or probably even know about it).
You will be graded on this based on how well you code the above materials and meet the standards above.
You will be graded on the quality of your code logs as well.
Your setup needs to be secure and be able to recognize users as they move around the site.
You must account for non-standard inputs into your forms and do appropriate error checking.
You will be graded on how modular your code is. You should not repeat code that does the same thing for two different parts of the site.
You will be graded on how well commented your code is.
You will be graded on whether your code is done on time.
I will have a more detailed description of the grading method on Wednesday or next Monday.

About this document ...

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latex2html lecture_5b -split 0 -init_file ./.latex2html-initOne -t 'First Deliverable and CVS '

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