Question

How do you ensure, that you can checkout the code into Eclipse or NetBeans and work there with it?

Edit: If you not checking in ide-related files, you have to reconfigure buildpath, includes and all this stuff, each time you checkout the project. I don’t know, if ant (especially an ant buildfile which is created/exported from eclipse) will work with an other ide seamlessly.

Answer 1

The smart ass answer is ‘by doing so’ – unless you aren’t working with multiple IDEs you don’t know if you are really prepared for working with multiple IDEs. Honest. 🙂

I always have seen multiple platforms as more cumbersome, as they may use different encoding standards (e.g. Windows may default to ISO-8859-1, Linux to UTF-8) – for me encoding has caused way more issues than IDEs.

Some more pointers:

• You might want to go with Maven (http://maven.apache.org), let it generate IDE specific files and never commit them to source control.
• In order to be sure that you are generating the correct artefacts, you should have a dedicated server build your deliverables (e.g. cruisecontrol), either with the help of ant, maven or any other tool. These deliverables are the ones that are tested outside of development machines. Great way to make people aware that there is another world outside their own machine.
• Prohibit any machine specific path to be contained in any IDE specific file found in source control. Always reference external libraries by logical path names, preferable containing their version (if you don’t use maven)