Being a software developer introduces you to many new concepts - importantly, of using and harness the technology yourself to the maximum. Slowly as you start picking up things you start using the same in your daily chores, for example, using mails to communicate often. When you are looking up for that song on your disk, you want the power of Google to do that for you. Recovering accidental deletions of files makes you think if you could have your own private repository with all files being safe. And the list goes on.

I am not left untouched by these thoughts in my own quest. With much of my life being spent in programming, I always look out to develop tools and utilities which help me in my daily chores. But, as the needs grow those don’t, reason me being lazy enough. In the last couple of months, I started development of these on a serious basis. To start with I got myself a repository, configured all damn things, put across the build servers and all the other things ones does except development.

Now being ready for development, I started investing time in reading and development to make life easier. My luck didn’t last long - I now stand at the point where in I use many systems for development and review of code pieces. I can view files in my repository, discuss them with people, find silly bugs and some blunders. Fixing these blunders is easy, but getting code back into the repository isn’t. Why? For I am not with my laptop which has the complete repository checked out. This makes me go back to square one - a need for a web based way to check in files into a repository.

Can I have some luck here on would I have to go back adding this in my wish list? I use Subversion as my repository, as if who doesn’t. Perforce guys, sorry you are too costly! ;) A little Google and I could find many a links to all sorts of web based subversion clients, bringing a big smile on my face. I thought I had found a solution. One by one, I kept clicking on the results, browsing to the features page, and checking if somewhere the word, ‘commit’, or ‘check-in’ or ‘write’ was written. To my bad luck, from one to second, second to third, third to n-th, none of them seemed to support web based modification of files.

I kept scrolling through results in anticipation that somewhere down there could be a link which might surprise me. Many a pages down under, I found Nirvana - I found what I was looking for - a web based tool which has write access. YooHoo!!!! I was so excited reading the features list and trying it out, that I am here writing this post. Check the great work from Polarion, the SVNWebClient.

A powerful utility for those developers who believe in the Google way, ‘Release Early, Release Often’. Check in your files on the move, and keep walking. The best part - its 100% pure Java implementation, which allows me to set it up on my existing servers.

Another good read-only browser worth mentioning is Sventon. Though it does not have the write capabilities, still it have many features of Fisheye, which makes it a right candidate to mention.

For all those developers harness the power of technology and surely, Keep Walking!

Hope this helps!