One of the tools that has been making great strides in the Java development community has been Subversion – a replacement for the version control system, CVS. With its growth, one thing that has been missing is a quality managed hosting for open source project repositories. Today, Javalobby and Intland Software are happy to announce the public beta of JavaForge, an integrated project management system with managed, hosted Subversion support, issue tracking, document management, forums, chats, and much more. JavaForge is based on the excellent, pure Java collaborative development platform, CodeBeamer , and aims to fill the gap in the open source hosting space for those projects that want to use subversion.

Some of you might be wondering why you’d want to start a new project using subversion or move your existing project over to this new system. The answer is that subversion makes it easier to manage your source code. You can easily move and delete files without creating a mess of your repository and you can tag or branch your code simply by making a copy of the files you are currently working on. It’s easy and with the latest releases of two of the major IDEs (Eclipse, IDEA, and soon NetBeans I hear), you have full, integrated support for Subversion. On top of Subversion, JavaForge provides extensive source code analysis, integrated Wiki, managed builds (CruiseControl and JUnit integration coming soon!), powerful reporting, issue tracking, comprehensive searching, and configurable levels of role management so that you can decide exactly who can work with the different features of your project.

Now, JavaForge is currently in beta, but it is almost fully functional. You can create new projects (just login with your Javalobby username and password), upload your source code (or attach to an existing CVS repository), and start working on your project. Your friends outside the system can even check out your project and code through our anonymous interface, giving everyone a chance to experience an open source Java project.

Because JavaForge is a beta system, there are a few things to keep in mind as you start working with the site. Currently, we are not offering managed CVS support. If you’d like to see us offering CVS support, send me an email and with enough demand we’ll implement it quickly. As an alternative, if you have a project with CVS hosted somewhere else, but you’d like to use JavaForge’s other tools, just create a project that links to your CVS repository. Your source code will be displayed in the JavaForge interface just as if it were a hosted subversion project. Neat huh? The other caveat to keep in mind is that we don’t provide website hosting for your project (yet!). We’ve got a few ideas on how to implement this and can probably make use of the Documents feature of JavaForge to provide you with a project homepage. As with CVS support, if there’s enough demand for site hosting along with the project management tools, we’ll throw the resources at it to make it happen pronto.

So, do you have a project in mind yet? Hop on over to JavaForge and get started today. Tell all your friends about it too and have them join your project or even start their own. The more projects that are available the better and you’ll begin to see a few of Javalobby’s open source projects there too! It’s all FREE (just like all the other Javalobby services!) and will continue to be free for as long as it’s around!