We’ve been using Springloops for a couple of months now and all I can say is ‘Wow!’.

Springloops claims to be “a unique source code management tool focused on web development teams. It allows you to code in parallel and share your code safely concentrated on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files”. It delivers. Working from home was never this slick and it removed the need to set up our own version control server.

Springloops is a hosted service and the amount of storage space and number of projects you get depends on what plan you sign up to. There is even a free account giving you up to 10Mb of storage and 3 projects. However, I think the sweet spot is the ‘ Garden’ plan. With this plan (and all higher plans) you get the automatic deploy option and we use this to deploy any code we commit to our staging server via FTP.

The interface is well laid out with the dashboard showing recent account activity and links to your projects. You can also set up users and restrict their access to specific projects.

This service has become integral to our workflow and I can’t recommend it enough.

Update: Since we signed up for Springloops we’ve seen a couple of other hosted version control systems. Beanstalk and Versionshelf look promising.

That’s it! I’ve given up trying to deploy a Rails app with capistrano from windows. Just spent two days trying to set this up (even tried cygwin) with no luck.

The solution? VirtualBox. I have just gone from installing Ubuntu server in a virtual machine to deploying the application in thirty minutes. It’s a bit long-winded commiting to subversion from windows and changing to the virtual machine to use capistrano but it works so I’m happy.

Why am I still working in windows? I ask myself that all the time but I’ve got so much stuff installed and set up on my laptop the thought of changing is depressing. Also use Visual Studio Express once in a while and that only works on windows.

Two thumbs up for VirtualBox.

Update: Finally got Capistrano to work on windows. About time!