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Issue 3

the Art of Joomla - Tools of the Trade

DeltaWalker

Every programmer needs to have a visual file diff application under their belt. I recently did the hard yards to once again review what was available and stumbled upon the perfect solution that was eerily familiar.

For some time now I've been pining about the loss of the only application that was originally holding me back from jumping ship and going Mac. That application was Beyond Compare from Scooter Software and it was just the best you could buy for a bit more than 30 bucks. Sadly they don't have a version for OSX and though I did have a go an running it under an emulation mode, it just was just too clunky a setup to use realistically on a daily basis.

I then turned to Araxis Merge for a while until the trial license ran out. It was ok but had some annoying habits like constantly opening new comparison windows. It's price point was also a bit steeper than I was wanting to pay unless I absolutely had to.

Then one day I decided to have one last go at finding something (as you do when trial licenses run out) to replace my beloved BC2. Then, after a long forum trace I finally found an innocent link to a company called Deltopia. It was a jaw-dropping moment to behold DeltaWalker. Because DW runs on top of Eclipse (hence the familiarity I immediately noticed since I used that as my IDE), it's available for Mac, Linux and of course Windows.

I use this application on a daily basis and while there are a few things missing, the authors (very responsive people) have assured me that my few "absolutely must haves" (and some minor bug fixes) are on their way in future versions (like saving a comparison session - I do miss that). However, with the current feature set I am able to work around those minor things I miss.

So, here is a summary of the things I like:

• File comparisons open in a tabbed pane, so you can quickly skip between several file pairs (that was one an "oh wow" moment).
• The file comparison windows are actually fully fledged Eclipse editor windows so you can do almost anything in there that you'd normally do in the IDE. I find this particularly useful for doing a regular expression search and replace over multiple (and usually annoying) differences - this usually brings the difference alerts down to a reasonable number. This feature really beats Beyond Compare and Araxis hands down.
• Copy to the "other side" is quite intuative and easily allows you to remove and add blocks as appropriate.
• The scrolling in the file comparison window is smart, with the connectors between difference blocks moving to sensible locations as you scroll.
• Typing paths will bring up a suggestions for the next file or folder names.
• Most importantly, the developers are easy to contact and very responsive to email requests and suggestions. That's always a good sign.

As I said, there are a few things I miss, like:

• There is no ability to save sessions (it's coming though, and the history of folders is enough to get by).
• There is no indicator that a folder has changes somewhere under it (this was a nice feature of Beyond Compare).
• You can select two files of different names and compare them, but this will open up two file comparison tabs (with the left and right sides blank respectively). You can copy the path of one side to the other tab, but it would be nice to just open the two files up to be compared together in the one tab.
• A right-click then "Set as base folder" would be useful in my view. This was a useful feature in Beyond Compare.
• Beyond Compare has the ability to put in manual align marks. I think this would be useful because DeltaWalker doesn't quite get some of the lining up the way I would like it, but I also understand this would probably nasty to implement. While a nice to have, it's something I can live without.

The price-point for the advanced version, which I purchased, is very reasonable at just a tad under $60. This allows for 3-way comparisons should I even need to do such a thing, and also XML comparisons which I have used a couple of times.

I'm told that support for comparing zip files, comparing to FTP (and other) locations, and of course my session saving is coming in future versions. All those things will round off what is already an exceptionally well put together product.

DeltaWalker is a worthy replacement for Beyond Compare. In fact, if I ever did have a momentary lapse of reason to go back to Windows land, I think I would be taking DW with me.

Errata

Version 1.8 has been released with quite a few improvements and new features, notably FTP support and comparing into archive or zip files.  Sessions and some other neat things will be available in the soon-to-be-released version 1.8.1.

I have updated this review in a more formal format appropriate at developer.joomla.org, adjusting for the new features in 1.8.0.

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