Portable Development Environment
Not that you’d want to run from a USB flash drive, but you can bundle Eclipse and the JDK all in one directory, as described here, to have a nicely self-contained development environment:
- How-to: Run Eclipse or Aptana from USB Drive
You can toss in a few more tools too if needed:
- How-to: Free Portable Web Development on a USB Drive
- StackOverflow: Development tools for a USB drive
- ServerFault: Tools that fit on a USB drive
See PortableApps for additional tools, including one that will put a menu in your system tray giving you quick access to all your portable tools.
Once you’ve got that set up, then use an option like one of the following to share the directory across workstations:
External Hard Drive
A flash drive would be too slow, but often an external HDD is fine. Of course, you’ve got to lug it around. And it’s no fun when you forget to bring it to work one day–as I did my laptop yesterday. 🙂 Drive letter changes can be another problem.
Mirroring Tools
A mirroring/backup tool is simple but error-prone. These are one-way tools, in that they copy everything from one workstation to another. The risk is that you make changes at one workstation, forget to run the tool, then change the same file(s) at your other workstation, and run the tool, overwriting your changes.
- rsync
- DeltaCopy
Synchronization Tools
A step up from a mirroring tool would be a syncronization tool. These detect changes and allow you to make choices about merging. You have to remember to run it manually, or use another tool to schedule it to run at certain times.
- unison
- SyncBack
Synchronization Services
These are services that automatically sync files between workstations. Most, if not all of them handle conflicts, and allow access to previous versions of files. They are nice because they are set-and-forget. You don’t have to remember to run a mirror or sync tool. Also, these eliminate the need to leave one workstation powered up so that you can manually sync to it when you get to the other workstation.
- Dropbox (One quirk here for users of Instant Rails is that the space in the “My Dropbox” folder name is a show stopper.)
- SpiderOak
- Syncplicity
- Windows Live Sync