Google have there fingers in many pies - infact in many ways they're becoming the new Microsoft. To be honest I find that a bit predictable and a bit scary at the same time. Geeks for years have been so proud of Google as a shining example to the rest of the software industry - here's how you should be doing things!

However, Google have now started branching out. The beginning was that toolbar malarky - install the google toolbar - let it take control of your browser entirely! Then we went to some funky web tools, great stuff. Now they're branching out into office software, purchase systems and now open source project repositories.

Google Code is a project repository - similar to those at SourceForge and Java.net. For a while it only hosted Google projects but now they've opened their doors to the public. Recently I started a little physics engine based on porting the GPhysics stuff. There's been some interest from the JGO community in the project so I decided to make the source and project available - ah ha! A good chance to test out Google Code.

Pros:

• It's Google - chances are any problems it currently has will be resolved quickly.
• Presentation - all the web pages and forms are well designed and have active components that make managing things easy.
• SVN - It's subversion based - in my opinion *slightly* better than CVS at java.net.

Cons:

• Slow - really slow. I'm currently waiting for the commit a few files in my phys2d project to complete. Seems to get jammed up really easily. This is probably just down to lack of power.
• GMail - The system seems to require a GMail account. This doesn't fit for a bunch of people who don't want to sign up for GMail. In turn this limits the number of people who might get involved in your project.
• Under Developed - the project management facilities are extremely limited at the moment. There's no release management. The SVN password is randomly generated and not related to your gmail account. The project page configuration is limited - no clean access. No way to add screenshots? No way to add coding standards?

Generally Google Code feels a bit half cooked at the moment - put it back in for a few months - it's not done yet! Saying that it's another resource for projects and hopefully Google will be responsible enough to prune dead projects and hence won't go the way of SourceForge.

Where will Google strike next? Watch your back.