Calling SVN commands from a java program

It's a really, really bad idea to use a GUI SVN client from within an app server. While TortoiseSVN can be scripted, it's still a GUI application, and an unexpected situation can cause it to pop up a dialog on your server (and some tasks may always open a dialog).

It,s much, much better ot use a Java implementation of SVN, such as SvnKit - then you can work with a nice Java API and your question becomes moot.

Sure, there are several libraries out there that do the job. Personally, I'd either go with SVNKit or with the Maven SCM abstraction (the latter is less powerful but more portable).

It's probably simplest to use SVNKit which is a native implementation of SVN in Java, provided you can get the version to match your command-line client version if you need to share working copies between them.

It's under a copy-left-ish licence, but as long as you're running the code on your own server and not distributing it that should be OK (but IANAL, etc.)