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Hi,
I would like to talk about an open source project that will be released soon to the public. It is called jabox and it is all about an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) using Open Source applications.
The idea is to have one application that is responsible to bind your development platform under one shelter. The vision is to have jabox able to run a full Open Source A.L.M. platform using embedded applications but still be able to take out and replace any piece with an existing application, integrating it seamlessly.
The target group will be Java developers using Maven as a dependency/build platform. These are the only requirements that are going to be left untouched on Jabox.
Now, lets start building some stuff above this. The first application necessary to develop is of course the IDE. Which one is the best IDE for working with maven? I will create a forum and do some questionaries in order to find out the most popular applications, until then I opt for Eclipse and Netbeans.
At this point should say that Jabox will be a web server where you can configure your options. So, what should be easier than just selecting your favorite IDE and clicking on the page to start it up (JNLP takes action and downloads your IDE, unzips it, installs the necessary plugins, configures it and starts it). This way all developers that are contributing to the application are using the same version of IDE, the same plugins, and any possible update will keep them synchronized.
Lets go to the next level. Any developer that respect himself should be using Software Configuration Management (SCM). The defacto application on the old days was CVS. Days passed and Subversion prevealed with its robustness, but still a new kid appeared with the name Git and its the new functionality of being distributed, and the list goes on. The question now is which one is the best for storing your source code? Which one integrates better with your selected IDE and which plugins are necessary?
Now that we have the code stored, we need to test it. Continuous Integration Systems (CIS) are the ones to put to the task. Obviously there is no doubt that Hudson is the winner here. If you don't believe me you can still try Continuum, Cruise Control or others. The CIS will be responsible for checking out the fresh code, build the new binaries, and running the tests. In order to be able to checkout the code it needs good integration with the selected SCM. Automatic configuration/integration of the CIS will be provided with Jabox.
Once we have our test run, we need to see the results and analyse our code in more detail. This is were Quality Management Platforms (QMP) are entering the game. Sonar is giving a very fancy solution. Similar solutions can be given by other tools also as Hudson & plugins or a much simpler report by Maven site. In any case we need to connect the application to our platform so that it automatically analyses our code.
So, now we have a nice platform that can create applications with quality. So, what do we do with our applications when they are ready to be released? We basically need a storing place for our binaries. On the maven world this is called Maven Repository Manager (MRM). Nexus is the way to go, or if you want to be Artifactory a Archiva.
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