Sneak Peek: What We Built While You Were At RailsConf
Unfortunately, Rick and I couldn't make it to RailsConf this year. We had our tickets and hotel all booked up, but when the time came to book the flights, we couldn't spring it. Not to be one to curl up in a corner and sob, we had our own 24 hour hackfest and put together Active Reload's next application.
Idea to Product in 24 hours
We've been knocking around the idea of building a simple SCM (subversion, darcs, etc) browser for some time now, however with Lighthouse rolling full steam ahead and a client project or two keeping us busy, we never had the time to turn our idea into a product. Well, while you guys were drinking it up and soaking in the presentations at RailsConf, we built our second application.
We had no plan, no specs, no prototypes. We just dove right in and evolved the application. Within an hour I had a sketch (something I rarely do) and a Photoshop comp, and less than 24 hours later we had an application that was practically complete.
File browser
Viewing a Changeset and Diff
Repository Activity
Viewing a file
Viewing the history of a file
A couple cool things to note are those little direction arrows you see in the Changeset Diff view. These let you page through changesets. You can also see these little arrows when viewing a file's source code. When your in that view, these arrows let you page through historical versions of a file.
Yo man, when can I get my hands on that?
We're gonna continue to polish up the app and finish rounding out the features so it's not quiet 100% ready. Also we'd like to give it a test run first before we serve it up for public consumption. Unfortunately, this won't be Open Source. However, it will not be hosted either (at least not in the short term). This will be a distributed application which basically means you buy a server license like you would if you were purchasing Mint. We'll announce pricing and an official release date soon, until then, enjoy the sneak peek!
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Active Reload is a small company founded by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. Rick is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, while Justin is a member of the Prototype Javascript Library core team. Together we build rocking software with a focus on awesomeness.
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Beautifully simple issue tracking. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.
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Web-based Subversion Interface Manage Subversion permissions and browse through your changesets and files with ease. Warehouse takes the complicated and mundane tasks of Subversion and makes it easy.
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We've changed the way you manage your blog. With a beautiful interface, multi-site support, and infinitely extendible through plugins, Mephisto is a fresh take on what a blogging application should be.
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May29permalink
Read your tweets for messages prefixed with @foo and post to that user. http://pastie.caboo.se/65927
# Read tyler-durden's tweets for any messages starting with '@project-mayhem' # # $ ruby twitter_bot.rb tyler-durden project-mayhem my-password # # Stores the last modified and highest id in a yaml file in the pwd by the anme of 'twitter_bot.cache' # Should block against dupes and be easy against twitter's servers -
May17permalink
Displaying nice relative dates
<%= relative_time(Time.now) %> # today <%= relative_time(1.day.ago) %> # yesterday <%= relative_time(1.day.from_now) %> # tomorrow <%= relative_time_span([Time.now, 5.days.from_now]) %> # May 17th - 22nd -
May16permalink
Rick: no more lightbox? Justin: no, I banished it because it was useless the way it was being used. Rick: ha, it was cool man Justin: yeah, Zune music sharing is cool too. Rick: touche -
May10
Scrobbler: Last.fm for Ruby —Ruby Library for accessing the AudioScrobbler web service.
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Discussion
Wow – this is very cool.
I can see you guys making my development process more beautiful bit by bit
Looks very cool and I’m definitely interested. Missed having you guys here in Portland though despite the obvious good work that came out of not being here. Next year!
This looks really nice. I can’t wait to give it a whirl.
Totally rockin guys! I’ve been wanting to see something like this for some time, I think it is the main thing missing from sites like devalot (though supposedly their next feature).
Up until now we’ve been using Collaboa which, if it didn’t have so many bugs and actually work with a huge repo, would do just fine. But I think the mint pricing model is a smart idea and if priced right I’d love to give a try :-)
(And also if integrated into lighthouse would make it that much more sexy ;-) )
Looks very very cool and got me excited for a start. If it costs somewhere between 10 and 20$ i`ll buy it.
Cheers and hope you`ll launch soon because i really need a svnbrowser app.
PS: You could also integrate it with lighthouse ! Could you tell me what icons did you use ?
Can I have it for free? or is that an insane question (OOPS).
I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but I’d say some kind of Lighthouse integration is a given :)
So is it going to be called ‘Warehouse’? =]
Integration of this with Lighthouse would make both applications more compelling.
Finally, ya damn slackers. Can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Yeah I’m all for integration with lighthouse – I’m a developer and can set up beacons and etc, but I couldn’t be bothered! We’d pay a lot more for some fully managed do-everything-for-us-please features :)
p.s. who does your design?
I’d be the guy responsible for our design work (and mistakes).
Once this is available I’ll finally be able to phase out our ancient Trac install! Already switched to Lighthouse for our ticketing system, just using Trac for browsing changesets and diffs
I’d be curious to know how you’re handling licensing for this.
More to the point, do you have a way to successfully obfuscate the license checking, or are you just going down the mint path and saying ‘DONT TOUCH THIS’?
I’m trying to work out licensing for my own distributed app and would be interested to hear how you guys are handling it.
This app looks beautiful. One of my favorite parts about developing with Rails is that you can get an app on its feet while you still remember what got you excited about it in the first place.
Keep up the great work!
There’s no way to truly protect your ruby source code, though jruby might be a solution in the future. However, keeping the source open means you’ll be able to make custom hacks as needed. Mint has a thriving developer community around Mint Peppers that really increases the value of the product.
Rick, I agree, I’m happy keeping my ruby source open. You’re right, Mint is a great example.
I was more just curious if you had something up your sleeve to somewhat protect the licensing stuff from being tampered with.
@Benjamin: I’m sure we’ll be talking more about this topic later on as we learn more about it ourselves. It’s an interesting problem, that’s for sure.
Right now our approach is to not be cynical about distribution and just build the application. We expect some form of piracy, but we have to assume that most people have good intentions.
So far, our best plan is to distribute it with this
Ryan Davis and Eric Hodel sell a variation of ParseTree that can obfuscate Ruby code, or even small libraries within a larger application. There are some limitations, but it’s being used in commercial products already.
hey topfunky – there is no real protection with obfuscation. poignant measures justins way will work with 99% of us petty-thiefs.
Oh, amazing. To the release seats, gentlemen!
Oh that’s pretty...
Looks like you guys got my email ;) Nice work.
Why priced? Tools like this often goes opensource, like trac. except this looks like much better than trac =D of course though, you earn the money in all ways.
So when are you going to launch it :) ? I really really need this kind of software and i don`t like trac but i love rails :).
this looks awesome. and justin, i love your feel for design
What is the status on this? I think it’s basically holding things up for me. I would very much like to move forward with lighthouse. Please let me know when the source code browser is functional.
It takes a bit of time to go from “functioning svn browser” to “sellable product.” Believe me, we’re itching for the chance to use it with our actual repos too :) Here’s a shot of the permissions editor, since you’ve been a good audience.
Hey guys,
This looks very good from here. But the link to the last pic you gave out rick isn’t valid. :(
Hope to see this out soon !
Warehouse looks RAWT! I can’t wait to try it out. Using TRAC for svn browsing just makes me feel dirty.
np: the pic works fine for me and others I’ve shown it to. shrug
Sweet, well, I’m excited to sign up just as soon as that’s good to go.
Fantastic! I feel a bit dirty when I use trac these days, but visualising changesets is just something that works well for my team. We’re really looking forward to a product that integrates with Lighthouse and looks as pretty as all of Justin’s other UIs.
I’d be happy to be beta fodder. And we code rails for a living too, so if there’s no obfuscation, we might be able to fix the bugs we find. :)