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2005

Roy Russo's Blog

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I think if I were to add up all the man hours spent on dealing with Sourceforge CVS by JBoss committers and anonymous accessors alike, we could have probably have achieved a manned space mission to mars, solved world hunger, solved world poverty, and brought peace to the Middle East with time left over for all involved to smoke cigars and drink 100 year-old scotch by the planetary water-cooler (... that's Jamaica, btw). Frankly, its hard to describe the anxiety and nausea I would feel right before having to perform a clean checkout or update, without resorting to profanity and mad tourette's style rants. We're a big company now, so Roy office rants are frowned upon, by some. Hence, the silent scream.

 

Whats the problem with slow CVS access, some may ask... just keep working as it works its magic in the background. Well, it wouldn't be so bad if Intellij IDEA had an "idea" on how to not lock the developer out of all instances of its product while a CVS command is running. For those of you that do not use IDEA, imagine working on JBoss Portal BETA, JBoss Nukes 1.1, and JBoss Portal HEAD, then running an update on JBoss Portal HEAD, and having to sit there for 20 minutes while all 3 instances are frozen in time as you watch the kilobytes *race* across the pipe at a rate of 1 every 10 seconds. Why the Intellij developers didn't think of this, is beyond me and defies logic. Maybe they had a fast pipe to their CVS repository.. who knows? My fellow JBoss developers using Eclipse IDE don't have this problem, and those using command-line CVS commands, avoid the problem with IDE locks altogether.

 

The problem with IDEA would not be even noticeable, if the connection to SourceForge was decent. In a word, it is abysmal during the day. I've found a clever way to get around this by staying up until 11PM EST to perform CVS operations. Okay, so its not clever, but it gets around the problem. A problem that will be a thing of the past.

 

Enter our new JBoss Labs Director, Damon Sicore (http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/dsicore/). As one of his first duties on the job, he's managed to migrate all CVS repositories under JBoss SourceForge Projects to our own internal infrastructure. +1, Damon... he's managed to save anyone dealing with JBoss CVS buckets of time and increase productivity by facilitating this move. Now IDEA locking will be an issue forgotten in the past. Maybe I'll stay with IDEA after all is said and done. ;-)

 

Now begins the task of updating all our docs, wiki articles, forums announcements, etc... to point to our new repository for those wishing to build off of HEAD.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

 

As we march toward our RC, due out in early May, I thought it would be a good idea to track progress made within the JBoss Portal project. I usually, end up looking at the stats myself, but thought it would be nice to open them up to the community as a whole.

 

Important Dates:

  • RC due May 1st.
  • Final Release due June 1st.
Team and Tasks:
  • We are on-target on our release dates thus far. Novell's side is also on-target with regards to releasing on the set dates placed before them.
  • Forums and XWiki work progressing.
  • The portal team is minus Thomas Heute. He is assisting in a consulting capacity mostly and helping in the forums for now. His tasks were dispersed by Julien to the remaining members. (me/Julien/Novell). His transition is going smoothly.
  • The portal team is plus 2 Novell developers. These guys are sharp, motivated, and dont play around. An extremely healthy addition to the team! We merged cultures, painlessly. Morale +1.
  • The Novell team is actively working on the Installer and Theme-API tasks.
Community:
  • JBoss Portal homepage ranked 17th most visited on jboss.com/org for March 2005. 17034 Total Visits. w00t!
  • Forums were started ~6 months ago. (Alpha was released 4 months ago.)
  • Over 1100 posts to date by 120 distinct members.
  • Average ~10 posts a day.
  • Average one new Poster a day.
  • Roughly 75% of posts are installation/configuration issues. (I estimate Novell Installer will mostly eliminate these issues)
  • Remainder of posts are members extending or building on top of the framework.
  • Independent contributor donated two example portlets: Spring MVC Example Portlet and Sun JSF-RI Example Portlet.
  • I will focus this month on sprucing up our homepage - bringing some important items up on the page will help, easier navigation, collateral accessibility, etc..
  • Forum stats are impressive. I never bothered to look, just answered posts. Picking up one poster a day, means to me there are XXX others lurking that downloaded and are playing with it. 

 

Our download stats on sourceforge have been broken, since we first posted our Alpha release several months ago. So I uploaded our archives to our own JBoss FTP server last night at 11PM Eastern, and routed all links to this new directory. I just had a look at the stats that run nightly and noticed a healthy number.

119051.63%76148651.34%/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-portal-2.0-beta1-bin.zip
2369.78%59397240.05%/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-portal-2.0-beta1-src.zip
311832.07%1229538.29%/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-forums-2.0-beta1a-bin.zip
420.54%46750.32%/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-forums-2.0-beta1a-src.zip

 

For one hour worth of downloads, this is a solid number of activity. Next month, I will post the totals for April. I also plan on releasing a JBoss-4.0.1/Portal bundled version in the coming days. This will suffice until we get the installer in place, for those who are having trouble installing the Portal.

 

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

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