SE News

Party of one: Surviving the solo open source project
Tips for structuring, maintaining, and promoting your ‘part-time hobby’

With more than 100,000 open source projects hosted on SourceForge alone, starting a new one is no small undertaking, and bringing it to the masses is hardly a sure thing. In this article reprinted from Pushing Pixels, Kirill Grouchnikov explores the challenges and pitfalls of being the sole developer on an open source project. Whether you’re thinking about starting a solo development project or struggling to maintain one, get tips for structuring your development timeline, managing development priorities, and finding a niche for your project, even in the vast sea of open source software.

Kirill Grouchnikov

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2008/jw-06-oneman.html

The Subversion open source community has announced the general availability of version 1.5 of the Subversion software configuration management (SCM) tool. Among other key features, Subversion 1.5 includes:

• Merge tracking for more automated and efficient branch management.
• Sparse checkouts to enable users to check out only a portion of a source tree to reduce the total footprint on their individual workstations.
• Repository sharding and partitioning, to more efficiently distribute repository storage across filesystem resources and to improve server performance.
• A proxying system for spreading read-load across multiple repository servers for improved performance.

http://www.ddj.com/architect/208700728
http://subversion.tigris.org/

The CMMI for Acquisition Primer, Version 1.2 provides those who acquire products and services an introduction to CMMI best practices that can help them. Replacing the CMMI Acquisition Module, the primer (57 pages) is based on the best practices of the CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), Version 1.2 model (441 pages) and can be used by projects that acquire products or services in government and non-government organizations.

Best practices in the primer cover activities such as monitoring and controlling contractors and suppliers that develop products and services and deliver services. The practices in this primer provide a foundation for acquisition process discipline and rigor that enables product and service development and service delivery to be repeatedly executed for ultimate acquisition success.

Dr. Karen Richter, Institute for Defense Analyses

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/models/primer-announce.html

De droom van een overheid die er is ten behoeve van dienstverlening aan ons allemaal, lijkt ver weg. En hoewel dat met de komst van het digitale tijdperk niet veel beter is geworden, gloort er licht aan het einde van de tunnel. In dit themanummer laten verschillende auteurs die betrokken zijn bij het implementeren van e-overheid zien op welke wijze de digitale overheid werkelijkheid kan worden.

http://www.informatie.nl/artikelen/2008/06/

This article discusses the reasons why ordinary sorted trees don’t work well as indexes and explains B-trees (pronounced “bee trees”), the data structures that are actually used by databases to build index structures. It also offers a B-tree program (in both Visual Basic and C#) for download, but none of the code is included the article body because it’s fairly involved.

Rod Stephens

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/38097

The visualization code_swarm shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

Michael Ogawa

http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

I constantly get the same question, “How do you manage a virtual team and actually get stuff done.” At Wildbit, each of the 10 team members work from home or a coworking environment. We’re spread out across four countries and many timezones. With such separation, we still manage to get a lot done and enjoy our work.

Before writing this article, I had not given much thought to exactly how we work in a virtual environment. My first answer was simply practice and many mistakes. Although, the knowledge gained from those mistakes can be narrowed down to three main ingredients: The people on the team, the process that drives the team, and clear communication.

Chris Nagele

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/building-and-managing-virtual-teams

Invariably, learning about REST means that you’ll end up wondering just how applicable the concept really is for your specific scenario. And given that you’re probably used to entirely different architectural approaches, it’s only natural that you start doubting whether REST, or rather RESTful HTTP, really works in practice, or simply breaks down once you go beyond introductory, “Hello, World”-level stuff. In this article, I will try to address 10 of the most common doubts people have about REST when they start exploring it, especially if they have a strong background in the architectural approach behind SOAP/WSDL-based Web services.

Stefan Tilkov

http://www.infoq.com/articles/tilkov-rest-doubts

At their core, Web services define a mechanism for machine-to-machine interaction using a network and XML. A key component of a Web service is a formal description with Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Until recently there was no formal language to describe REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Web services—now there’s WSDL 2.0. This article introduces you to REST and WSDL 2.0, and walks you through creating a WSDL 2.0 description of a REST Web service.

Lawrence Mandel

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restwsdl/

Project documentation is often one of the necessary evils in delivering a software product. But imagine being able to generate your documentation at the click of a button. In this installment of Automation for the people , automation expert Paul Duvall explains how you can use open source tools to automate the generation of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, build figures, entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs), and even user documentation.

Paul Duvall

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ap06108

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. “Velocity” fuses memory across multiple computers to give a single unified cache view to applications. Applications can store any serializable CLR object without worrying about where the object gets stored. Scalability can be achieved by simply adding more computers on demand. “Velocity” also allows for copies of data to be stored across the cluster, thus protecting data against failures. “Velocity” can be configured to run as a service accessed over the network or can be run embedded with the distributed application.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645013.aspx

Vindt u kwaliteit vanzelfsprekend “Must Have”, of moet hieraan speciale aandacht worden besteed “Nice to Have”? Is te veel of te weinig aandacht voor kwaliteit een risico voor uw Business of voor uzelf? Zijn we verwend met kwaliteit en weten we niet meer hoe het zonder kwaliteit was en kunnen we ook niet met ietsjes minder of zijn we dan gelijk ontevreden? En, wat hebben we tot nu geleerd van mislukkingen en successen in tal van ICT projecten?

Over dit soort van kwesties willen wij op deze woensdagmiddag met u van gedachten wisselen. We gaan daarbij in op hetgeen we hebben geleerd van Q (de “best practices”), hoe het staat met de menselijke maat van Q (de ‘human factor”) en hoe de toekomst van Q eruit ziet (de Future of Quality).

http://www.st-spider.nl/QProfs/Voorjaar2008.php