Welcome to the November openCollabNet Technical Newsletter. I’ve lined up some interesting stuff to read, like Marcello Sales’ SOAP article and news around the CollabNet Desktop – Eclipse Edition, with updates for both SourceForge and CollabNet Enterprise Edition users.
The next webinars about Subversion 1.5 will take place on December 5th and December 12th, catering both the European and the American time zones (a webinar for Asia Pacific was held on November 28th). More information is below.
CollabNet is updating all its training materials for Subversion to include the new functionality of Subversion 1.5. Upgrade training for existing users will be available; both teacher-led and as an online class. I’ve looked at the new materials and they are really good; these classes will certainly help you rapidly adopt Subversion 1.5. If you want to be notified about the availability of the new training program, go to http://www.collab.net/services/training/ and click on the link: "Get notified when the class becomes available".
Best regards,
Guido Haarmans
Developer Relations, CollabNet, Inc.
In this issue:
Subversion 1.5 Technical Webinars
(note: these webinars are now available as replays, just use the below URLs)
Don’t miss CollabNet’s webinars about what’s new in Subversion 1.5.
American time zone: December 12th - 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
Join us December 12th for the ultimate technical overview of what’s coming in SVN 1.5, a live webinar with our Subversion committers. CollabNet engineers Daniel Rall and C. Michael Pilato will discuss the merge tracking feature of Subversion 1.5, as well as sparse directory checkouts, interactive conflict resolution, changelists, and many of the 50+ new features and improvements in Subversion 1.5. You will also learn what to keep in mind when upgrading from earlier versions to Subversion 1.5 and how to migrate merge history that you created with svnmerge.py. Finally, Dan and Michael will show the new GUI clients CollabNet developed for merge management.
Register at http://www.collab.net/webinar26
European time zone: December 5th – 10.00am GMT
This webinar has a broader focus and includes real-world experiences from a customer (JP Morgan Chase). Discover how you can scale Subversion to hundreds of projects and thousands of users and learn from Subversion experts the key features of Subversion 1.5 (such as Merge Tracking). The webinar will end with a peek at some of the functionality CollabNet is developing for the Eclipse IDE.
Register at http://www.collab.net/webinar25.
So…. What is new in Subversion 1.5?
A lot of people asked CollabNet about the new features of Subversion 1.5 from a command-line point of view. Johannes Nicolai diffed the help systems of Subversion 1.4 and 1.5 and created a document in which he highlighted all changes and new features. Read Johannes’ blog post at http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2007/11/changes-made-fr.html.
Configuring svnserve to Run as a Windows Service
Running the Subversion server as a service makes it easy to monitor and manage the server from a remote Windows client and also allows the server to start automatically when the system boots.
To run Subversion as a windows service you need Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista and 1.4.0 or higher of the Subversion svnserve executable. Versions of Subversion prior to 1.4.0 require that you use a 3rd party program that acts as a service. CollabNet Subversion (CollabNet's certified Subversion binaries) automatically installs Subversion as a Windows service.
Read the entire article by Mark Phippard.
CollabNet Desktop Update – Never Leave your Eclipse IDE
With the release of the CollabNet Desktop for Eclipse in May, users of CollabNet Enterprise Edition have improved their productivity and workflow by managing more development tasks directly from within Eclipse, rather than jumping back and forth between different development tools. A beta version of the CollabNet Desktop for CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise is now available on openCollabNet.
The CollabNet Desktop is a downloadable set of plugins for the Eclipse IDE, built on an extensible, lightweight framework. It provides developers with Eclipse plugins for Subversion and CollabNet tools that work seamlessly together within Eclipse. The CollabNet Desktop includes:
- Issue tracker connectors for Mylyn: Manage your issues from within the Eclipse workspace.
- Subclipse: Version your code with the best open-source Subversion plugin for Eclipse.
- Merge: Manage the merge process graphically, from inside Eclipse (Merge Made Easy).
- Change Set Merge: Connect issues in your issue tracker with Change Sets in Subversion. Manage the merge process in a more natural way.
- CollabNet Perspective. See all parts of the CollabNet Desktop in one view.
- CollabNet Sites View. Access Subversion and CollabNet products from within the Eclipse environment.
- CollabNet CUBiT. Provision servers for build and test from within Eclipse.
- openCollabNet Search View. Get answers to your technical questions.
More information is at http://eclipse.open.collab.net.
Install the CollabNet Desktop beta for CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise
To install the beta for CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, point your Eclipse update manager to:
http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/sfee-beta
Don’t have CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise? The free 15 user download is at http://downloads.open.collab.net/sfee15.html.
Install CollabNet Desktop for CollabNet Enterprise Edition
To install the Eclipse Desktop for CollabNet Enterprise Edition, point the Eclipse update manager to:
Eclipse 3.2: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/merge-client/e3.2
Eclipse 3.3: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/merge-client/e3.3
These URLs will not install the Merge and Change Merge clients as these plugins are still in beta. Installation instructions for the beta are at http://tinyurl.com/2xdyot.
Enter the above installation URLs in your Eclipse update manager, not a web browser. Zip files are at http://eclipse.open.collab.net.
Create Innovative Integrations with CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise and SOAP
(Note: go to http://api.open.collab.net to find out about web services for CollabNet Enterprise Edition)
By Marcello Sales
CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise includes a rich set of programming interfaces that exposes almost the same set of core functionality as the standard online user interface. Any CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise user can use these Web services to access and process data programmatically.
In practical terms, you can use the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Web Services APIs to build connectors to your CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise installation through which your users can access CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise features such as Tracker, Discussions and Version Control. A client application, written in a programming language of your choice, can create and update content without going through the web interface.
For example, you could write an AJAX client to show news announcements from an CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise project on another web page or Google Pages. Or you could write a client in the Python scripting language to read the status of the tasks and send the information to a mobile device, and take updates to the data from the mobile device.
If fact, existing customers have already implemented their own connectors to extend their installation to the fullest. For example, the popular open-source continuous build system CruiseControl includes powerful capabilities to upload results to CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, such as automatically creating tracker artifacts for build failures, and uploading successful builds to the file release system.
CollabNet has made available a number of useful add-ons that take advantage of the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Web Services, including:
- SourceForge Explorer, a complete Windows-native application for interacting with CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise.
- The Microsoft Project plug-in, enabling synchronization between Microsoft Project and CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Task Manager.
- The Microsoft Office plug-in, enabling direct editing from and saving to the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Document Manager.
- Tasks for the popular open-source build system, Apache Ant, for automated upload of files to CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise File Release System.
- The popular CollabNet Desktop plug-ins for Eclipse include support for CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Tracker.
Capabilities
Most of the capabilities offered through the Web User Interface are exposed by the application components as Web Services. You can explore the Web User Interface functionality with the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise User Guide, and then look up the corresponding remote method call from the WSDL files, as summarized by the lists below. Here's a summary of the interfaces to the application components on any given CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise installation:
- SourceForge (wsdl): Managing the core of the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise server is as easy as reading the list of the services.
- Easy integration with a single sign-on process using the login and logoff methods.
- Management of projects, project templates and the specific status information about access level, memberships, quota and disk usage for hosted projects.
- Management of users, as well as getting its groups, verifying its permissions against an existing entity.
- Management of groups, as well as interaction with the addition and removal of members.
- Management of associations between 2 existing objects, as well as indexing different internal objects.
- Additional utility methods to retrieve information about the API version, host information and the available command list.
- Convenient methods for Audit history capability, as well as listing attachments existing on a given project.
TrackerApp (wsdl): Stay on top of your tracker! Just use it to manage your favorite tracker artifacts using your personal PDA and cellphone, for instance, and stay connected! From creating artifacts with attachments to managing artifacts in general, this web service interface can make a difference. Just look at the implementation of the CollabNet Desktop that currently uses the Tracker Web Services API for Fields, Artifacts and their dependencies and the Work Flow Dependency List. Automated build systems like CruiseControl can create bug reports or work orders based on failed or successful builds.
ScmApp (wsdl): If you can't miss a single commit from your development team, then you need to use this service. The ScmApp service includes methods to access the list of existing repositories on a given project, making it also possible to retrieve the commit messages log and the data from the repository itself. Similarly, developers can closely manage the team commits and see if changes to the repository affects their piece of code.
CategorizationApp (wsdl): For sites with a large number of projects, SourceForge's project categorization system is the key to keeping them organized and easy to find. This service makes site administration easier, offering management of project categories, as well as management of the categorization of particular projects. If you're using web services to automate the creation of your projects, then automatic categorization can be the final step.
DiscussionApp (wsdl): A convenient way of getting connected to the discussions on the projects is using the Discussion services, which offers the access to the list of Forum, Topics and Posts, as well as the management of posts. With this service, you can create notification clients to always keep track of an important topic your team is discussing right now.
RbacApp (wsdl): What about managing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) definitions with your own client? With the RBAC service, you will be able to create, remove and list the project roles, among other operations. However, one of the most important and used calls throughout an CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise installation is in regards the permissions of a user for a given artifact, that in this case, it will be available on the SourceForgeApp service.
WikiApp (wsdl): HTML pages without knowing HTML? Then create Wiki pages! Using a simple syntax one can create HTML pages with basic text formatting, tables, etc. The Wiki web service enables remote update of wiki page content, including page attachments, so your build system can update your project home page with the latest test results. Fetch the contents of a wiki page as a rendered snippet of HTML, and you can embed that wiki page on a portal site or embed it in an email message.
NewsApp (wsdl): Keep the news coming! The News service allows you to manage and retrieve the list of all news posted to the project and to the complete site. Fetch your project's latest news and display it on your company's intranet portal!
TaskApp (wsdl): You will never miss a task anymore!!! The Task service gives you an interface to manage tasks on your plate, as well as task groups and dependencies. The taskApp web service enables synchronization with popular project management tools like Microsoft Project.
DocumentApp (wsdl): With DocumentApp service any client can have access to the documents and folders inside of a project. Automate the posting of your weekly reports, so they'll always be shared with your team. Edit and upload your project's documents directly from your favorite applications, with tools like the Microsoft Office Plugin.
FrsApp (wsdl): At the end of the day, it's all about building great software and sharing it with your colleagues or the world; the File Release System is the place to share it, and the FrsApp web service lets you access and manage its contents automatically. Your automated build system can upload the latest successful build to the FRS via CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise support built into CruiseControl or an Ant task. Your automated test machines can fetch the latest build for installation and testing across all your supported platforms.
SimpleFileStorageApp (wsdl) and FileStorageApp (wsdl): File storage interface that provides method calls to common file upload capabilities such as uploading, downloading and getting the file size. Use this when managing attachments, documents and file releases.
IntegrationDataApp: this simple but powerful web service enables your application to store its own data attached to any object in CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise. The sweet spot: a two-way integration with an external application can use this web service to store the external IDs of any CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise object right in the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise database, along with any other important metadata needed to keep your systems in sync. Build a virtual card wall to manage your user stories, and use this service to store the X and Y position on the screen.
Get detailed technical information about the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Web Services API at http://sfee.open.collab.net.
You can start developing a new integration today, using the free 15-user download of CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise.
Recent Blog Posts
Branching Strategy Questioned (answer to branching questions from our webinars)
How to pimp CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise 4.4 to support Subversion 1.5-dev
Changes made from Subversion 1.4.x to 1.5 – A command line point of view
What about branching and merging?
A list of all our posts is at http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/archive-titles.html
CollabNet Webcasts and Live Demos
Reach a New Level of Productivity in Eclipse for Collaborative Development and Build & Test Virtualization – December 4th
European Webinar: Subversion in the Enterprise, and What's New in 1.5 – December 5th
What's New in Subversion 1.5? December 12th
Collaborative Development with CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise – December 18th
http://tinyurl.com/ytwusd
A list of all our live demos and replays is at http://www.collab.net/news/livedemo/
Recent CollabNet News
CollabNet Named Finalist for “Red Herring 100 Global” awards 2007
CollabNet Integrates CUBiT, its Distributed and Virtualization Solution for Build and Test into Eclipse™ IDE
CollabNet announces joint Webinar with Salesforce.com on the impact of ALM 2.0
CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise for Distributed Software Development
Feedback and Suggestions
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Copyright 2007 CollabNet Inc.
CollabNet and openCollabNet are trademarks of CollabNet, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective holders.
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