First Month With Kenai.com, Or It Is Easier To Create A Project, Than To Delete It, Some Feedback 📎
I needed a place for the samples of the "Real World Java EE Patterns" book. I already own the java.net p4j5 (Patterns For Java EE 5) project already. It has over hundred (it is hard to count) observers and few committers. The problem was the name: the new examples do cover Java EE 6 as well and are not patterns only. SVN didn't worked really well with java.net performance and my "disconnected consulting" mode, so I created the http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/ kenai.com project with mercurial SCM and use it intensively for about a month. My experience so far:
- The invitation process works smoothly - I got an account in about 24h.
- Creating a project is very simple - especially from Netbeans 6.7. It is very well integrated with this IDE. You are, however, not dependent on Netbeans. Everything is possible via the web-UI as well. The whole process (regardless whether from Netbeans or not) takes less, than 5 minutes. I guess it is even possible to accomplish it in seconds if you are typing fast :-)
- Your project is immediately visible and usable after its creation. Thats exactly the opposite to java.net.
- It is easier to create project, than to delete. I would like to delete a test project I created, but have no idea how to accomplish that.
- The site and SCM performance are very good. Substantially faster than java.net.
- Bugzilla integration works too good. I got first tickets few hours after the initial check-in :-). Bugzilla is integrated with SCM in Netbeans - you can commit/push code and resolve issues in one transaction.
- Mercurial setup and integration are very good. The performance and source-browsing capabilities are good.
- Forum is well integrated - you can easily use it as announcement and discussion tool.
- Chat is nice - you get a channel with your project, so you can communicate with other project members, while you are working. Chat is nicely integrated with Netbeans 6.7, or the Web directly. You only have to click on the bubble in the right upper corner above the title. There were always some folks out there.
- Hudson is well integrated with Netbeans - didn't tried it yet on kenai.com.
- Wiki is well integrated and it works - but didn't used it intensively yet. Mailing lists etc. are working as expected.