kenai.com For Private Clouds / Commercial Offerings? The Guerilla Infrastructure 1.0 📎
With kenai.com it you can setup a new project with the whole infrastructure: mercurial, svn, JIRA, bugzilla, CI / hudson, project page, forum, chat and wiki in few minutes. The integration with the NetBeans IDE is unique - it is very easy and convenient to find and check-out an existing project and nicely integrated chat. Furthermore, there is a RESTFul API available (e.g. javaee-patterns example), with that your can access the meta data directly. Also the management of the project members is intuitive and convenient.
All that is very nice and convenient for opensource projects, but is even more interesting for commercial applications behind firewalls. In most enterprises there is no standard and unique way to access and find a project - but even the URL to the root repository are not maintained in a central place.
kenai.com as a private cloud would solve that easily and could be introduced as a lean facade to the different respositories. Also there is always some plumbing required to set up a Java / Java EE project inside an organization. You have to interact with different departments, even organizations (contractors) to get your whole infrastructure running. It may take several weeks until everything is up and running. But even after that time, your project will be probably not standardized - because it was created without any template. The following features would be particularly interesting for commercial, private projects:
- Management of project members (with invitation, access rights etc)
- Easy SCM setup and linking with the created project.
- Standardized project homepage - for commercial offerings there should be away to extend that with additional meta data like department, target domain etc.
- Search capabilities - it is aways hard to find an already existing project with up-to date sources.
- Easy CI setup and integration.
- Communication channels: mailing lists and chat.
- Project management: kenai.com comes already with JIRA and Bugzilla integration. Something like trac would be even nicer.
- Issue tracking: bugzilla and jira area already well integrated with kenai.com and NetBeans. NetBeans even links the commits to the issues.
- Presence information: NetBeans shows the information how many projects members are online.
- kenai.com could be introduced as a "Guerilla Infrastructure". Instead of asking several departments for the needed infrastructure, you could just launch and setup a project in few minutes. This would especially encourage standardization of small and mid-range projects.
- The kenai.com front page is a nice dashboard and overview for all projects inside the enterprise (especially activity). It is a nice "Infrastructure Activity Monitoring" for the managers and CTOs. The front page could be extended with additional information like LoC, activity (check in / check out) and other nice widgets like e.g. estimated project costs.