Forge: Continuous Integration and Usability Improvements

By: Sebastian Kurfürst

An update on what was happening on Forge during the last week: Continuous Integration, usability improvements and more!

First of all, I did my first steps in setting up hudson, a great continuous integration tool. Because unit testing is quite load-intensive, we did not want them to run on forge.typo3.org, but on another server instead. Hudson provides nice support for such distributed scenarios, so setting up a continuous integration slave was quite easy. Currently, there is only one linux node running unit tests, but a windows and mac node is currently being set up.

Besides, I still wanted to utilize the "one-login-everywhere" idea for the hudson login - a task which was difficult on first glance, but was solved with an extended version of the winstone servlet container using the forge database.

I as well set up some other hudson jobs useful to the TYPO3 project, like a nightly build of the TYPO3 v4 Core PHPDoc (which needs 1,6 GB of RAM - wow!).

Currently, there is nothing to see yet, but the hudson/forge integration is currently top priority, so hudson will be public soon.

My main goal this week was improving usability on Forge. After a rails/redmine upgrade I thought a lot about making projects easier to find. This resulted in an AJAX based project search directly below the main menu. Just try it out yourself!

One of the main concerns many people had was that there is too little space for the content, because we had the menu on the left side, and an "actions" area on the right side.

We decided to merge the left menu and the actions menu into one area, and now you are able to switch between these areas with tabs. The system tries to guess automatically which tab might be more appropriate to you. Besides, it is possible to hide the tab bar completely, giving you 100% of the screen for the bugtracker or whatever you are doing right at the moment.

Thanks especially to Ingo Renner, Ingmar Schlecht and Sebastian Böttger for giving me input and feedback!

I hope you like the progress made on forge, and as usual, if you have some ideas, improvements, criticism or encouragement, just drop me a line or open an issue.

Greets,
Sebastian